Nineties dance music was affective but not introspective or romantic
Evidence
The music doesn’t have to be explicitly sad for this to be the case — there is a melancholia intrinsic to the very turn inward. As Reynolds points out, the idea that Nineties dance music was unemotional is a fallacy. This was a music saturated with affect, but the affect involved wasn’t associated with romance or introspection. The twinning of romance and introspection, love and its disappointments, runs through twentiethcentury pop. By contrast, dance music since disco offered up another kind of emotional palette, based in a different model of escape from the miseries of individual selfhood. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1304
Categorization
- XREF: Recall Fisher’s familiar claim in Ghosts of My Life that dance music’s collective catharsis was a lost possibility; this elaborates the emotional palette distinction. — connects to: UK dance music shifted from future-directed to intensive internal exploration — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1236; Dance music’s shift to fragile introspection marks a loss of collective cathartic release — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1243; Participants experienced early-nineties rave music as purposeful evolutionary unfolding — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1248 (+6 more)
- ADDENDUM: The contrast between individual-romantic pop emotion and collective dance catharsis parallels the escape-from-self framing central to the immodesty/historical-morality themes about what collectives vs individual bodies feel.
Broader Connections
- Dance music’s affect was collective catharsis, not romantic introspection
#corroborates(0.92) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1304 - Dance music’s inward turn traded collective affect for privatised emotion
#expands(0.85) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 450 - The inward turn in post-dance music privatised what rave felt collectively
#expands(0.82) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 450 - Formal incompleteness in music can convey longing more deeply than resolved expression
#corroborates(0.75) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 460