Sample-triggered sorrow can seep into club pop from outside its lyrics

Evidence

On their blog No Good Advice, the blogger J describes the use of a sample from Kaoma’s 1989 track ‘Lambada’ on Jennifer Lopez’s 2011 hit ‘On The Floor’: ‘The snatch of ‘Lambada’ functions as a buried-memory trigger, a sort of party hauntology that lends the song a slight edge of wistful, nostalgic sadness.’ There is no reference to sadness in the official text of the track, which is a simple exhortation to dance. So it’s as if the sorrow comes from outside, like traces of the waking world incorporated into a dream, or like the grief which creeps into all the embedded worlds in Inception (2010). — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 464

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Party hauntology’ introduced as the buried-memory sadness a nostalgia sample injects into a dance track.
• XREF: connects to: Digital enhancement technologies produce an upgraded normality stripped of flaws — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 453; A single sample can inject unscripted nostalgia into dance music. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 464; 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marks a loss of collective cathartic release — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1243