Happy Birthday, Ravers!
This week, dance music has been popping open bottles of champagne and blowing down those unfurly hooter things people have at parties, to celebrate two notable anniversaries in its glorious history.
Mind you, dance music tends to behave like that all the time, so let's just imagine they're really BIG bottles and, y'know, gold-plated hooters or something.
Anyway, two major dance institutions are celebrating significant birthdays this week. Mixmag is 25 years old, and Positiva Records - home of Fragma, the Shapeshifters, and best of all - is 15.
Now, had these anniveraries happened a couple of years back, we'd be kind of shrugging a bit and saying something like "so what? Some dance institutions are getting on a bit. It's hardly as exciting as this Paris Hilton CD, is it?". Seriously, that's how we used to talk in The Past.
But ever since those Klaxons came along with their pesky new rave thing*, well, suddenly it's OK to like dance music again, which means it's officially OK to be pleased that these birthdays have come around.
Which also means it's alright to have a good wallow in the of interviews Mixmag have set up off the back of the cover shoot for their latest issue. The cover features a massive roll-call of dance music legends (*deep breath* Fatboy Slim, Basement Jaxx, LCD Soundsystem, The Prodigy, Moby, Mylo, Goldie, Faithless, Paul van Dyk, Underworld...), and each one has been interviewed, and each interview is on YouTube (or will be very soon).
Some of them are a bit sweary, mind...
Now, in these heady post-Klaxons times, you can have a band like Hadouken! making one rock-infused dance track, and that song can become the theme to a ´óÏó´«Ã½ television show. At the same time, all manner of guitar bands are borrowing that punishing disco beat which Joy Division also took a shine to. And Basshunter proved that you can still take a dance track to the top of the pop charts for a decent length of time, and knock back a hot property like Adele, just as her made-up Brit Award was being engraved.
And this is what we've all been leading up to, the very pinnacle of all things Dance and Music. In such a forward-looking medium (apart from all those remixes and reissues and 'Anthems' compilations, and songs which are based on samples from hits out of the '80s), the only point of interest is surely going to be next week's Top 10 dance smash. Nostalgia is for rockbores and Mojo magazine, right?
Well here it is, courtesy of September.
(Nobody mention though, eh? It could ruin EVERYTHING!)
*Yes, yes, I know. Some of you liked dance music all along and the Klaxons can hardly be credited with keeping the entire genre alive. Plus they were rubbish with Rihanna on the Brits. But still, you have to admit things have picked up for dance-lovers in recent years...
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