Dance (or why 1990 was an epic year in music)
Soon - My Bloody Valentine
I don't think I'll ever get over how good this song is. It's like a sonic representation a terrible chaos fucking everything beautiful and awe-inspiring in the world. It's like a sound painting depicting a feeling of such utter ecstasy that your whole self is forgotten and it's like something's kicked to the bottom of the container of your being and you've emptied out and spilled over into everything you can't even decide whether you're happy or sad because words and emotions don't make sense any longer and you just are. The voices and the bodies are washed out and actually rather disembodied, because it's something more than human, it's something organic and thriving and above you. And it's downright danceable, in the most drugged out way possible. Er...not to get carried away or anything.
It's so astonishing how dance music has such power to truly unite so many people together and let them transcend their own egos in a moving orgy of life and passion, where everyone is connected through one beat, a certain pulse that unites everyone, but it seems to never be put to such great spiritual use nowadays. Tribal people understood the power of dance and how exceedingly religious an action it was...but now what do we have? Just a lot of rappers moaning about how rich they are over a catchy beat? What happened? I wish more dance music was this ethereal and vaporous and had infinitely less lyrics about getting drunk and banging some chick you don't even know. I want to make that kind of dance music.
I've been really getting into acid house lately, as there's something so compelling about the music of the first raves in '88 and '89 and '90, when ecstasy first hit the streets in Britain and people were flocking to dance clubs to feel a sense of complete union with their fellow people, and there was this passionate hope and optimism and belief in the power of love again not seen since the '60s. (No wonder I've heard it actually referred to as "The Second Summer of Love").
This is the jam:
Click to view***
In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.
- The Dance, William Carlos Williams
***
EDIT: I just discovered that it's pretty amusing to listen to either one of the songs and then view Breughel's painting. The beats on both are so insistent that they seem to animate the townspeople, and you can almost imagine them anachronistically grooving to each song. "Loaded" is especially fun for this exercise:
"Sir Bartholomew, didst thou completest thy hay-balinge and gut-scraping foer the evning suppere?
"Nah, man. Jus' trippin'."