January 02 2005, 11:28 AM Club Tactics

Everything I know about Dance music I learned from my younger brother and Son House.

This is something of a simplification, but there is a little truth in it. I would submit that the motive power of good music, any good music, is the catch and throw of tension and release. This is particularly true of the blues; perhaps the most accessible recommendation I can offer towards this is The Sky Is Crying from the second side of George Thoroughgood's first live album, or perhaps when Joe Perry busts out at live shows. The Blues is much deeper than this, of course, but if you already know that, I do not need to give you examples. I will: seek the five disc set of the American Folk Blues festival, and on the first find John Lee Hooker's rendition of The Night Time.

Good Dance music is like this. Again, accessible recommendations of this phenomenon are The Crystal Method's first album, or (the aforementioned here, and somewhat less so) East Coast Edition of Sasha and Digweed's Northern Exposure II.

What I have learned from my brother is that dance music does not have to be simple. Sonnets are simple; it is surprisingly easy to crank out sonnets, in part because the form is so rigid is leaves one few choices in how to go. Good sonnets, sonnets that use the form well, they are harder. Harder still is the contemplation of how to heighten the form and the meaning by breaking it, putting tension into the work. There are stacks and stacks of CDs of rigid dance music, and there is little wrong with any of it; the purpose is to ram a melodied, insistent metronome into a darkened crowd of sweaty movement hopped up on its own shared experience. But there is also examples of the genre that work to master the form.

I have learned to largely follow my brother's nose in these things. While he is not a professional DJ, he is an accomplished amateur, and he has impeccable taste. He has learned to discover (and led me to learn to discover) dance music that is deeply layered, syncopated to cause delight, and, for lack of better words, undismissive of the complexity of the human condition, even that stripped and simplified condition in the throes of the dance floor.

The real trick, though, is storytelling, and this is where the art lies: to string these songs together, blending them without seam to move us from place to place, so that at the end of an hour, elated and spent, those on the floor are in an entirely different space from where they started. It is a form of storytelling with awesome feedback, for it is the crowd that moves, and the crowd's moving that must be catered to, teased, and ultimately released. The music is part of the path to letting go. The good Dance music makes one conscious of that act, but demands it anyway.