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26:27 · 3,992 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The organising observation: dance punk comes back roughly every 20 years, and this time is different because three generations of it are alive at once, the 1980s originals, the 2000s revival and the current post-Brexit UK wave.
▶ 00:01:06
- The genre was born out of spite. Punk fans hated disco as manufactured and overproduced, so by the late 1970s the most anti-punk move available was embracing the thing punk despised.
▶ 00:01:51
- John Lydon formed Public Image Ltd straight after the Sex Pistols broke up, and the dub and reggae influence on its first two albums produced the earliest dance punk cuts.
▶ 00:02:56
- Gang of Four's Entertainment is treated as the foundational record: funky basslines, steady percussion, jagged angular riffs, and lyrics on consumerism, free will and alienation. Kurt Cobain listed it among his 50 favourite albums and Flea credits it with shaping his bass playing.
▶ 00:03:14
- The pioneers crossed racial as well as genre lines. Talking Heads took criticism for the Afrobeat fusion on Remain in Light, Liquid Liquid borrowed African and Latin percussion, and ESG, three sisters from the Bronx, became one of the most sampled acts in hip hop.
▶ 00:05:00
- The whole 2000s revival splits on one single. The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers, released March 2002, set the template: live drums, techno hi-hats, handclaps, jagged guitars, raw vocals and a lot of cowbell.
▶ 00:06:40
- Luke Jenner avoided the DFA at first because he thought dance tracks would alienate the band's fans, and he and his label hated the mix when it arrived. It then became the DFA's best-selling single.
▶ 00:08:19
- Losing My Edge came from a real fear. James Murphy started hearing other DJs play the same obscure records he had built his sets on, and wrote a song about an ageing DJ losing ground to younger ones.
▶ 00:09:46
- The working definition offered after all that history is deliberately loose: a post-punk approach with restless repetitive rhythms, something to dance to, and a punk edge. Everything else is personal opinion.
▶ 00:14:30
- The current wave inverts the last one. Where the 2000s turned dance punk more dance, the post-Brexit bands have made it the most punk the genre has been, and more sarcastic, anxious and manic, with Parquet Courts, Viagra Boys, IDLES and Yard Act as the cases.
▶ 00:20:38