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Earlier this weekend, I got to see a Skream set in Nashville. For those who aren’t familiar with the origins of UK dubstep or who Skream is, seeing Skream play in Nashville is like a country music fan from Poland seeing Johnny Cash play in Krakow, or a rap fan from Mongolia going to a Wu-Tang show in Ulaanbaatar. The DJ traditions that Skream comes from and the dubstep subculture which he was so instrumental in developing in mid-2000s and early-2010s London are entirely foreign to the music culture of the American South. Yet, there he was, a master of the art of DJing playing an open-to-close set at a small club in midtown Nashville.
I arrived to the club in an Uber a few minutes before the set was scheduled to start at 10:00 PM and got a gin and tonic at the bar while I waited for the mirrored sliding door to the dance floor to open. By the time the lights dimmed, the door slid aside, and people made their way down the hallway from the lounge to the floor, Skream had already started his set with no introductions—a lit cigarette hanging from his lips and a pair of headphones resting at an angle on his head over one ear.The first ones in the room stood stationary around the dance floor’s perimeter holding their drinks. It had been raining that night, and most people left their homes with jackets that now, since the club didn’t have a coat check, lay draped over their crossed arms while they watched Skream behind the decks. Dumbfounded as to why a club wouldn’t have a coat check, I walked back into the hallway and stashed my heavy rubber raincoat behind a trash can for the night. Unencumbered, I finished my drink, put my phone in my pocket on Do Not Disturb, made my way to the center of the dance floor, and let my body do whatever felt better than standing still. I had come to dance.
Americans generally don’t know how to interact with a proper DJ set. As the room slowly filled in, the audience members naturally arranged themselves in parallel lines facing the DJ booth, the muscle memory of seeing live bands perform concerts. I made a conscious effort to position myself perpendicularly to the crowd, preferring to experience the room itself rather than to try being entertained by Skream as he hunched over the turntables in meditative focus. The volume of the music crescendoed along with the swelling noise as the crowd grew and the night went on, and soon even those who were stationary on the dance floor had no choice but to succumb to the rhythm. People swayed, waved their arms, and nodded their heads with the beat (most while keeping two feet firmly planted on the ground, though). These instinctual responses to the music gradually dissolved the rigid ranks of bodies into a single breathing, fluid mass that spread out to fill the entire room. Dancing is a liquid.
By 12:30 the room felt like a proper dance floor. The audience surrendered to their movements, subconsciously reacting to differences in timbre and rhythmic accents as Skream expertly curated a revolving door of textures and grooves to stimulate them. Intermittently, he would allow the four-on-the-floor kick drum to relent and the crowd to temporarily rest their legs, awakening from their trances and becoming aware of the energy in the room. In these moments of respite the audience shuffled in awkward anticipation of the beat’s return. I let out a cheer, reminding my fellow dancers that these momentary gaps served to facilitate our communication with the DJ, allowing us to express our collective pleasure and let Skream know that we were engaged, wanted more, and were demanding for him to bring the beat back. After the first cheer others were quick to accept the permission to participate and follow suit. Once or twice the crowd broke out into the “ooh-ooh” chant, a vestigial language of audience call-and-response left to us by the disco era—the last time when there was a prominent mainstream American dance culture.
Somewhere in the decades that have followed, our nation lost its social apparatuses for instilling people with the human tradition of social dancing, the fault of our prevailing Western culture upheld by the institutions of power within our nation. It was capitalism that gave us the 9-5 work week which impoverished us of our time and energy, making the physical exertion necessary for dancing less appealing than the lounging required for consuming escapist media. It was capitalism, too, which concentrated riches among the ultra wealthy, robbing the masses of disposable income and rendering such events a luxury rather than a vital function of society. It was patriarchal and puritanical religious traditions which labeled the physical flesh as sinful and made us ashamed of the bodies we inhabit, internalizing in us the notion that dancing is somehow a sinful act and that our human desires are to be ashamed of and ignored (which, as an aside, is perfectly demonstrated by the fact that Nashville has a Christian night club that serves no alcohol and restricts what kinds of dance moves are permitted). And it was a confluence of factors that led to the dissolution of our society’s third places, leaving us all to collectively seek out parasocial community online while being isolated in our homes, gathering in digital spaces while the physical spaces which once housed communal behaviors fell into disrepair and faded to the passage of time.
As humans, however, we still possess the ingrained biological needs both to release energy through movement and to socialize, and these needs are so profound that we continually develop ways to fulfill them without understanding why. Intrinsically we know how to jump around at a concert, we know how to get rowdy in a mosh pit, and we know how to imitate TikTok dance trends in an atomized simulation of our deeply embedded need for social dance outlets. But, aside from the few remaining exceptions (i.e. queer club spaces, imported dance cultures from Latin America, rural folk traditions like line dancing), American culture largely stopped producing recreational spaces where people could come together and discover how to tune into their bodies and let rhythm naturally guide their movements.
Thus, the American collective consciousness is slowly forgetting how to simply dance. We’re forgetting how to let tempo dictate which body parts we’re able to move quickly or slowly enough to keep time, how to form repetitive movement patterns to repeat on a loop, how to observe a crowd and respond to and imitate the moves of others—the social language of music and movement. Like a house cat who simulates the hunt for prey by chasing after a toy only to lose interest upon catching it, confused as to what goal the instinct which drove its pursuit served to accomplish, young Americans show up to high school proms, wedding parties, and dance clubs having little practice in or behavioral knowledge of how to engage in the experiences which these settings were created to facilitate (actually though, cheesy though they were, does Gen Alpha have an equivalent stand-in for The Macarena? The Hokey-Pokey? The Cupid Shuffle?). They stand in place awkwardly, unsure of how to participate with what the music is offering them, stunted by their culture in their ability to express this existential element of their humanity. But, on the dance floor at the Skream show in Nashville, there were those of us who were giving into the music and becoming human again.
Within the shared experience of the crowd we were all equal participants. Between flashes of strobe lights I caught passing glances of other people who faced their fellow dancers rather than the DJ, and during the few breaks I took to get water at the bar I struck up conversations with those who I noticed had also understood the purpose of what Skream was providing. Together we mourned the fact that, despite techno and house music’s origins in Midwestern American cities like Detroit and Chicago, most of America lacked dance music scenes like those in major cities like New York, London, Amsterdam, or Berlin. We expressed our wishes that Skream would switch it up from house music and play some dubstep, maybe some of his early classics. Someone complained to me that he hadn’t played his newest Charli XCX remix yet, and I assured them that he would. One person dapped me up, told me they liked my vibe, and offered me some of their ketamine, which I politely declined but I thanked them for the compliment. These conversations were nothing less than the breaking down of interpersonal barriers, and precisely what institutions such as night clubs were meant for.
Around 2:00 AM the crowd started to thin out. Those of us who remained huddled around the DJ booth and tried not to break our immersion by recognizing that we were dancing in a mostly empty room. At 2:30 Skream started playing dubstep. The switch from garage, house, and techno (each being around 120-130 BPM) to dubstep (traditionally around 140 BPM and in half-time caused a noticeable change in movement. While house music is felt in the feet, the legs, the hips, and the shoulders, dubstep is felt in the head, the torso, the arms, and the hands. I appreciated the rest for my lower body which Skream had granted with the change in genre.Skream played OG tracks like 3K Lane by Joker and Jakes and his remix of La Roux’s In For The Kill (I wrote a note on my phone thanking him for playing the former, he nodded and gave me a thumbs up). A fellow dancer in the crowd held their lighter up to the booth to light Skream’s cigarette. At 3:00 AM Skream closed out his set with his Von Dutch remix, which I celebrated with the person from the bar earlier. There was much pain in the world that day, but not in that room.
As the final notes of the last song faded, the diminished crowd erupted with praise. Skream folded his hands and bowed, taking a moment to thank those of us who stayed for the night before stepping off stage and into the back rooms. Then the house lights flipped on and the staff ushered us all outside. I made sure to grab my raincoat as I exited, no one had touched it.
On the sidewalk we were all once again strangers. Small groups of friends huddled together under the awning as they waited for their rides. A few lone stragglers wandered off into the night on foot. I sat on the curb and checked my phone while I waited for my Uber, in which I sat mostly silent as I came down from the high of the dance floor. T.I.’s Live Your Life played on the car radio, a song I hadn’t heard in years. It was like seeing an old friend again. I actually listened to the lyrics for perhaps the first time. Back at my apartment I climbed into bed and listened to Burial as I fell asleep, the perfect outro music for a cold and rainy night spent dancing at the club.
Sep 29, 2024
Comments (14)
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are you writing a novel here because there is a hole in your chest that nothing can fill
dailey probably don’t have a novel in me at the moment but I could pop out a few more essays for sure
royallmonarch you are a pillar of this site i mean that truly!! I mourn the days I never lived in the 70s-90s, the days of disco, the height of breakdance, the birth of house. TikTok dances feel like such a cheap alternative to the communal culture you describe. Part of my problem is "training" at home to dance at the club instead of inhabiting scenes (live in the suburbs, ick). Great read, also if anyone has any more dance culture reading recs please share em!!
This is an amazing piece of work. I learned a ton here!!!
Have you published this elsewhere or do you plan to? (I hope so)
mattshawsome I got a blog on my personal site but i’m not like a career writer haha
royallmonarch Well, consider it!
You've clearly got deep knowledge on the subject, a really thoughtful way of approaching it, and some mad writing skills.
So epic! I have some notes.
- There is a proper dance club (well minus the coat check) in Nashville?? Amazing.
- The DJ pedestal / staring at the DJ thing actually came from Europe and infected the US somehow in the late 2000s IMO
- I hope you've read Tim Lawrence's Love Saves the Day and other adjacent musicological history books about dance music coz you'd love that shit
- Skream did a fun takeover of the NTS Breakfast Show last year, if you wanna hear a set by him where he's frequently dropping onto the mic check it out
iconicindex yo i’ll check that book and mix out for sure. a lot of my observations were informed by David Byrne’s How Music Works and his sections on the social evolution of dance.
iconicindex also re: the DJ as a performer trend yeah I can see how the first DJs to become spectacles in and of themselves may have started in Europe, but it’s basically just another way that we’ve lost the distinction between performer and curator and how DJs are still straddling this line
there’s something very spiritual and grounding about dancing like just dancing at a party/in the club where it feels like everyone present is one huge organism and sound is your connective tissue. you put this across very beautifully! glad you had a great time dancing.
Related Recs
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I love to create a long ass list of mixes to listen to on YouTube (and pray that an angel has put the tracklist in the comments)
One thing I have noticed in the comments of DJ mixes, is people's pure amazement that a DJ has mixed a wide range of genres together.
I picked up DJ'ing two years ago and with that, a keen interest in the history of genres and where they originated. To be fr, the majority of music we listen to today was created by black people who were innovative against all odds. I truly believe that rhythm is intrinsic to that creative process and the reason why a lot of these genres blend so well is because of common drum patterns and melodies.
For example, I went to a salsa night and felt moved by the drum patterns of the songs being played, as they were reminiscent of the music I grew up on (Highlife, Ghana). This can be traced back to the slave trade, where Africans were enslaved and transported from Africa across to the Caribbean, taking those rhythms with them and creating new sounds that established this tangible sonic connection.
So when we witness DJ's mix Jersey Club, with Reggaeton, to Baltimore Club to Grime, to Jungle, Baile funk and back again... that's lightwork! Black people pioneered all these genres, infusing those intrinsic rhythms and unknowingly creating a formula that makes all these musical genres blend so perfectly.
So the next time you listen to a multi-genre DJ set (I'd recommend Zack Fox's Boiler Room to start) just know you are getting schooled in BLACK HISTORY!
Sep 17, 2024
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i started DJing for fun, and also to build a new relationship to music when feeling uninspired as a songwriter. in pursuing DJing more seriously, i have developed a real passion for it. i realize i am becoming part of a musical, cultural, and political history. so i've been trying to put in the work of learning more about it all, aside from just the skills of the CDJs.
this series from RA highlights the importance of DJs, dance music, nightlife, and the communities they build. it's so cool to see how different cities and their social norms impact nightlife, and it gives a great intro as to why nightlife is the way it is. it's also an interesting watch considering a lot of these were made before COVID, so it's a little nostalgic, too.
Feb 10, 2024
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Being a DJ is one of the coolest things you can do in 2022. I’d like to live in a world where everyone DJs during lunch break, after work, before bed. The anime series “D4DJ: First Mix” is an idyllic example of such a place. When you meet someone new and you’re talking about music and you say “this one hits when I spin it at the club” or “I have a really cool remix of that on my USB”, your hotness increases so much. My first DJ set was in high school at Utopia Studios in St. Louis, Missouri and I played so much festival dubstep to a crowd of unknowing prep school kids. Since then it’s been much more of the same.
Jul 12, 2022
Top Recs from @royallmonarch
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I consume a lot of music regularly, and a huge part of keeping a fresh diet of new listens going is having enough sources of recommendations that aren’t an algorithm that either 1) reinforces your existing listening patterns, keeping you stagnant in your tastes, or 2) platforms whoever paid enough to push their product to the top, serving you something that may not inherently be of inferior quality, but may not align with your tastes, may not be exciting beyond just being a new release, and realigns your current listening habits to be more in line with what the average user on the platform is also listening to — which socially might have benefits but which creates a homogeneity of consumption that can become bland since you’re listening to something really just because it’s the next product on the assembly line to have its public moment and not because anything about the music actually captured your attention. the current landscape of streaming is designed to keep you at an all you can eat buffet where you take what’s served to you, and as a result a lot of us have forgotten how to look at a menu and order.
so what does taking a more active role in your own music curation look like? for me, it’s meant not using streaming as a primary listening platform. I mostly use my local Apple Music library on my phone that I curate with the vestigial iTunes Library framework that’s still a part of Apple Music on my laptop. probably going to find an alternative soon since apple seems to be cutting integration progressively. I like this method because it forces me to choose what to sync to the limited storage space I have, forcing me to take inventory of what I actually listen to and what I can offload. the files I get are mostly from Bandcamp or Soulseek depending on whether it’s available for purchase or entirely unavailable online (as is the case for a lot of electronic music that was on vinyl only, which is where soulseek comes in clutch). I also have freedom here to change the ID3 tags to better sort and organize, rate, change track info, and track my own listening data.
Bandcamp and other music purchasing platforms are great because 1) it reshapes my relationship to music away from consumerism and back towards curation. I have to pay actual money for this thing now if I want to use it, so i’m forced to consider its value (usually i’ll stream a release first to gauge my interest). 2) having to spend money helps me to course out my meals so to speak, as i’ll buy a few releases i’ve accumulated in my cart over the month and cash out on Bandcamp Friday when 100% of my money is actually getting to the artist (TOMORROW IS BANDCAMP FRIDAY BTW!!!), and between purchases I can actually chew and savor and digest my last orders, they don’t get swept up in the deluge of new releases. my plate is full until i’m done and then I order more. also for the times of the year like now when new music isn’t coming out as regularly I take time to find older music that I would normally overlook while keeping up with new drops. currently very into early 80s/late 70s music with early digital production, kinda stuff that would evolve into synthpop and dance music.
so how do you know what to order? for me, I’m getting recs through trusted curation platforms. whether it’s bandcamp daily, y’all lovely folks here on PI.FYI, friends, or most importantly musicians who I follow on socials that share their tastes through posts, stories, playlists on steaming, interviews, etc. I like this last one especially because it’s kind of like a musical game of telephone. if I like an artist and they share their interests and influences it’s like every layer in this process is stretching my palate further from the sound that I was originally interested in and into a new territory that has some shared DNA but would never have been recommended to me by an algo because there’s no shared category or label between them, only the musical influence and interpretation of it made by the artist. as an example, I was a huge Skrillex stan, he signed KOAN Sound to his label, they collab with Asa who collabs with Sorrow, Sorrow takes huge influence from Burial, Burial makes some ambient adjacent stuff and takes huge influence from 90s rave music and drum and bass and 2000s rnb, now i’m listening to Brandy - All in Me, William Basinski, Aphex Twin, none on whom would get recommended by Spotify to me from Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.
LAST thing i’ll say — because in yappin about this i’m realizing how actually passionate about this subject I am: MAKE LISTS! playlists are cool, but they can flatten your music into vague categories of “vibes” and “aesthetics” and encourage picking one-off songs from artists that you never form an active audience relationship with. I make a practice of making my own year end lists of top 25 albums (plus some honorable recs and top individual songs) and keeping them in a notes doc that I regularly update and rearrange over the course of the year. this forces me to consider the actual relationship i’m forming with what i’ve ordered for myself. did I like it in the moment but it didn’t have staying power? is it slowly growing on me? it also encourages taking albums as a whole. maybe I liked one or two tracks a lot but the rest wasn't resonating. that’s ok! maybe I rank it lower but now i’ve actually taken time to consider it, it’s in my library, and maybe (quite a few cases for me) something I ranked like bottom 5 albums becomes a retroactive favorite from that year as my tastes evolve. also 25 albums to take with me from each year is really more than you'd think, i struggle sometimes to even find 25 that I formed a true connection with. I think the biggest thing the itunes era ruined that led into now is the single-ification of music, the ability to separate the hits from the deep cuts. albums are meant to be taken as a whole, and then once you've really sat with the whole you can find what actually stuck. even then I like to keep the whole around because soooo often i’ll write off a track that yeeeears later I come to love. trust the artist, they made it like they did for a reason.
aaannyyyywayy TLDR: get recs organically, be more active in deciding your listening patterns, fr*cken pay artists yall, trust the artist embrace the album, really consider what you consume
Feb 29, 2024
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i’m not gonna go into the state of politics in this country, frankly I enjoy that this site has been a politics free space for the most part. with that being said, resigning to despair and the feeling of powerlessness serves only the status quo. inaction is not the solution, nor is waiting for the government to be what you want it to be. politics over: here’s the rec
be the change you want to see
as much of a cliche as this saying is, i’ve grown to believe in it with my full being as i’ve gotten older. for the things you have control over, for the practical needs that you can meet within your community, for the little things you can do every day to ease someone’s burden or generally be a pleasant interaction in someone’s life: bring to the world what you feel it lacks.
where you live there are likely already communities that are arising to support each other and call for change. seek those out if that’s a motivating notion for you. participate as much as you are able and as little as you please, every bit counts. being a visible and tangible example of how the agency we all have can create something better will motivate others to find their voice. a lot of people feel like you, but even a few in action is better than multitudes in despair.
community is so key, and the world we live in has created a situation where isolation is the default so that individuals are forced to rely on the market or the state to meet their needs. how much better would it be to have neighbors and friends as a support network, mutually exchanging their time and resources to strengthen the communtiy and invest in relationships that benefit the whole. the moment we all realize that we can do for each other what the world tells us we need to do ourselves, the stronger we will be and the more we can come together and enact real change from the bottom up, rather than being divided in pleading for a top down approach.
this may sound revolutionary because we have become so detached from community that we cannot envision the changes in our model of living that would have to be made, but it’s sooo not that deep, and it feels more like investing in the good in others than sacrificing personal comforts. it can look like:
- shopping at a local business vs a corporate chain, get to know the staff, get to know your fellow patrons
- spending time with friends, there doesn't need to be a reason or occasion. make meals together, drive together to go do something, maybe literally just be in each others presence as you do daily life, share each others sacred presence amidst the mundane
- give things you don’t need to a friend who does, exchange clothes, exchange favors, share knowledge and resources, lend a skill or a craft, donate things if you don’t know someone who can use it, exchange things and experiences without the need for monetary incentive
- create things together, make art together, share and exchange media, try things for the joy of experiencing them without the need to be “good” at it,
- grieve together, worry together, talk out negative feelings, commiserate, support, encourage, motivate, share your accomplishments, celebrate together
- get to know your neighbors, why is everyone in isolation while in such proximity?
- get off that damn phone if it makes you feel bad, you wont miss out, the world happens outside of it, unlearn FOMO
- enjoy nature, go on walks, get outside, sweat and run and jump and see the sky
- remind yourself that life is about what happens right now, don’t be concerned with what could be or what was if you are unable to affect it in the present.
- go to a concert at a small venue for an artist you’ve never heard of, bring friends, don’t preclude experience for the perceived necessity of entertainment
- unlearn grindset, but also unlearn bainrot. don’t fester in your down time. rest can be active, activity can be restorative. your time is precious and you will meet your need for purpose and direction by literally choosing to pursue a “meaningless” hobby in even what little time you may have vs scrolling and taking psychic damage.
- learn to enjoy the abundance of freely available joy in this world, we have been tricked to believe that money is the sole provider of a happy life
idk i’m just becoming mindful of what brings me life in this world and so much of it is available to me solely by seeking it out instead of idleness in my free time under the guise of “rest.” so much if it comes from seeing the divine in others and creating bonds and relationships and support networks. so much of it comes from enjoying beauty and art, and moderating and savoring that experience vs endless consumption and media gluttony.
the world through a screen is bleak, the world in front of your eyes can be beautiful, the system is broken but you and everyone you know has some untapped agency. anyway imma get off my soapbox, go catch a firefly or sit around a campfire with the homies. you’ll be glad you did.
Jun 29, 2024
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not because you met someone or anything but because you take psychic damage every time you doom swipe on there and you probably never liked being on there in the first place and why does everyone seem to have a wack helen keller take and feel the need to put that on their profile like it’s cute??
time to do it the old fashioned way and mix and mingle at the sock hop or however our grandparents did it. after all, you just being around and living life is gonna be a better pitch for why someone should date you than those same 5 photos and your two-truths-and-a-lie prompt.
Feb 22, 2024