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.
