Dance music is like a virus: it has affected so many different genres.
I have crazy, different influences in my songs. I want rap music, I want Congolese rumba, I want salsa, I want dance music, I want hip-hop music, all mixed into one!
It’s really cool to see glowsticks at the show, to see dance music culture infiltrating and becoming one with the metal community.
To me, dance music is a lot of space – to listen to other things than melodies. I think club music and dance music really require a different way of listening.
Bristol is known for having quite a good success rate of music – Massive Attack and Portishead, that drum and bass, dance music scene. I never listened to that stuff when I was a kid, but my parents did, and my parents knew some of those people.
Trance is a very emotional and uplifting form of dance music. It appeals to many people in this way having such a strong connection with emotions. It makes people happy and ready to party.
I just like the lineage and the heritage and the fact that British dance music is still progressing. I’m from London; I love London, and I wouldn’t know how else to show that love in musical terms. There’s something about British stuff that’s a bit faster, a bit harder-hitting. Just tough.
Every music – except dance music, which is for dancing, I suppose – is for the spirit of the human being, and not for the body.
I’m definitely a fan of dance music. I guess we really call it ‘dance’ music because music seems to have become very functional. For years, people were trying to be everything. Now, musicians are becoming very specific.
Dance music always goes through its changes; many styles come have their light and go back to the underground ’til it happens again.
Whenever you play dance music, it serves a function. It becomes a utility; you have to worry about the tempos and what you’re going to play for people. But when you’re playing for listening, you’re free.
I’ve always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. There’s hip-hop art, dance, music, but there really isn’t hip-hop film. So I was trying to do that.
The first thing I remember hearing was just the dance music that was in the charts when I was growing up. I don’t remember many of the names of specific tracks – they were just kind of early acid house things.
Being from a background of dance music and what you might call club music or electronic music, I think something that gets neglected in that scene is personal vulnerability.
I think people look at dance music and see it as kind of a bad thing, and bad people hang out in nightclubs, but it never felt that way for me. Growing up in Chicago, music was the thing that saved me, that kept me on the straight and narrow.
I actually have been really influenced by dance music.
I was always very into heavy metal, and heavy metal is full of emotion and extremes, and I think that’s the same in dance music.
I think every Dutch person has a connection with dance music.
Holland is a really small country, but with a very strong club and festival scene. Dance music has been huge in Holland since the late eighties. So there were a lot of opportunities for producers and DJs to release records and play live.
What’s wrong with the ‘Laffy Taffys’ and the Soulja Boys? We need fun records. We gotta have dance music. We gotta have club music. We gotta have kids’ music.
So dance music is now pop music. So now, as a dance producer, what do I have to do? So I’m starting to do alien music, because pop is not pop anymore; we need to go alien to be independent.
I love music, and I loved dance music immediately. So I bought some equipment and started making my own. When I started this, I didn’t say, ‘okay I’m going to do this step and then this step’ to become popular. I just created music that I loved.
Gay nightclubs offer better dance music.
I don’t think I make dance music. It’s not even 4/4. And it’s slow.
In ’92 – ’93, I was at that age when I was looking for my identity and that’s when I found dance music and I really fell in love with it.
Even before I auditioned for ‘X Factor’ the second time, I was doing a lot of dance music.
The music industry isn’t converging toward dance music. Dance music is dance music. It’s been around since disco – and way before disco. But there’s different versions of dance music.
I love music, and I loved dance music immediately. So I bought some equipment and started making my own. When I started this, I didn’t say, ‘okay I’m going to do this step and then this step’ to become popular. I just created music that I loved.
From the beginning, I wanted to make dance music with a human element to it.
New York feels like the whole city is into dance music. That’s not how it felt when I was younger. There was more of a hipster scene.
New York has a deep culture of house and dance music, and to be able to tap into that is my way of shutting off. I go to friends’ parties and local spots around the area: places I can go to, have a dance, and forget about being an actor and the attention.
I think hip hop is a dance music that’s rebellious by nature.
This was a time frame when dance music and clubs were having a real impact on culture, and it had an impact on me.
Scotland is one of my favourite places to perform: it’s really something special. Scottish audiences are just so enthusiastic; their approach to dance music just feels similar to my own somehow.
I think the impact my music has had on dance music fans is to bring out their inner love for dancing and having a good time.
I have been a huge fan of Major Lazer for a long time and they have done a phenomenal job in redefining dance music across the globe.
Jazz in the 1920s and ’30s was dance music, teenage music for parties, for being wild and young. There’s this punk feeling I really love. It was something so radical and different and new and not codified. People didn’t have a definition of what they were doing.
We always thought the Tom Tom Club could change to anything, but it acquired this image, which was cartoon animation and this real light-hearted dance music.
When playing big festivals, I tend to play big, over the top techno tracks, like hands in the air songs that make sense being played in front of 30,000 people. I steer away from subtlety in the interests of big bombastic dance music.
Making dance music is a spiritual thing. It’s about being completely absorbed by rhythm and vibration, so much so that the petty stuff of life stops mattering.
I found that dance, music, and literature is how I made sense of the world… it pushed me to think of things bigger than life’s daily routines… to think beyond what is immediate or convenient.
There are so many things and so many aspects to gay life that I’ve discovered and so many things to write about. I have a new life, and I have a new take on dance music because of that life.
I’m a DJ who makes dance music who got to play with Sting.
I am trying to walk a tightrope; trying to keep the DJ community happy while trying to spread the message about dance music to more people. That is the mission that I am on.
When I’m running, I like to listen to dance music and hip-hop.
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