Hellllllllllllllllllo there, how are you? I am so pleased to share this crisp fall edition of HTF||HTS, a repository of sounds and stories equally serving the human and shape-shifting among us.
This issue is a little something to help liven up your blah days and release pent-up energy. Can you handle what a great song transition may do to your composure? Are you ready to confront the depths of your passion in four-on-the-floor time?
BC THIS IS THE DANCE ISSUE!
Specifically, the dancing at home issue. Ultra specifically, the dancing at home alone issue. You the deejay, you the master of step-stool hydraulics. ♫♫ THIS IS YOUR NIGHT [day or afternoon], DANCING FREE UNTIL . . . whatever comes next. ♫♫
Normally I’d say listen and then come back and read on, but this is nearly 4 hours of music. So do whatever suits you and read on for the full story.
To get that “home but make it club” feel, toggle your settings so that crossfade’s set to keep you moving into the next song, none of that awkward silence. If you can make this a cord-free experience, do it! Volume up (without harming your ears or bumming out your neighbors) and intentions set - “this is my time to dance.” Dance2forget and dance2remember. Just dance!
[Listen on Pandora]
Dancing wildly throughout the night has kept me going during some of these darker times. Among the tools of self care, treating my own apartment as a bonafide rave or Y2K bat mitzvah has lifted me out of pits where I sincerely doubted a a future, into a present where I did not care to debate a future because something like “Fergalicious” (not featured, but dear god) exists and is transcendent in just the right set of circumstances.
Pure pop trash provides an uplift that is frankly unhinged and that cannot be reproduced by any other vehicle - yet with a formula utterly reproducible. When I started collecting dance tracks, I noticed how easy and natural it was to just wrap myself up in a blanket of schmaltz. It feels good in the moment and for several moments to come, but then and always, everything in moderation. Too much Tiger Beat and you go into a sugar coma, the mental and physical state of anti-dance.
Want to get the body moving?
Take a cue from some honest-to-goodness living. Feel it on your neck when the temptress living inside your eyeball sighs, and feel it in your gut when the asphyxiation of a car crash jolts you into consciousness.
If anything, it’s that absurdist range of experience that’s going to move you to dance! And yet.
To shed the unfortunate but very real insecurity and shame that comes with fully inhabiting and manipulating my own body, I must personally feel the music at a level that is not so different from being possessed.
I want and need to feel possessed by my curiosity and all around newness to dance, to be fully overcome and committed to feeling sexy, a little evil, angry, powerful, excited, nostalgic, scared, sacred, heartbroken, in love and on fire.
And then, stepping outside of me and my apartment for a moment, what would we call that thing when a song so perfectly and so unexpectedly transitions into another song that the whole dancefloor starts screaming?
. . . Is it not possession?
In her NYT piece exploring dance in times of crisis, Carina del Valle Schorske quotes the late French historian Philippe de Félice, who noted that “eras of greatest material and moral distress seem to be those during which people dance most.”
She writes from our own present day and proximate era of covid (unfolding, as it has, amid a background and simultaneous foreground of great social and political unrest), and describes the medieval dance manias that took over Europe following the worst of the Black Death as well as during other catastrophic periods. During these manias, mobs of people would congregate in public frenzied dance displays, dancing for days and weeks at a time until the climax of ecstasy, exhaustion, or the ultimate - death.
There are theorists who characterize this “choreomania” as a type of mass psychogenic illness, or mass hysteria. (Another mass psychogenic illness with considerable historical precedent is hysterical laughter.) Others cite occult reasons, and still others, good old-fashioned coping mechanisms. In any case, feels fair to say it encompasses a state of being possessed.
“Despojo,” literally “dispossession,” is the advice Carina’s mother gave to her during the most isolating and seemingly hopeless periods of quarantine, encouraging her to dance in her NYC apartment, albeit alone and with everything else generally sucking.
I personally started off nearly every single night in isolation by popping in earbuds and blasting Cerrone’s “Supernature,” Eurodisco’s finest and the backing track to the opening dance sequence of a visually stunning (if not completely nauseating) film that I one kind of hate, and two, thought about obsessively when I first began trying to understand how and why people were behaving the way they did in the earliest days of the pandemic.
(Content warning on a content warning: Climax contains gratuitous gender-based violence and sexual assault. I can’t in good conscience recommend watching past the opening sequence.)
Gaspar Noé’s 2018 “Climax” is a ruthless study in the genre of body horror - a subgenre of which is dance horror - where contorting bodies that are literally trained to push themselves to the absolute limit are weapons capable of and, in fact, inclined toward, extreme acts of violence. In it, members of a French dance troupe drink heavily spiked sangria and find themselves increasingly losing all sense of composure, cascading from a celebratory post-rehearsal dance party into a hellish and deadly executioner-cum-orgy-style witch hunt for the culprit.
It’s not, though, that the dancers become violent under the zany brainy influence of drugs. LSD adds hallucinatory grandeur to the already out-of-control experience, but what really propels the dancers’ sustained violence is more primal and pre-wired, a rebellion against the loss of control itself. (Noé says as much when asked if the film is “anti-drug.”)
There is extreme violation and violence in losing control non-consensually. In the first months of covid hitting, people, myself included, absolutely crumbled without any immediate tangible harm from the disease or its chain of casualties. The struggle over a loss of control - or at least the myth of control - is what motioned an unravelling.
Feeling out of control over feeling out of control begets feeling more out of control. It’s an incredibly simple recipe!
As we saw throughout the year, huge swaths of the population grew demonstratively more violent, more possessed in their right to rebel against currents that felt personally targeted against their own autonomous movements and goals.
It’s fucking gross and a million more things I could say but won’t. (Right now.)
Straight-up dancing, however, is giving informed consent to lose control. Similar to orgasm, it’s the movement of possessed dispossession, the ultimate body freedom.
Real talk: If you are apocalyptically horny and don’t know what to do, a) take a break and dance, b) don’t worry because I’m about to talk more about psychedelic fungus.
When I first watched Climax, I thought that it was an allegorical spin on “Le Pain Maudit,” or “cursed bread," a nickname given to a 1951 mass poisoning event in which more than 250 people in Pont-Saint-Esprit began to very suddenly hallucinate and flip a small French town into chaos. Though conspiracies around biological warfare flourished (like covid, how fun!), it was most-widely believed that the outbreak traced back to a bakery serving rye contaminated with ergot - a fungus used to make LSD.
I’m going the distance here because ergotism, too, was also originally cited as a cause of the dance manias that befell Europe throughout the 10th to 16th centuries.
Shitty bread has since been debunked as the source of either, with the more modern French case still largely remaining a mystery. As to involuntary medieval writhing, sometimes for months on end? Consensus now generally points to the crushing psychic weight of being alive.
Living life can be preposterous, and dancing is truly an excellent balm for stress.
So, here it is, “Home Dance!”
As with most everything I curate, this playlist puts range at the helm, intentionally hopping between genre, decade, lyrical subject matter, and tone. Amid the shifts are patterns, accelerations into decelerations and decelerations into accelerations that function like different acts in a play or stages of a party.
At the same time, something about my Libra moon-ness being in my 8th house orients me toward darkness and taboos, themes I instinctually run to seeking security and safety (per Co–Star).
I will and do wake up at 7 am and immediately queue the abyssal, languid sensuality of ambient drone, or, at the other end of the spectrum, the sexually Luciferean and caustic noise of Electronic Body Music (Pelada), a hybrid of Techno, Punk, and Industrial (Special Interest).
And I understand that most people, and most dance floors(!), also don’t work this way. So I’m working to respectfully temper these impulses - respectfully, inasmuch as I still think that they are valuable, that they can and should coexist in space. And respectfully, in that they can’t and shouldn’t suck up all the air and airplay in a room.
A more formal party typically begins with some type of cocktail hour, easing our minds and bodies into mingling, toe-tapping, and eventually, full-bodied dancing. To ease into things, I started Home Dance off with some lighter and brighter notes.
Janet Jackson’s “Go Deep” has the perfectly balanced momentum to get a party started in an energetic, though contained, way. It’s a buoyant track that’s literally about embarking on a night of hedonism, delivered with a confidence and sexual agency that is native to Janet’s decades-spanning catalog, but also with the characteristically clean, lean, and honeyed vocals, production, and instrumentation that makes Janet’s music so very direct, universal and accessible, almost like THE blueprint for all pop and R&B to follow.
And I don’t mean this in a bad way; the opposite, really! Janet releases pristine bops that are vulnerable, sexy, and fun, and she’s one of my all-time favorite artists. There’s enormous range to her music, too, keeping up with, defining, and advancing well ahead of trends and times in all different genres.
What feels so immediately and consistently graspable - and thus, danceable - about her music may seem basic and achievable enough, but it just doesn’t register true for many or any other artist catalogs. And that makes it a confident bet in any space.
In sum, starting a party with a Janet hit is ALWAYS the right choice. I’ll physically fight you on it if I must!
The mood on Home Dance grinds into darker and more intense territory every handful of tracks, the first shift signaled in La Neve’s “Needs It,” an agitated yet catchy rail against what, to me, reads as gaslighting. (“But what do you do when you know about it, and what do you do when it’s all around us?”) Needs It clocks in at just under three and a half minutes, making it a dancefloor-ready interpolation of Television’s 1977’s “Marquee Moon,” the iconic bassline introduced by punchy drumming in place of the latter’s iconic guitar riffs.
If I had to pick an inflection point at which to scream loudest, it’s the unexpected and imho seamless transition from Needs It into Ciara’s “Ride,” a very sexy song about sex that hits climactic tensions in its very first seconds. The power-play between the stretched-out bassline and chopped and screwed male (Ludacris!) vocals, and the ribbony synths slinking around Ciara’s salutes to being a dom simply DOES SOMETHING FOR ME.
Things continue to accelerate with aggression and queerness on “Bang This,” a raucous and relentless anthem by self-described nu jungle, digital hardcore, and US grime hybrid duo Ghösh. In chopper-fast flow, singer Symphony Spell exorcises systemic corruption while threatening and promising in the same I-don’t-fuck-with-you breath to dismantle and displace that power.
And to tear ass on the dancefloor.
To maintain the balance that is so critical to dance marathons, there is also a cool-down period just about midway through the playlist. Beginning with the ethereal drum & bass serenade “To Myself” by Chippy Nonstop and dj genderfluid, this flirty segment bubbles along with Tinashe’s appropriately bouncy “Bouncin,” sandwiched, as it were, by one of the 90’s happiest-sounding sad songs (“Lovefool”), and the playful minimalist glitch and jingle jangles of Angelnumber 8’s “Frozen River.“
And now, appropriate as ever, a note on Lovefool and nostalgia on the dancefloor.
Nostalgia overdone can backfire. As miserable ad man Don Draper reminds us, the term is constructed from a Greek compound meaning “the pain from an old wound.” Ouchie!
Nostalgia can pack such a profound punch that it takes us right off the dance floor and into a much headier, existential space. Alternatively, it can feel like a gimmick which, like pop schmaltz, is cloying in excess.
Sprinkle these things in every now again, though, and you’ve got a gameplay for some real good fun!
Have you been possessed by fun lately? I think I’m getting there.
Because when I thought my moody supine would truly send me spiraling into the earth’s core, dancing grabbed me by the waist and spun me into different dimensions. It didn’t materially change anything that was happening or that had happened, but it gave me a reprieve from the damning control nightmare whose only purpose, it seems, is to inflate itself.
Is there going to be a different way of me being me, on a public dance floor, after countless hours of dancing alone in my house? I honestly cannot say.
In the meantime, there’s Home Dance. I hope you like it :’)
*** Like what you hear? Support the artists by purchasing their music and merch - Bandcamp is best for this! - going to shows, and sharing their work with people who make you wanna dance! ***
***Like what you read? Support this platform and forward HTFHTS to your friends!***