Maybe it’s just me… maybe it’s personal taste… maybe it’s to do with when I was born… but I’ve always felt that all the best dance and trance music was produced between about 1990 and 1996. It’s all there. After that it all got silly and rappy and sounded like the same old stuff. Before that I was too young to care by far, but even so, it doesn’t seem to be up to scratch.
I theorised once that dance music – good dance music – ages: and that the best dance music at any given time was approximately nine years and eight months old. Perhaps that’s just to do with my age, again, or maybe it’s to do with humans and how nostalgic they get about things about ten years ago. Or maybe I’m still too young to develop such a theory anyway. But there’s a lot of people who’ve supported me in this brave little theory.
At heart, I’m a rocker. Give me something with a wild man on a guitar and lyrics that actually mean something and I’m in my happy place. But secretly, I’ve always had a passion for dance music, particularly trance music (or, as I put it – dance music with the bassline removed either entirely, or alternately, throughout the song). It’s great to write code to… and it’s amazing how productive you can be on a long night’s hacking with some dance music thumping away in the background, as I suggested some weeks back. It’s because you don’t have to think when you’re listening to dance music… it just happens. But the thing that makes good dance music good is that it makes you feel happy (discussions about beatrates divided by heartrates and theories about the reasons for this are left for another day).
So; as I said, there’s been a nasty lull in dance music for the last eight years or so, with only a few notable and worthwhile tracks released therein, IMNSHO. But the other day, in Burger King with Gareth, I ended up in a discussion about the music that was playing on the radio at the time. It was dance music, but it was actually good. We suggested that we may be entering a period of revival of “good” dance music. So I’m spending the evening on alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.dance, downloading heaps of randomly-selected new dance tracks, to see if they’re any good.
It’d be nice if they were. I have some big coding projects to do before Christmas, and I could do with some mindless happybouncey music to do it to.
I suggest for coding music – http://205.188.234.4:8016 (shoutcast) or http://streams.ragga-jungle.com/tunein.m3u
You do need bass for coding.
–Jon
Thanks for that, Jon – sounds just like what I’m looking for!