Hip-hop is something that’s always felt very American in origin. We never said, “This is ours.” Nor do we talk about dance music in the way we do hip-hop or rock ’n’ roll. In the US, we didn’t invest in dance music. It just didn’t catch on in America in the same way that it did in Europe, particularly in the UK, and the rest of the world. And it’s ironic because house music was literally created in the United States, in predominantly Black and brown queer communities. I shouldn’t say “problem” - it stems from a specifically American perspective. I think that a lot of this is a very specifically American problem. But you point out that this take is a little uninformed. If you look at the media that’s covering Bey’s album, there are a lot of articles framing this as a resurrection. One of the things you wrote that fascinated me is that there seems to be an overarching and faulty narrative that Beyoncé and Drake are saving or revitalizing house music. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. Given his expertise, I thought Reynaldo would be the perfect person to explain most Americans’ tenuous if not superficial relationship to dance music, why that exists, and what Beyoncé’s new album does and doesn’t mean for a genre that Americans seem so enthusiastically ready to declare is on life support. Reynaldo writes First Floor, a newsletter laser-focused on dance music, and argues the fact that most Americans don’t know or aren’t proud that the United States is the birthplace of house is a failure. “So why isn’t it common knowledge that disco, house music, techno and electro, and all these other genres also came from Black American communities?” “Everyone knows about Bruce Springsteen, and everyone knows that jazz started in the United States,” Shawn Reynaldo, a music journalist specializing in house and dance music, told me. But dance music is as American as rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop, country, or R&B and is just as serious and important a genre. Her album comes on the heels of Drake’s dance-heavy album Honestly Nevermind, another signal that dance music is ready for its moment.Īs a fan of Beyoncé and dancing (I make no claim to do it well), this is fantastic news.īut the narrative that dance music needs changing or revitalization goes back to that pesky, ever-prevailing idea that dance music is not good to begin with. It’s a moment, according to the press coverage surrounding its release, that may change the industry and shift the way we think about dance music, house music specifically. She released the first single, “Break My Soul” in June, which used a sample of Robin S.’s “Show Me Love” and incorporated house music elements. If that’s the case, then music that’s designed to be joyful and make you dance can’t be good, right?Įnter: Beyoncé, arguably the biggest superstar and greatest performer in music today.īeyoncé is on the verge of releasing Renaissance, an album that’s dance-centric and reportedly will borrow heavily from disco and house.
Anything that makes you happy has to have a drawback. I get why this fraud has been so successful.Īmericans are, at a very young age, taught to be suspicious of joy. In the odd case that dance music is so good that one can’t help but love it, it can be easily brushed off as ironic appreciation.
The conspiracy has gone so far that people somehow believe dance music isn’t American. We have been convinced that it has neither merit nor substance, and that it cannot be serious. One of the most successful scams ever perpetrated on Americans is the idea that dance music sucks.
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