Music Book Review: Dance-Punk by Larissa Wodtke

Dance-Punk
by Larissa Wodtke (Music 781.66 Wod)

If you visit the Polley Music Library or Lincoln’s record shops, you may have seen some books in a series called “33 1/3” published by Bloomsbury, each of which focuses on a particular recording. They’re small books, just a little bit taller than a CD, and they are cleverly marketed to both bookstores and record stores as a fun way to learn a little bit more about your favorite albums. We have quite a few of those books here at Polley, and the series continues to grow each year. Late last year, the 33 1/3 series expanded into a new set of books called “Genre,” and as you might guess, each focuses on a particular genre of music. So far, they’re focusing on what perhaps could be thought of more as “subgenres” of music, relatively small music scenes that definitely have their own identity and history, but aren’t nearly so comprehensive as “rock” or “hip-hop” or “classical” would be to document in one volume. The books are a little bigger than the main series covering records — in fact, their footprint is just slightly larger than a typical mass market paperback — and they’re each written by a single author. One of the first three books is the series is Dance-Punk by Larissa Wodtke, along with books about trip-hop and death metal.

 

Perhaps the toughest job author Wodtke has to face in Dance-Punk comes right at the beginning: what are the boundaries of dance-punk? This question is tricky because the origins of this music didn’t come from bands calling themselves “dance-punk.” The term is more of an editorial critic’s term added after the fact, though it’s useful for tracking a kind of musical approach that isn’t satisfactorily addressed with some of the other genres this music ultimately slipped between. It’s one of those small genres that initially came into being to address particular trends noted across a few bands, and then it took on a life of its own. Today, there are lots of playlists of dance-punk music on streaming sites, and the term was used more broadly by bands in the “second wave” of the music in the Oughts. But parsing out the earliest origins is a bit of a chore, having to pick bands that are otherwise known for being punk, post-punk, no wave, new wave, or even with influences from disco, krautrock, afrobeat and experimental music genres.

 

After a brief introduction in which Wodtke details her personal experiences with the genre (her interests in music started in the 90s, between the two waves of dance-punk discussed in the book), she dives into the process of identifying the markers that make dance-punk music unique. Her analysis of dance-punk boundaries looks at multiple fronts, including aesthetics, cultural theory, and sociopolitical conditions, and using all of these tools, she’s ultimately able to locate the unique markers for this music within other genres in the late 70s. And already at this early point in the book, one gets the sense that the author isn’t entirely a fan of some aspects of the dance-punk scene, though she is a fan of the music. In her introduction, she alludes to the scene’s connections with “hipsterdom,” mostly the domain of economically comfortable white males, and in looking further into the roots of the music, she again notes some of the postmodern markers found in both “waves” of the music: “Perhaps this lack of affect and sincerity is a comment on the impossibility of fighting for a more socially just system, or maybe it’s because the majority of the artists making dance-punk were and are from relatively privileged backgrounds, and therefore have no stake in resilience or truly changing the status quo.” This position between modernism and postmodernism, straddling different musical genres, results in the genre being what she describes as a “compromised genre,” with artists whose intentions and sounds aren’t always in lockstep. To some extent, I don’t think this really matters, and I don’t think there are any truly pure “uncompromised” genres to be had (and it would be a little boring if there were).

 

The important thing is that Wodtke uses all of these tools with surgical precision to extract various artists from the punk, post-punk, no wave and new wave genres to re-examine them as the pioneers of dance-punk. In Chapter 2, she starts naming names, starting around England and NYC in the late 70s and early 80s. Across the pond, she finds the post-punk music of bands like Public Image Ltd, Gang of Four, and A Certain Ratio to fit into early dance-punk, and in New York, she hones in on some of the no wave-associated acts like James Chance (James White and the Blacks, The Contortions), Liquid Liquid, and Bush Tetras. While these bands obviously have genre affiliations outside of dance-punk, I think she made excellent choices here: all of these bands stood apart from their contemporaries as having a kind of emphasis on danceable beats, even if their music was sometimes more dissonant, intellectual, or otherwise more hard-hitting than what one usually thinks of as music for dance floors.

 

Later in the 80s and 90s, Wodtke notes that the concepts of dance and punk coexisting in the same music drifted apart again: punk music got faster and ditched any implications of club-friendly grooves, while dance music went far more electronic. Guitar-centered bands that weren’t as assertive as punk ended up in the large, generic “indie” category, and the music industry gradually consolidated as major urban centers gentrified. But those earlier dance-punk bands still exerted some influence on some new music throughout those decades, and by the Oughts, the conditions were right for a kind of 2nd wave of dance-punk music, which is detailed in Chapter 3. Interestingly, this wave of dance-punk music percolated in NYC and England again. In the US, Wodtke looks at LCD Soundsystem and Le Tigre, and overseas she examines the work of Franz Ferdinand. While not mentioned in the book, Nebraskans have our own band to be proud of that fits into the vibe of Oughts-era dance-punk, too: The Faint.

 

Chapter 4 explores dance-punk from a mostly aesthetic perspective, breaking down the genre to its most common representative musical elements and describing how these appear in different acts. Considering that the genre is a “compromised genre” as mentioned earlier, not every band prominently utilizes every musical commonality, and there is a lot of stylistic range to be found among the bands discussed in this book, but this chapter serves as a good starting point for having some concrete characteristics to work with. Again, Wodtke does a great job of highlighting clear, distinctive aspects of this music, and she supports her findings with musical examples and quotes from artists and critics. So if you hear music in the future with groovy, syncopated rhythms, minimalistic arrangements featuring angular guitars and a very dry, in-your-face production style, and a kind of ironic postmodern detachment in the lyrics, you’re probably listening to a dance-punk tune.

 

The final chapter discusses class, racial, and gender dynamics around dance-punk music, a kind of analysis becoming common in recent music history books. While not surprising for a genre mostly active in the 1970s and mid-2000s, dance-punk wasn’t particularly progressive in terms of socioeconomics or representation. It’s still an interesting exercise to review what went wrong and what was more successful in these areas, though. This is followed by a brief afterward looking at what’s left of dance-punk in contemporary music scenes (not much, really), and a decent but not exhaustive recommended listening list. Overall, this book lived up to the potential for this new “Genre” series of books. Though it’s a small and fairly quick read, it successfully places some pragmatic boundaries around a small subgenre that has never been very clearly defined as a “genre” before, looks for its origins and development over time, puts everything into useful historical and aesthetic contexts in defiance of the streaming music playlists of the world, and generally leaves the reader feeling both more informed and with a list of artists to check out. The only thing missing that I wish this book featured is an index, which would help make this a useful reference book for Dance-Punk in general.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001-2011 by Elizabeth Goodman, or No Wave: Post-Punk, Underground, New York, 1976-1980 by Thurston Moore.)

 

( Publisher’s page for Larissa Wodtke )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Librarary

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