Overview

For some people, at some times, in some places, on some drugs, dance music can be a gateway to transformative, even transcendent experiences. With the help of skilled DJs, dancers can reach euphoric states, discard their egos, and feel social barriers dissolve. Dance floors can be sites of openness, subversion, and even small-scale acts of political resistance. At a minimum, dance music lightens the burdens of contemporary life. At its best, dance music offers glimpses of better worlds. Yet even where dance music communities are built on principles of resistance and liberation, they nevertheless share the grittier realities of the rest of the world. Dance Music makes the case that dance music is ordinary and that something exceeding the social and spatiotemporal bounds of the dance floor is required for the transformative promise of dance music to be realized.

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9781501346408

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Reviews

Amidst a recent wave of books on dance music and club culture, Tami Gadir’s Dance Music stands out. Gadir celebrates the ways in which dance floors may be spaces of self-realization and community, but goes further than most in capturing the ways such spaces are fraught with risk, anxiety, and the violence of oppression. Commonplace ideas about club culture—like those claiming the ‘transcendence’ of dance floor experience—are scrutinized with care and a sharp sense of their political stakes. Well-written and impeccably researched, this is an important contribution to an expanding field. * Will Straw, Professor of Urban Media Studies, McGill University, Canada *

Author Information

Tami Gadir is Lecturer in Music Industry at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Gadir’s research addresses the social and political mechanisms of musical life.

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