Video Editor, Brian Lynch for Rolling Stone If you’re wondering how we got to a summer where Drake and Beyonce are suddenly releasing house records, this is that story - or, at least, our version of it. That’s why you’ll see Prince, Robyn, Britney Spears, Shakira, and Justin Bieber in here bumping up against Adonis, Frankie Knuckles, Moodymann, Goldie, and SOPHIE. We were looking for tracks that seemed to transcend and feel more universally canonical, and we were especially mindful of the moments where dance music has intersected with the wider musical world– with synth-pop, hip-hop, funk, Miami bass, R&B, indie-rock, Latin music and pop. The list doesn’t attempt to incorporate every ripple in this oceanic confluence of sub-genres. These sounds all had peak moments of exposure, but they never fade away: drum ”n’ bass is having a new moment right now, and there are house songs here from the past few years. It gets born again when disco is re-engineered as house music in Chicago and techno in Detroit, and mutates with almost comic velocity into the Nineties rave explosion that produced everything from jungle to trance to gabba to garage, and eventually the EDM and dubstep bonanzas of the 2000s. James Brown, our story of dance music begins in the mid-1970s with disco, and moves into early Eighties club sounds like electro and Latin freestyle. But to make our list of The 200 Greatest Dance Songs of All Time, a song had to be part of “dance music culture.” It’s a more specific world, but an enormous one too, going back nearly fifty years and eternally evolving right up to today and into the future.Īfter paying homage to the godfather of the extended groove, Mr. Nearly all the hip-hop and reggae ever made is great dance music. The Beatles made great dance songs - as did Slayer. In a sense, any song that ever got any one person moving in any perceptible direction is a dance song. Seek and ye shall find.What do we mean by “dance songs”? Good question. Fact 2. Nouvelle Vague’s version of Love Will Tear Us Apart is one of the most downloaded tracks on Plain Or Pan. Pete Doherty would give his trilby-hatted skanky head to get this sound on one of his records. *BONUS TRACK! French artist singing in English cocktail jazz re-working of ‘This Is Not A Love Song’. I’d never tire of punching those other 2 though. She’s got the attitude, style and ballsy presence that all my favourite female singers have. I like Karen O, even if she looks like she’s going out as Joey Ramone for Halloween. But for want of a better phrase, it rocks! I don’t know what he’d have made of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (cough) ‘reworking’ of the track – it too is fairly keyboard heavy. It was this version that prompted guitarist Keith Levene to leave the band. A remixed version featuring brass, keyboards and noticeably less guitar was released as a 12″. The original version of ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ was PIL‘s biggest hit single, reaching number 5 in 1983. But there’s no denying both are terrific songs, even if one borrows heavily from the other. Where John Lydon sneers, Karen O breathes. ‘Heads Will Roll’ is cracking hysterical vocals, electro rush and an outrageously shame-faced borrowing of the guitar riff from PIL‘s ‘This Is Not A Love Song’. Can’t get that new Yeah Yeah Yeahs single out of my head at the moment.
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