Finding the Rhythm

The title of this posting is something I’ve pondered a lot over time, and it’s been on my mind a bit more lately.

The primary reason for this is that as PD for iDanceRadio.fm, as our audience grows and awareness of us builds, I find myself being the target of more promoters and record labels who are presenting product to us for consideration. That’s a good thing, of course, as it lets me hear an even broader array of music. But it does tend to make this particular question pop-up a bit more frequently.

One example from a few months ago was Creamer & K’s remix of Tom Geiger’s Can One Day Change Your Life. We played it on the station, and I even used it in some DJ sets. It was apparently a big club hit in South America, but was it dance music? Well, I don’t know. It had dance music producers doing a remix. The tempo was in the range of dance music. But the song still had a very laid back, very AOR feel to it.

I just added a track this week from Hey Champ titled Cold Dust Girl. I really struggled with this one. There’s a remix available, but I felt the remix was a bit dull to put into rotation on the station, plus it wasn’t all that much more “dancey” than the main mix. Is the main mix dance? I still don’t know. I would consider the track to be more synthpop, but then, where’s the line between synthpop and dance?  Both tend to use obvious four-on-the-floor beats, and both are “electronica.”

Another recent example along the same lines is The Best Revenge from Fischerspooner. A good friend of mine has been a huge Fischerspooner fan for years, and despite his pleading, they’ve just not even done that much for me. But Revenge is a fantastic track that’s amazingly well-produced. I took to it pretty much immediately. Is it dance? Well, I always ask myself, “Can I picture myself dancing to this?” Yeah, I could, so I added it. But here too, the song is not the usual club-style dance music, it’s more broadly electronica, and certainly after listening to more Fischerspooner lately, I’m not sure how I’d categorize their music other than “experimental.”

Just this week, I received a promo CD from Angela Latti, which was expressly being promoted as “dance.” When I listened to it, I don’t hear “dance” at all. On the contrary, it’s reggae in my view. Can you dance to reggae? Well, yes, people do it all the time. Does it make it “dance music?” You could certainly make a case for that. But unlike Fischerspooner, or the Tom Geiger track, I don’t think it works in the context of the rest of the music that I play as a DJ, or that we program for the station. So as much as I liked some of the songs on Angela’s CD, I won’t be adding the focus track to the station.

What I struggle with sometimes is that I have a pretty broad definition of dance music, and I like a lot of sub-genres, from filter house to techno. And with the radio station, our mission is to deliver the broadest array of “dance music” possible, while still having a cohesive, listenable end result. Hopefully it works, but I suspect I’ll always question where the boundaries are located. And from time to time, I’ll look to push them a bit.