Last Night a Dj Saved My Life

Over spring break I flew over to London. There's something to be said about going to the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street and seeing a whole ground floor dedicated to dance music and singles, with pop and rock relegated to the floor above. That a chain store, a reflector of mass consumption tastes, chose to arrange its space that way says something about the music scene across the Atlantic. In contrast, I came back to the U.S. and logged on to cdnow.com, only to find dance music classified under the manufactured catch-all heading "Urban/Electronic."

In all fairness, Tower Records on Newbury Street offers a decent selection, and I'm grateful for stores like Satellite on Mass Ave, but it's hardly the U.K., where clubbing magazines can be bought from any newsstand and where the austere Guardian has its own club reviewer. Imagine the Boston Globe doing that.

I was supposed to write about "the future of techno" in this column, but really I don't know anything about techno or rave music, although I've heard my CD collection referred to as both (if anyone dares to use the phrase "electronica"...) What I do know a bit about is house music, and it's hard to say anything definitive about a genre that spins off a few hundred subgenres a year. But I'll hazard guesses about the near future. What I loved in 1998 was the emergence of the French disco house genre with a retro sound that explored house music's roots and brought back a lot of the element of fun, including Daft Punk's Homework album and the song of last summer, Stardust's "Music Sounds better With You." It continued this year with Cassius's 1999, an excellent disco cut-up pastiche work, and I'm hoping for more quality Gallic crossovers. I also think the stunning new Armand van Helden and Basement Jaxx albums (2 Future 4 U and Remedy respectively), with their amazing singles ("You Don't Know Me" and "Red Alert"), signal that dance still has lots of promising avenues to explore. Trance music also seems to be on the rise, with great songs like Paul van Dyk's "For an Angel" and Humate's "Love Stimulation" showing that even without words, songs can still rock a dance floor without being repetitive.

All these different directions show that dance music isn't just a fad, and that the future does hold promise; the question for me is how much any of this will catch on in the mainstream in the U.S. That Fatboy Slim is finally getting the airplay he deserves this late in his career seems to be a good sign. But it's hard to learn what quality club music is when the drinking age is so high that college students can't go clubbing on a regular basis and when places like Boston still have 2 a.m club closings. And it seems record companies trying to bring dance music to the States can't avoid thinking in terms of rock music and keep trying to create stars instead of putting more emphasis on individual songs. Whatever happened to the single, that ephemeral nugget of sound? Billboard now allows "singles" to hit the charts even when record companies don't release them for sale, purely based on radio play.

The thing that gets to me is that so much of good house music originates from the States, but it's still an underground sound. Most people I've met here either don't listen to dance music at all, or listen to its more esoteric forms, like Goa trance. They did tell me this was a country of extremes. But just because house music's fun to dance to doesn't invalidate it as a music form. Sometimes I feel like a missionary trying to win converts, but really I'm just trying to stop people from playing the same cheesy songs every time I go to a party. That means you over there with the programmed MP3 play list. Stop it. Now. Daryl Sng