The term “dance music” may conjure visions of heaving clubs, packed festival tents and partying with abandon, and certainly these concepts are a substantial piece of the pie. But so too is the term reductive, a broad catch-all that does little to indicate the dizzying taxonomy of sounds and experiences contained within.
A complete culture unto itself, dance music is vast and contains multitudes. It can be hard or soft, joyful or melancholic, hedonistic or contemplative, big or spare. It’s both lusty and full of longing, joyful and angry, protest music disguised as a good time. It’s hard to think of a human emotion that doesn’t have a corresponding sound or song within the genre, or a type of person that wouldn’t find something to love within it all.
So it’s about dancing, yes, but it’s also about so much more than the party. Since its inception in the late ’60s and early ’70s — as new technology created the instruments that created the sounds that created the songs, that created the culture that pushed music and the world at large further into the future — dance music has been both underground refuge and mainstream juggernaut. It has pulled in bits and pieces from every other genre of music, generating sounds that reach around the world and through time itself. While its presence in pop culture and the major charts ebbs and flows, it’s always been happening just around the corner from ubiquity, if you know where to look.
Because of all this, the music on the list of all-time best dance songs will naturally be strange bedfellows — a group of tracks and artists who to the naked eye may not have much to do with each other, but which share the DNA connecting the genre’s five-plus decades of existence.
This week we’re rolling out the 100 best dance songs of all time, 20 per day, through Friday (March 28). See 100-41 below.
