Jaxx of Clubs

Basement boys: Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe

Related Content

• Prince first hit the cover of Rolling Stone 30 years ago
  April 29, 2013
• Fatoumata Diawara: I'm working on a voice for women that didn't exist before
  April 12, 2013
• The Big Wedding is vile, racist, and embarrassing
  May 1, 2013
• The Lewis Connection: Resurrecting a legendary album
  March 13, 2013
• Bobby Z's Benefit 2 Celebrate Life at First Avenue, 3/9/13
  March 11, 2013

More About

• Prince (Musician)
• Basement Jaxx
• The Beastie Boys
• Fatboy Slim
• Dance

The great divide between dance and pop is authenticity: With looped voices and digitally displaced sentiments, dance music denies our "soul"-derived insistence on a subjective "I" dying for an objectified "U." (Even a diva crying, "I need you," can seem more actor than lover.) That's why 2step's house/R&B/jungle fusion--which treats the human voice like one more element in the mix--gets nowhere in the U.S., and trance's nu-age swvooosh, which pretends dance music should ignore emotion and simply "funktion," fills airplane hangars. Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers tried to transcend the emotional issue by blowing up dance music until it felt like classic rock, but both got cold feet. The Chems went back to their techno roots and Fatboy, rumor has it, intentionally sabotaged his celebrity with his limp last album. And so we strive for our own utopias: The space where your head is at is always sweeter than the space it's taking up.