Music Monday: Where Did All The Dance Songs Go?

Picture this: You’re at a wedding or a party and there is supposed to be dancing. But you and everyone else are too afraid to be the first to step out onto the dance floor. So you wait around for the DJ to play one of those songs like the “Cha Cha Slide” or “Cotton Eye Joe” to get people moving. You can sing along to the words and the dances are choreographed so it is a lot less awkward than making up your own dance moves to a random tune you hardly know. However, those songs eventually fade out and the DJ has to make a decision. What song is going to keep people on the dance floor? Before one can answer this question, they must also ask: what makes a song a true “dance” song?

In my meager 19 years on this earth, I have realized that there are things that make a song dance-worthy. I have witnessed both the tragedy of poorly crafted dance playlists and the success of playlists that are so energizing that guests fear to leave the dance floor because they feel that they will miss the best music. Some of these classics are “Uptown Funk,” “Apple-Bottom Jeans,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “Mr. Brightside” and so on. Even from this short list, you may notice a theme: none of these songs were released after 2015. This simple fact points to a few key reasons why certain songs end up on the best dance playlists.

There is nothing necessarily special about the year 2015 that makes the music created before that year better than any others. However, I think that after the mid 2010’s, there was a shift within our culture, specifically our music culture.

You and I are consumers of nostalgia. We rely on nostalgia to deliver the kinds of feelings we don’t currently get to experience. This is true with our movie choices, the clothes that we wear, and what I would say is one of the most prominent examples: our music taste. However, songs that end up on dance playlists are much more than just “feelings of nostalgia.” These songs are timeless.

It is true that we often have nostalgic connections to music, and that may be one reason why we love a certain artist or album. But music that becomes timeless is more than just nostalgia — it captures a moment in history that the culture as a whole chooses to remember.

Although plenty of people can experience the same universal feelings toward certain music, nostalgia can tend to become too personal. A cultural moment or an era of history is much more recognizable to an entire population. Consequently, the songs that reflect this are the songs that we will continue to dance to for years to come.

In the same way that fashion and movies are time capsules for certain periods of time, music is a time capsule for these eras as well. Time capsules are created to savor moments and make the active choice to remember them. If I am being totally honest, I think one of the biggest reasons that there are not many current dance songs from the last few years is because there have not been many moments that we as a culture have wanted to recreate.

Our music reflects this idea. Sure, there certainly are some good dance songs from the last five years. Take “Magic in the Hamptons,” released in 2018, or “Levitating,” released in 2020, for example. Yet, overall, I think our music taste from the last ten years is far more melancholy than celebratory. I believe that we choose to remember the artists and songs that are more celebratory for dances and parties because we want to recreate that moment in history where this was the norm.

Sadly, this period of history seems to be long gone. Don’t get me wrong, I love Noah Kahan just as much as the next guy. However, even the most upbeat of his songs are not ones that I would want played at my wedding reception. I think there is a clear distinction between “good” music and “dance” music, and sometimes a song can be both. It also seems that the music created around or before the mid 2010’s was much more carefree. Our generation is captivated with thoughtfulness, while the music produced by the generations before us seemed more concerned with simply having a good time.

The way we listen to our music also influences which songs become part of that cultural moment I mentioned earlier. Even in my lifetime, I have seen popular music move from being primarily played on the radio to being easily accessible on our cell phones.

Accessibility was a huge leap for the music industry. Now we can play any song we want any time that we want. This is an incredible luxury that seems to have done a lot of good. Yet it has taken away the original avenues for how music used to become popular and well known. With so many music options and with little incentive to be committed to those options, the odds of a group of people being true fans of a particular artist or song become fewer and fewer.

Now that we can stream, we are less committed to the music we listen to, and I think this impacts the way that we enjoy it. We don’t have these classic songs on repeat on a physical CD or the radio, so we tend to have less of a connection with both the songs and the artists themselves. Because of this, universal party songs die out and we are left with the type of music that we have today.

Although the artists of today may not be creating arena-style music anymore, they are still contributing to our era’s own cultural movement. This movement is composed of ideas from self reflection to empathy for others to feeling your emotions. Whether or not these songs fit on the dance playlist ten years from now is up for debate. However, this will be for the future generations to decide.