![]() ![]() Its thumping first single, “Body Pump,” name-checks AlunaGeorge’s breakout debut, Body Music, but sounds freer than that record’s buttoned-up stylings. Here are 21 of the songs we’ll take with us from this year into 2021 - where hopefully we can dance together again.Īluna Francis made her debut solo album, Renaissance, separate from her producing partner, George Reid, as part of a conscious mission to recenter Black women in dance music. They also set dance up to once again be one of the most exciting spaces to watch in music after the past decade’s awkward growth spurt. Their work reflected on the past, explored and strengthened identity, worked toward justice and equality, mourned losses, and, most crucially, restored our sense of momentary attachment to one another. “I think astute poets can smell a bad time coming, and music is also slippery and reflexive,” Vulture’s music critic Craig Jenkins wrote in April of the Rolling Stones’ eerily apt “Living in a Ghost Town.” The same could be said of dozens of other musicians who released dance songs in 2020. It’s the canonically central idea of this music: a night, a connection, a moment of freedom. “Last night we danced, and I thought you were saving my life” is how Ware opens her song. We knew nothing of COVID-19 when Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now” and Jessie Ware’s “Mirage (Don’t Stop)” came out in fall 2019, but they set the tone that would become pervasive throughout the unexpected year of solitude that followed. How, then, will historians remember the role dance music played in 2020? From the beginnings of the current disco revival in late 2019 - a third wave, after a prior disco renaissance around the turn of the 21st century - the songs seemed uniquely centered on human connection, often fueled by nostalgia. AIDS coincided with the advent of Hi-NRG music, aggressive and super-electronic, which Powers notes “sponsored a kind of mass ecstasy.” In the face of a plague, dance music doubled down and encouraged the togetherness that seemed to be in jeopardy. “People’s need to stay in touch with what made being alive matter to them pushed music into hyperdrive even as death pressed close,” the critic Ann Powers writes in Good Booty, her 2017 history of pop music and sex. Many of the songs that best captured the mood of this strange year were ones we never got to experience as they were intended to be - in motion, in a body of people.ĭance music and public-health crises have been connected since the early 1980s, when the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic threatened the connections that queer people, especially people of color, sought out on the dance floor. Past icons returned, and new ones were crowned disco came back in full force and dance became even more of a platform to explore racial, gender, and sexual identities. Between the struggles for racial justice, the political chaos, and a global pandemic, there was more than enough reason to crave a night of release, escape, and celebration, but one that could never happen - a fact that felt all the more punishing as the year continued to prove genre-changing for dance music. This was the sort of year that made you want to turn to the dance floor for refuge. Photo-Illustration: Vulture, Getty Images and YouTube Here are 21 of the songs we’ll take with us from this year into 2021 - where hopefully we can dance together again.
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