lack of 'content' (reduced there to visual/verbal descriptors of the music rather than anything specific about the music itself) is one of the ways dance music lends itself to so many varieties of communal experience and engagement
prurient said something in an interview also conducted by kiran sande about his work being a way to explore selfishness and personal obsession without the constraints of genre or audience. although i like the music on blackest a bit that ethos couldn't be further from what i look for in dance music
This. My dance music epiphany (and I'm pretty sure lots of other people's) in part involved realising that music can have a 'function', and fulfilling that function can be a major preoccupation for the people who make it, without that somehow making it 'inferior' art. What Kiran Sande might call conservatism is, from another angle, just a far tighter set of formal constraints within which innovation can occur. For me the fact that dance music, by definition,
has to consider its audience is partly what makes it so compulsive to listen to/dance to/make. Obviously Kiran knows this too, or did at some point, but has I guess become jaded, which is his prerogative. Not saying that's the only valid way of doing things of course.
Also uncomfortable about using the word 'content' here, as what people are referring to is
extraneous content i.e. articulable concepts, cultural reference points outside of music. It's stuff that's hooked up to the sonic reality of the music, thereby adding extra dimensions to it, rather than something that is 'inside it'...I don't think you could argue any music is somehow sonically 'contentless' as it involves fluctuations in air pressure. Maybe that's pedantic but I think it's an important point. Implying that music w/o a message/meaning which can be expressed in words or images is 'empty' is a subtle way of replicating a kind of rock/pop-centric 'anti-dance' discourse.
As Ben was I think hinting at the functionalism of dance music leads to a kind of communal engagement which can actually have a very concrete social/political 'use'.