The gentrification of 'urban' dance music. Very weird times. Well no ones dancing now!
tbf I'm slowly coming around to the opinion that dance music needed to be destroyed, and if the middle classes needed to dig their own grave, then so be it.
like punk before it, many people used the instruments in the same way their fathers used them.
the best dance music is precisely not *dance music proper* but dj music, like hard techno, early 8 bar stuff, 92 ardkore, chicago jack traxx etc.
All Joy O did was fold that sensibility of it only being club music and it only being suitable for nightclubs (not squats) into the last hideout of London. but as a whole that dynamic was long since under way, post-98 drum and bass, some of the nuskool breaksier stuff, 4x4, and of course dubstep. in fact the biggest weakness of dubstep was not the sound but the overidentification with plastic people and then DMZ at mass. as soon as people start talking about X-Y clubs, you can tell that a mythology will accrue around it which will eventually strangle it. even a lot of deep house producers who gush about paradise garage can't match larry's eclecticism.
only people who come close these days are traxx and hieroglyphic being. and Mick Wills from Germany, always willing to drop 'dance but not club' music in their sets.