Bodies swayed to music: dance culture in Ireland

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Notes

This nervousness can be seen in the state‐sponsored Irish traditional dancing where movement is de‐sexualised in the stiff, upright posture—arms by the sides, and an absence of any suggestive pelvic activity.

This was a chapter title in a post‐Commitments history of Irish rock music: Tony Clayton‐Lea and Rogan Taylor, Irish Rock: Where It's Come From, Where It's At, Where It's Going (Gill & Macmillan, 1992), pp. 104–126.

Noel McLaughlin and Martin McLoone, ‘Hybridity and National Musics: The Case of Irish Rock Music’, Popular Music vol. 19, no. 2 (May 2000), p. 183.

See Matthew Collin, Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House (Serpent's Tail, 1997), pp. 13–14 and passim; Hillegonda Rietveld, ‘The House Sound of Chicago’, in The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies, ed. Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne and Justin O'Connor (Blackwell, 1998), p. 112.

For a discussion of the adaptation of Gilles Deleuze to the politics of dance music, see Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound (Routledge, 1999).

McLaughlin and McLoone, ‘Hybridity and National Musics’, p. 181.

Of course, U2 had faced similar criticism when they launched ‘Mother’ in the early 1980s, a label which offered a first recording opportunity for many emerging Irish bands. Attitudes towards U2 at the time—and the bands that recorded on Mother, such as Cactus World News and In Tua Nua—were on the whole typically begrudging.

The problem, as Bill Rolston points out, is that it is rare for the ‘authentic’ statements of rock and folk artists to be grounded in communities of resistance. And, as individual statements, they are often born out of an ignorance, particularly outside of Ireland, about the nature of Irish politics … Music is now a major global industry and is restricted by the structures and ideological imperatives of that industry. As a consequence, most performers are far above the day‐to‐day political concerns and struggles of race and class. They are not organic to the communities of resistance which attempt to forge a collective, communal response to capitalism and racism; or, if they are, they are quickly incorporated into the music industry and its concerns. From within that virtual monolith, there are rigid limits on what they can say and how it can be said. (‘ “This is Not a Rebel Song”: The Irish Conflict and Popular Music’, Race and Class vol. 42, no. 3 (2001), p. 65)

Gilbert and Pearson, Discographies, p. 164.

David Holmes, Gritty Shaker (BBC Northern Ireland, 1996).

Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Polity Press, 1995).

In the first systematic critique of modern popular music in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Frankfurt School philosopher, social theorist and cultural critic Theodor Adorno found it to be entirely collusive with the capitalist system within which it was created; see ‘On Popular Music’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp. 202–214; and Philosophy of Modern Music, translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (Seabury, 1973). Adorno's pessimistic analysis has since been subject to significant revision, of course, and nowhere more so than in Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), translated by Brian Massumi (Manchester University Press, 1985).

See, for example, Sean Bidder, Pump up the Volume: A History of House (Channel 4, 2001); Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved my Life: The History of the DJ (Headline, 1999); Collin, Altered State (1997); Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (Picador, 1988).