No shirt, no shoes, no disco

About a month ago, Axis Night Club, 419 N. Walnut St., hosted Lezbend, the female DJ trio from Warsaw, Poland. Their style is dubbed "progressive house," and, being the ever curious musician, I decided to check out the girls in action. \nAbout an hour into their first set I was very confused. Was I at a dance party or a tea social? Aside from the handful of enthusiastic ravers and clubheads, the only dance party taking place was between Lezbend and those dancers-for-pay that decorate the tops of the dance floor islands. So many people outlined the perimeter of the floor that I wondered if the Bloomington Police Department was going to start distributing citations for loitering.\nWe all paid our admission, tickled our palates and now, it was time to be "entertained." I couldn't understand this pathetic response to the DJs; after all, this was "dance" music. What Lezbend was spinning was very accessible -- no different from what you might hear while perusing couture in Abercrombie and Fitch. Why does music become so threatening once it enters the nightclub? Why do Americans seem so incredibly uninterested in dance music. \nEthnomusicologist Kai Fikentscher, in his book "You Better Work!": Underground Dance Music in New York City, touches upon the status of dance music in our post-disco era. Fikentscher questions American apprehension of the music by saying, "Could this be because the sound of disco and post-disco music is essentially black, and its sensibility gay?"\nDance music seems largely marginalized because of its cultural upbringing in the black and gay communities -- two historically oppressed subgroups of society. I do agree that some Americans have a visceral distaste for those "underground" peoples and their "underground" music. But there's more to this picture. \nDance tracks do periodically gain mainstream popularity (think artists like DJ Sammy, Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim, etc.). But the genre is usually trivialized as catchy background music for commercials. Some people argue that big record companies have control over the market and try to flood listeners with pop. But just because someone tries to spoon feed you something, doesn't mean you have to take it. No one is forcing you to buy a Justin Timberlake CD.\nFor me, American reaction to dance music is much akin to our reaction to soccer. We just don't really care, yet we don't know why we don't care. Think about it. Practically everyone in the world is gung-ho over soccer except the United States. Did the Yankees just miss the boat? \nFelix Buxton of Basement Jaxx, in an interview with the New York Times (broadcasted in its entirety for a special online feature on the subject entitled "Talking Music -- Sounds from the dance floor"), reflected on dance music's popularity among young people in England. "The kids, they all listen to dance music … they're not interested in bands," he said. In this sense, England is not much different from much of Europe and Asia. \nThe awful irony in our dance music problem: from a musicological standpoint, the development of the genre was largely an American effort. Techno and house were largely crafted by young DJs in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Detroit and Chicago, respectively. Jungle (drum 'n' bass), a popular speedy subgenre of dance music, is based largely on breakbeats from hip-hop and funk -- two American musical idioms. Since the beginning, New York City has acted as a global laboratory for dance music innovation and experimentation.\nEven music intelligentsia are beginning to recognize dance music's tremendous capital. Our lack of investment in the music is puzzling, but, until a substantive excuse for avoiding the music is put forth, I see no reason why American society cannot work to bring one of its own musics home.