I am trying to find any research/published work on Dance Music - any
leads
        welcomed.

        Henry Yeomans

Dear Henry,

As dance music seems to be a hot topic for many media and cultural studies
students, especially for dissertations, I thought I'd reply to the list, in
case anyone else is interested or is in need of recommendations in this
area.

I think that the best academic writing on dance music is Jason Toynbee's
chapter in his book Making Popular Music (Arnold 2000) plus various things
that Will Straw has written, including his classic but gnomic article on
'scenes' in Cultural Studies (5,3, 1991; reprinted in Gelder and Thornton
(eds), The Subcultures Reader, Routledge, 1997) and best of all, his
hard-to-find piece 'The Booth, the Floor and the Wall: Dance Music and the
Fear of Falling' (Public vol. 8, 1993).

Discographies; Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound, by Jeremy
Gilbert and Ewan Pearson is also worth a read. Hillegonda Rietveld's This is
Our House has some interesting historical material. A rare effort to address
dance music itself is Philip Tagg's 'From refrain to rave: the decline of
figure and the rise of ground' in Popular Music 13,2 (1994). My own efforts
on dance music culture include 'British Popular Music and National Identity'
in Morley and Robins (ed.), British Cultural Studies (OUP, 2001) and (with
Caspar Melville) 'Urban Breakbeat Culture' in Tony Mitchell (ed.), Global
Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA. (Wesleyan University Press, 2001)
(Sorry, I can't resist the temptation to try to save these pieces from utter
obscurity).

The most cited academic work on dance music is Sarah Thornton's Club
Cultures (Polity 1995) but this is a very particular (and very well written)
take on dance clubs, rather an analysis of dance music. If you're interested
in clubbing, I really like Ben Malbon's book Clubbing (Routledge 1999) and I
would highly recommend Maria Pini's new book, Club Cultures and Female
Subjectivity (Palgrave, 2001). Steve Redhead has edited two collections in
the area. Rave Off (1993) was an early but very flawed effort; and The
Clubcultures Reader (Blackwell, 1997) is a very mixed bag, but with some
good stuff.

There's a huge non-academic literature on dancing and clubbing as well, much
of it awful, but some of it very good indeed, most notably Simon Reynolds'
brilliant Energy Flash (Picador 1998) and Matthew Collin's Altered State
(Serpent's Tail, 1997). I review the latter, plus Thornton and the second
Redhead book in 'Club Culture Goes Mental' in Popular Music (1998).

This list isn't exhaustive, and I've probably forgotten some very good stuff
(if so, my apologies to any authors who might read this) but I hope this
helps.

Best wishes,

Dave Hesmondhalgh
Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University