VDM: Vulnerable Dance Music

ISSUE #147

The room is just as crucial to the music as the melody. Peripheral pieces of a song—separate from the pitch, the key, the tempo—can go unnoticed until they’re gone altogether, things like volume, echo, reverb, resonance. Music has a physical shape, after all, each song a special pattern made of airwaves. Give it the space to fill the room and it covers every inch of you. You can quite literally bathe in sound.

It’s the room that I miss the most. Headphones approximate the sound of the dancefloor but won't replicate how music runs its fingers up our arms, won't get our chest to thrum like a timpani. Cloistered listening fills me with longing, like a goodbye kiss before boarding a plane or the mournful peal of words left unsaid.

To hear songs over speakers in our masked supermarkets leaves me starving like Tantalus, fruit tree out of reach, my body buzzing with taut reflex. How music tortures me when there’s no place to move! I crawl to the car just to scream, pace in circles to let myself loose.

The pandemic has already left its mark on dance music. Without the clubs the genre demands, a surge of introspection has emerged in what I’m calling VDM: Vulnerable Dance Music. Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, Romy, Prospa, Jim-E Stack—these electronic artists are carving space for sorrow within house’s driving rhythms, penning elegies to our lost years for the kitchen's tile dancefloor.

VDM, in my eyes, was a seed planted by New Order and sown by La Roux’s “Bulletproof" and Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own." Released in the wake of the financial crisis, the story of the genre mirrors the dance and disco of the 70s, born from the slump of the largest unemployment rate since the men shipped off to WWII. In hardship, we search for love and escape. Only this year, we had nowhere to go.

Heartache and resilience, trauma and testament, the central tenets of VDM are thus: that the greatest dance songs are served in minor key; that sadness is never defeated but can always be tamed; that joy can be conjured through movement and perfect sweat; that we can kick loose our pain like Pan with his shadow if we just find the rhythm of the room.