Thank you, electronic dance music
Hi there.
The weather has been balmy and beautiful in the UK1. I just got back from a day trip to Cambridge, where I got to see the best of the UK spring. Swan families out on the water, bright yellow oilseed rape fields stretching over gentle hills. Tiny round trees with tiny, new leaves.
Do I forget each winter how beautiful the world is when plants come out of hibernation? Do I forget the joy of wearing a sweatshirt and no jacket, drinking iced coffee without my bones turning into ice sticks?
Perhaps that’s why each Spring surprises me, because I always forget what I’ve been missing.
Anyway, I’ve written something about effort, and how I learned a key element of trying hard out on the dance floor. I’ll accompany it with completely random and unrelated imagery.
Here it is:
People in Europe like electronic dance music.
This is a generalisation, but I have found it to be generally true.
People don’t just like to dance to it on nights out, a phrase which means staying up until at least 3am dancing to music in a building that used to be a [school, warehouse, factory]. People like to listen to it in all sorts of contexts. I’ve heard electronic music played in Greek restaurants, Maltese cafes, and British clothing stores. Adults like electronic music. Kids like electronic music. It’s the auditory backdrop for much of European life.
I have never understood electronic dance music.
People who like electronic music see an elegance and detail in it that I’ve never managed to see. In fact, I think people’s appreciation of electronic music is marvellously under-appreciated. That humans of our attention-deficit era — who normally spend no more than 1.5 seconds staring at any one image before swiping it away — have a penchant for bopping to the patience-testing stretches of monotony, the naturally uncatchy, wordless journey that is electronic music, is an astounding anomaly in our modern world. I think this so much that I refer to electronic music as the classical music of our generation.
If you like electronic music, (I’m imagining here), it is a spirit. It is a wave. It isn’t a piece of tidy poetry on the outside of an ice cream truck, it’s the quiet undulations which make up the history of a forest.
If you like electronic music, it is a sewing machine. Under its influence, you become a tidy knot. It ties you to everyone else, every dance floor a unique fabric of humankind.
If you don’t like it, electronic music is the small-print edition of a dishwasher manual printed on bible-thin sheets of paper. It is the history of a nearly forgotten president which you must read all night in order to prepare for a school presentation.
I’ve always respected people who see something in electronic music because it tells me that they have some ability to ride a wave that I am not privy to. They can hook into a groove and move forever.
Attempting to fit in, I’ve gone on my fair share of nights out. Perhaps I believed I would start to like electronic music with a certain amount of exposure, a certain amount of learning on the job. Perhaps I just wanted to hang out, and this was where hanging out was happening.
On these nights out, I would dance. It would have looked odd if, surrounded by my dancing friends, I stood motionless, but, if I were alone2, this is what I’d be doing.
I don’t know what makes the body want to dance — what propels the leg muscles to bop along to a beat, the arms to swing to and fro — but on nights out, none of that was happening voluntarily for me.
My body was never fuelled by musical incentive. Instead, I needed to move along to the beat manually, arduously, which I would do in people-pleasing solidarity with my friends who were having the time of their lives.
Manual dancing is tiring and I often wanted to do something else. I’d wonder in my mind, is it time to suggest a change of scene, another drink, a little walk around the club?
Or have we just done that?
From my brain down to my toes, I’d feel resistance, like my muscles were being wrapped in progressively heavier exercise bands. Gently but firmly, my body was notifying me: I am not having fun.
In those moments, knowing I shouldn’t, couldn’t, daren’t be a party pooper, I took control. I’d tell my body, firmly but gently: you must continue to look like you’re having fun.
You must continue to dance.
Eyes closed, I’d manual dance even harder. Locked into the rhythm and the bass, I’d resist the resistance, work through the pain, and throw the metaphorical exercise bands off of me.
During nights out, people whoop occasionally, emitting seemingly involuntary displays of joy and euphoria. Resisting the resistance gave me the only feelings of euphoria that I ever experienced during these nights: those micro moments of overcoming pain and persevering made me feel powerful and in control.
For most of my twenties and early thirties, I resisted tremendous effort.
Through observation of myself and others, I’d developed an association between effort and obsession, thinking you could only really try hard if something unhealthy was fuelling you.
As a result, I wanted a life with a calm and regular cadence, a warm lazy river of moderate excitements and minor setbacks. I tried to achieve this by going to yoga, meditating, and avoidance — avoidance of the bigger things I wanted to achieve which were scary, and focus on the smaller things which made me feel safe and comfortable.
Lots of things felt effortful during this period of my life. It stands to reason that if you never push yourself, everything you do feels as hard as the hardest thing you do. Cleaning the toilet, thinking outside of the box at work, an eight minute workout: they all felt the same, like I was back on the dance floor, exercise bands tying my limbs out of use, squeezing my brain into a fog.
At the time, I didn’t put two and two together. So I continued to attempt to have a life of relaxed carelessness, unaware that I was actually leading a life of struggle and difficulty.
At my new job, I’ve been introduced to high intensity interval training (HIIT). If you don’t know about this kind of experience, made famous by places like Barry’s Bootcamp, HIIT classes are very arduous exercise classes, often done in dark, nightclub-esque rooms.
Loud music plays through speakers while you follow the instructions of at least one amped-up personal trainer. At a regular cadence, the trainer pushes you to go faster or work harder, sometimes standing right beside you, cheerleading you through the last few horrendous seconds of a rep.
These sorts of places run hell weeks every January and pride themselves on making you delirious with 45 minutes of gruelling torture, marketing which is worryingly successful.
Worrying, at least, to someone like me, who shirked away from intense effort in favor of more healthy-seeming ways to spend my time. I considered these exercise classes cringey, artificially, and - dare I say, unnaturally - pressure-filled environments for people who enjoyed torture.
So when I started going to HIIT classes, prompted by an invite from my new colleagues, I was very hesitant.
I waded through my first HIIT class or two. Like a fledgling bird making use of its wings for the first time, I struggled to come to grips with the fast pace, the instructions, and the idea that I really could do everything the instructor was saying.
You want me to do how many burpees and other similar comments were common for me to have as I threw weights over my head and felt like I was trapped in a dungeon.
Over time, though, I started to get it. I started to get HIIT. If my effort was a mine, these classes were blowing through rock that I hadn’t been able to move by myself. I felt my ability to persevere increase, both inside the gym, where I would push myself harder than I thought I ever would for any reason big or small, and outside, where trying seemed easier than ever now that I was able to compare all of life to the pain of a terrible gym class.
Getting through a class was never easy, though. There’d always be a moment when my mind would focus too much on the pain, and I’d feel that same resistance I felt on the dance floor. I am not having fun, my body would say to me, and I would consider taking a rest, turning the incline on my treadmill down, standing up from a painful set of squats.
Just the other day, during one such painful moment, I had a realization. As I was running on the treadmill and feeling the resistance, it occurred to me that electronic music was blasting in the gym — just like it does at a nightclub. I thought back to all those times I didn’t want to dance, just wanted to sit and chat, but I focused instead, overcoming the resistance and dancing even harder.
Just focus on the music, I thought, and when I hooked into the beat, I realized for the first time what people might love about electronic music, and what I’d been using it for since the very beginning. I was being carried by the wordless monotony, buoyant and floating on its naturally uncatchy and endless wave. I was into the groove and, as a result, I felt like I could try forever.
We all need something to hook into in order to persevere through pain. It was revelatory for me to understand that I don’t even need to like the thing I’m hooking into all that much in order for it to help me perservere.
Electronic music allowed me to relearn the value of trying hard in one part of life, and the knock on effects that trying hard has on everything else. Sticking through utter torture has its perks, it turns out.
Perhaps next time I’m invited on a night out, I can dance like everyone else, happy and unhindered, because dancing on the dance floor won’t come close to being the hardest thing I’ve done that week.
Speak soon,
:) Alex
As you can probably tell, I wrote this intro during the exciting, hot and beautiful weekend that tricked me into thinking that summer was here to stay.
and unable to leave