We’ve Lost Dancing (to Capitalism)
Jasmine Donnelly, BA Digital Media, Culture, & Creative Arts
Nobody goes to the club any more! Only 25% of Gen-Z are still interested in going out, according to Keep Hush’s 2022 survey ‘U Going Out’. Packed tightly, shoulder to shoulder, sweaty and endlessly bobbing to the relentless, unchanging beat - nobody really dancing.
London’s nightlife has gotten so dull. What happened to the city’s early 1980s warehouse parties? Glittering drag queens, studded punks, rastas, and casuals all in the same room, dancing wildly without a care, bound together by their differences and love of music. No cameras, no doorman to turn anybody away, just people as they were. How did we go from there to here?
The underground scene was born in bass-thumping, derelict warehouses across 1980s London as a counter to the prestige of the current new wave and disco scene of the West End. These free, inclusive spaces were first created by the people, for the people. They ran on community: guerrilla electricians, heavy lifters doubling as bouncers, and posh boys smoothing things over with the police to keep the lights on and the music loud. Their joint effort and shared vision kept the scene alive and well.
These parties were unlike the club nights of today. The idea of song mixing as DJing was relatively new and most DJs were just people who collected and played records for the love of it. There wasn’t a sense of hierarchy on the dance floor. Anyone could do it as long as they were dedicated to crate digging and seeking out a tune. A song would start, energy would swell, then bodies would start moving and grooving. These dark rooms became the counter-culture and respite, where people would lose themselves in the crowd and celebrate their existence through dance.
By the mid 1980s, New York style parties introduced US imported disco, house, garage, and electro into the London scene which boomed in popularity. The underground grew to the point it was overflowing, becoming exposed to the world and easily policed, so it moved into London’s gay clubs where dancing remained vibrant and embodied. Flavours of freedom and self-expression lingered in the air on those nights, fueled by Black music and queer culture.
As the sound spread, the spotlight followed and in its glow, conformity crept in. London’s first house superclub, Ministry of Sound, was built in 1991 and exploded club culture. Its modest yet atmospheric interior echoed the simplicity of the warehouse set-ups but with the best sound system the city had ever heard. Yet all the vibrance of the underground couldn’t make it past the bouncer and the turntables were now at the will of ‘professional’ DJs as the scene began to be commercialised. The plentiful subcultures that thrived off of community became flattened into a purchasable club night. The DJ booth, high and out of reach, mirrored the distance and difficulty it now took amateurs to break into performing sets.
Despite club owners’ putting on a front that music was at the core of what they did, profit was always the priority, so the groove and queerness of dance music became sanitised. Hi-NRG, disco, and house which were considered to be ‘gay music’ suffered a decline because of growing homophobia due to the AIDS crisis. This shift was reflected in the straightwashing of both the music and its spaces. Today, the sound of house is less colourful; the genre is dominated by straight men and serves as the default sound for straight, mainstream nightlife. But queer communities adapted, finding new sounds from hardcore techno to donk that preserved the raw energy and freedom the genre once held.
Underground parties and their communities live on through the grapevine, though scarce. But for the average person who goes out once in a while, attendance to events is bought through apps like RA Guide or Dice which are never short of choice. This abundance has turned clubbing into a shopping experience where anybody can buy a ticket to anything. Our tastes are now unknowingly pushed upon us by clever marketing and algorithms that feed us what’s most clickable. Almost every niche is swallowed up, commodified, and regurgitated back to us as a generic playlist or club night smoothed of all its complexity. The scene has died because most can't afford to follow it anymore, being a regular face at an event now costs a fortune.
With the widening inequality gap, people become more alienated from themselves and others. Attending club events, drinking, and even buying fun party outfits have all become ‘splurges’ that people cut out of their budgets. As people drink and go out less, strict wellness lifestyles have taken over, cloaked in the language of health and self-optimisation all while our screen time climbs higher than ever. Behind early morning workouts and ‘social’ media, we face new levels of isolation without an outlet for expression and socialisation. People are often too self-conscious to put themselves out there and dance, which is why clubbing now is more similar to standing in a pub than losing yourself in a rave. Everyone is stood, drink in hand, stepping side to side.
Social media has changed the way we consume culture from community to curation. Our listening and event attendances are now badges of identity, performed online in a subtle competition of uniqueness and taste. So instead of broad, welcoming communities, we end up with cliquey micro-scenes which rely on cultural capital and status, mystifying music into something reserved only for those ‘in the know’. Algorithms and endless choice have killed our loyalties to certain styles and genres, showing us ‘a bit of everything’ and bypassing the journey of discovery that allows us to connect deeply with a song.
As economic conditions decline and political uncertainty weighs on our conscience, we need to look back on the communities of the old underground scenes that danced to celebrate life and socialise despite struggle. “I think as our country becomes more divided, community-driven projects are actually on the rise,” says Sarah Arsalan from SOAS DJ Society. A new wave of clubbing is emerging from the ground up in function rooms and living rooms where zines are launched, collectives are formed, and political, literary, and creative communities come together to dance. These events blur the lines between nightlife and community organising, art and activism, rebuilding dance as a form of connection rather than consumption.
We can reject the narratives that tell us to always be productive by reclaiming our joy and bodies, and stepping away from clubbing as a ritual of spending. Music and dance belong to everyone; they are innately human, drawing us out of our minds and into the shared present with others. To dance together again without agenda and spectacle is to remind ourselves what community feels like.
