Intelligent Dance Music

  I don’t want to talk to you about music. What I want to talk to you about is the name of a genre of music. There is something incredibly arrogant about the title ‘intelligent dance music’. That something is, of course, that it implies that other dance music is somehow intellectually lacking. This may or may not be the case, but I hardly think it’s the place of one subgenre to make implicit relativistic statements about qualities other genres or subgenres other than that which is directly related to the music. Dance music isn’t something I have a huge amount of interest in, and what I do like would probably be almost exclusively classified as ‘IDM’, but it’s nonsense to declare a type of music as superior in its very name. I would imagine that most genres are named by those with a keen interest, and these people are predisposed to thinking the genre in question superior to those in which they find less appeal. If this became a trend we’d end up with subgenres called things like ‘better than that other genre’, ‘great’ and ‘auralgasm’.

  I also hate how absolutely everyone thinks their taste in music is eclectic.
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