Abstract

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a marked increase in the number of rave tracks appearing on the UK Top Forty chart. This music appeared to have little to do with conventional song forms. Rave tracks often lacked vocals, foregrounded left-field synthesizer sounds, and eschewed the verse–chorus structures that had dominated the charts since the 1970s. This article asks: is it possible that rave music overlapped in some ways with Top Forty pop songs? I will argue that the answer to this question is a qualified ‘yes’, and that certain types of rave music functioned as a type of pop music. Rave tracks may have initially seemed quite alien to the pop charts, but they actually replicated several conventions of mainstream Western pop songs. In particular, they frequently adopted a structure resembling the verse–chorus form: verses were replaced by ‘rave’ sections, while choruses were replaced by vocal hooks, samples of existing songs, and other signifiers of pop familiarity. The article constitutes a preliminary attempt to analyse how electronic dance music functions when it is heard away from the dance floor.

摘要

1980 年代末和 1990 年代初，出现在英国前 40 名榜单上的锐舞曲目数量显着增加。这种音乐似乎与传统的歌曲形式几乎没有关系。Rave 曲目通常缺乏人声、前景化的左场合成器声音，并且避开了自 1970 年代以来在排行榜上占据主导地位的主歌合唱结构。这篇文章问：锐舞音乐是否有可能在某些方面与 Top 40 流行歌曲重叠？我会争辩说，这个问题的答案是合格的“是”，并且某些类型的锐舞音乐作为一种流行音乐发挥作用。Rave 曲目最初可能看起来与流行音乐排行榜很陌生，但它们实际上复制了几种主流西方流行歌曲的惯例。特别是，他们经常采用类似于诗歌合唱形式的结构：诗歌被“狂欢”部分取代，而合唱被人声钩子、现有歌曲的样本和其他流行音乐熟悉的符号取代。本文初步尝试分析电子舞曲在远离舞池时如何发挥作用。