eading the English dance music press, one is struck by how pervasive is the sporting metaphor. It is the device through which UK journalists interpret dance music.


The metaphor is viral. You catch it unawares. When you read the monthly UK dance magazines, your eyes run over the pages, restlessly, like a fan scanning the field. In front of the photos, small pockets of writing, like a live commentary, tell us who to watch: who’s made the first division; who’s been sidelined. Some records really kick. Others don’t quite score. I won’t labour the point: see for yourself how many sporting motifs enchain the minds of dance music journalists. You will find them all over the page like cockroaches in a Sydney kitchen.


Worn out from the lifestyle, the journalists are overtired, overwired and buzzing senselessly in a kind of excitable fug, like children who should’ve gone to bed hours ago. Weary and driveling is their prose, which cannot be read but only skimmed.


Does electronic dance music deserve better? Now the preserve of self-aggrandising narcissists, it has gone the way of all things. Perhaps there is nothing worthwhile beyond these addled pages in the history of dance, but, then, again, perhaps there is.


Now, electronic dance music is something rather special. Done well, it is muscular, inventive, intuitive music, drawn from the heart. It is not the property of journalists who like a bit of a kick about. It slams, you dance to it, it unlocks your awareness. It is restlessly creative and deeply emotional.


Competitive sport, is not, ultimately, a good metaphor for dance music. Football is a game of two sides and two halves. Each side aims to win. In dance music, there is no competitive element intrinsic to the music. You could add it, but you are not obliged to. This is what makes it so beautiful.


The highest dance music is not dominator music at all, which is to say, it does not have a structure designed to produce a winner and a loser. It takes two sides to have a war.


Dance music doesn’t form two sides, but seems to generate energy from its own centre. That centre, which is just behind the rhythm, does not seem to have much to do with life, although it includes life. Intense, anonymous dance music builds and maintains an atmosphere or groove that is transpersonal. It is not powered by animal longings as such, but seems to roll along all on its own. It requires no metaphor, sporting or otherwise. It is, in part, a sonic representation of the architecture of the unpeopled world: of cities, planets, and atomic particles in motion; of fire, water, air, earth and space. That is what distinguishes it from styles of music which aspire to what we might controversially call the trappings of a bourgeois lifestyle: fine clothes, sexy bodies, nice cars, expensive house with a swimming pool, champagne, millions of admirers. These preoccupations are, of course, self-oriented. Delusions, mental delusions: that owning property and being popular will solve troublesome little matters you may have lurking in the back of your consciousness like YOUR INEVITABLE DEATH.


Doesn’t the prospect of your imminent date with oblivion frighten you? If it does, what are you going to do about it? How can dance music help you? It can’t – but more importantly, it doesn’t try. It has no message and suggests no solutions. This is, paradoxically, how it can help you – it doesn’t bullshit you. There are no solutions to the big problems of existence, and dance music doesn’t pretend that there are; and this itself is cause for celebration. This is a radical perspective on existence to throw on to thousands of young kids every weekend: a non-philosophy of celebration. It’s a kind of bio-intellectual nihilism, without the nihilism.


It is out-and-out dance music which really makes this perspective stark. It is written without intent for the body and thereby manifests as an understanding of the universe as rhythms in motion. This is a far cry from the things that we say are important, to ourselves or to each other. It includes these moralistic concerns, within itself, but only as rhythm and sound.


It was a natural progression for electronic music to find its way to our feet, to the floor. It felt so right, back in 1989, when most of us first heard the sounds of Detroit, Chicago and Sheffield, as our older brothers and sisters found it earlier with house, or, if we were older still, with funk and disco – or, back further, to the first rock records - we can keep going back into history indefinitely and discover the same philosophy. Even in their heyday, at the cutting edge of these styles was a new beat, a new form of dance music. Each one, wordlessly, or with words, burst upon culture with the same old philosophy, and each time it was a revolution. It’s only when you’re on the floor that the philosophy driving this revolution becomes clear.


Of course, only a watered down pop version finally comes through to the mainstream of culture. Mainstream culture is rife with the quest for eternal life – just listen to any pop lyric. If you're pursuing a policy of denial in your life, you don't want to confront any kind of music that's a little dark, a little heavy. That is just the way it works. The delusion is self-protecting. It is best exploded suddenly, unexpectedly. Electronic dance music is the perfect consciousness atom bomb for our times.


Alan Oldham recently remarked to the effect that so many DJs say that techno doesn't cut it on the floor, then you play it to them really loud over three decks on a powerful heavy metal system and they think they've seen Jesus. Techno is revelatory. It throws your awareness into the physicality of what you are, and dwarfs your personal concerns, whatever they may be.


And this echoes the philosophy hinted at earlier: Free your mind and your ass will follow. That is, the mind, the world of ideas, beliefs, structures and so on, does not control the body. These constellations of things we say to ourselves are Blake’s “mind-forge manacles”. We made them up to make ourselves feel better, but actually they are pushing us around and making us feel worse. In fact, the mind itself is a delusion. What is real, is physical: it is body. The universe is body; that is to say, it has weight, form, texture, physicality. Thought is inner speech. Produced by the body, it does not oppose the senses. Thought and action are already dancing together.


The mind is inner speech. Inner speech is a bodily activity. Mind, body, the world – all are physical process, evolving, twisting, turning and recurring in all the flavours and textures of the cosmos. Yummy, it’s so delicious being a sentient being. This is the insight which the most cutting edge dance music can bring to the dancer.


The illusion that mind and body are opposing teams, fueled by sentiment and by nostalgia, by the familiar, by the conceptually well traversed: "Ah yes, I remember this song, it reminds me of the time when..." Thus is perception referred to the past; thus is the illusion created of the mind spinning off, out, and away from the body. Nostalgia is the death of engagement. The theatre goes dark.


Great dance music is at once intellectual and physical. Its intellectuality is transparent and sensory. Techno music is a sonic representation of this kind of intelligence, which is so pure and so physical. Cutting edge dance music is often badly recorded, yet somehow perfectly recorded- like Derrick May's early efforts, or the first house gleanings of Fingers and Adonis, or Sly and the Family Stone, or even Lee Scratch Perry. Rough and ready in the mix, it still sounds massive over a good system because it has authority, it has weight. This kind of intellect is not too serious or self-important. However, although such music is not heavy-handed, it’s always heavy. The humour is just a little black. Gallows humour. Friends, we are complicated worm food.


When music has that kind of humility and dignity, it remains fresh and true long after the genre from which it came has withered away. If you want to express something profound about human existence right now, you will tend to gravitate towards techno, because in 2002 it offers maximum freedom, intelligence and creativity to the dancer and to the artist. Hurry up, because this won't be the case forever. Sooner or later the forms of techno will become hard and brittle, and the more adventurous creative souls will move on to fresher techniques; the media will give it a new name; some people will make money and some people won't.


So, there’s football and there’s the infinite game. The latter has no determinate sides and can’t be won or lost. We should hazard an adventure beyond football if we want to understand dance music.