Difficult Music

I have to compile some music for the dance portion of a reunion dinner/dance. It’s a challenge to come up with stuff. My music collection isn’t exactly rich with tunes to dance to. With fancy’s help we extracted a bunch of things that might please the people, and after she raided Mel and Adam’s shelves we gathered a good two hours’ worth of danceworthy material. Anyone with a Britpop fetish should be well pleased.

I’m determined to make the playlist completely populist. No Sonic Youth even. I initially wanted to include Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control,” but I ended up rejecting it after I put it on and tried to picture copyeditors and corporate communications specialists moving to it. Poor old Ian wouldn’t have wanted it that way. On the other hand I never thought I'd be so glad to hear “Groove is in the Heart” as when the belter pulled out a Deee-Lite CD and loaded it into the iTunes.

I thought I’d be able to use a lot of the stuff I got during the half-decade I used Spin as my buying guide, but apart from a couple They Might Be Giants songs and maybe some Bjork, I’m not finding much. It’s all Jesus Lizard and no Jesus Jones.

I've got a line on a copy of Abba Gold, and I'll mine that for all it's worth.

If anyone has suggestions for more surefire dance hits, please drop me a note.