Fred again.., Charli XCX and dance music's context collapse
good music performed badly
A couple things happened recently that got me thinking about dance music in 2024. In a curious role-reversal, British producer Fred again.. played a giant show at the LA Coliseum while also-British alt-pop sensation Charli XCX played a Boiler Room party in Bushwick. In general, DJs play Boiler Rooms and pop-stars play stadiums no? While opposites in a way, these events signal an ongoing context collapse within dance music that, to me, isn’t great.
Before anyone accuses me of yucking other people’s yum, let me just say that I like some occasional Fred again.. and while pop music doesn’t really interest me, everything I’ve read and heard from others about Charli XCX leads me to believe that she too is a purveyor of aesthetically rich and boundary pushing art (if Jeff Weiss’s recent profile is any indication). “Brat summer” and all that. But in a live setting Charli and Fred’s treatment of dance music degrades what is special about the club culture they draw so heavily from.
It’s worth briefly tracing how we got here. The 2010’s EDM boom (Avicii, Calvin Harris, etc.) marked dance music’s third and final push to achieve true mainstream prominence. It almost happened in the 70s (disco) and the 90s (acid house, trance), but those movements were ultimately snuffed out due to racism, homophobia, and moral panic around drugs (snuffed out in the mainstream that is; dance music has more or less always thrived as an “underground” concern). EDM is the wave that broke the levies. After that, dance music became a popular phenomenon itself while also lending its conventions to other genres, namely pop. As certain audiences moved away from EDM, pop music continued to mine dance music for inspiration via its many sub-genres, most notably “deep house.” More recently, as artists like Fisher have taken the “deep-house” (more accurately “tech-house”) phenomenon to its commercial zenith, the zeitgeist has set its sights on some of the more esoteric corners of the dance music canon; genres like techno, breakbeat or drum & bass. With that, we return to Fred and Charli.
These two are at the forefront of exposing mainstream (non-derogatory) audiences to obscure, often challenging dance music. Peggy Gou also fits this category, but she’s a dance music producer and performer first and foremost, not a crossover act. XCX’s Boiler Room especially is a far cry in sound and atmosphere from the heyday of EDM. Instead opting for a showcase of punishing techno, bass music and her signature “hyperpop.” Fred’s music is a crash course in British dance genres like jungle and UK garage (pronounced “garridge,” even by Americans). All of this is great. Popular (the adjective) and pop (the genre) music should be judged with the same rigor as anything else, and thus should be celebrated for its ability to educate the art consuming masses, even if it also strives for mass appeal. Both artists do this pretty well. By no means an easy task.
But here’s the thing… it’s one thing to co-opt the sounds of dance music to make pop that’s interesting and fun to listen to, it’s another thing entirely to do justice to dancefloor culture in a live setting. That’s where the two shows in question fall woefully flat.
First of all, it could be argued that Boiler Room defeats the purpose of the club culture it strives to promote; it divorces the music from any sense of privacy or escape. By design, Boiler Room is an internet-based music discovery tool. Only recently has it morphed into a concert series. It was acquired in 2021, after which a strategy executive with an MBA probably suggested they turn the beloved internet brand into an IRL events organizer, following in the footsteps of countless other brand-rich, revenue-poor internet media companies.
Before all that it was just a promotional outlet used to convince fans to go to see DJ’s at clubs. In fact, these showcases used to be industry events that were rarely open to the public. I went to one in Berlin in 2014 that ended at 11pm on a weeknight so the crowd could make it to work the next day, hardly the sort of hedonistic escapade the scene is known for.
These events pale in comparison to a properly curated night out with longer sets and less tourists seeking their fifteen minutes by rubbing up against the DJ and messing up the show. Boiler Room remains a noble institution, but in 2024, it feels like the same people dying to go to one would never buy a ticket to their local warehouse party or club night, where dance music culture actually takes place. What started as a way to promote lesser-known DJs using the internet has evolved into… a marketing activation for a pop album rollout? If you were at a proper dance music venue of the sort Boiler Room aims to recreate and you saw this many iPhones (above), you would leave. Despite how hard it was to get in (400 spots for 35,000 hopeful attendees), the event made little sense as live performance with its four short DJ sets squeezed into an hour and relatively little in the way of actual DJ’ing. Though it made tons of sense as clickbait with on-camera appearances by Julia Fox and and Addison Rae.
Fred again..’s Coliseum appearance (and most of his shows for that matter) present a different version of the same problem, which is that the forms of music from which Fred draws his inspiration are not designed for stadiums or venues like The Shrine or Terminal 5. This music doesn’t scale, especially when it’s divorced from its intended context. What we’re left with is Fred’s at-times questionable DJ’ing (or, playing pre-recorded versions of his songs and mashing buttons on a drum machine to make it seem “live”) and various attempts at spectacle such as him mashing said buttons in different areas of the stadium.
Let me complete the compliment sandwich by saying that I’m sure these events were fun as hell if you’re the type of person dedicated enough land a ticket. And again, much of the music in question is pretty good. If I heard Fred’s recent collab with Lil Yachty and Overmono at literally any venue I too would go nuts. But in the face of millions of people commenting “OMG ICONNNN” on grainy Instagram reels of these two shows, someone’s gotta stand up and say, actually that kind of looks terrible.
I don’t know where we go from here, but I do want to position myself as solution-oriented and not a hater. So if Charli wants to more outwardly embrace her dance music bonafides, I’d love to see her tour as a proper DJ in addition to a pop act. That’s how she started her career, so she’s no stranger to the scene. I’m sure her tour, where she’ll be doing pop-star things like singing and dancing, is going to be a massive success critically and commercially. (Taylor Swift’s three-hour marathon sets have set a high bar for pop live performance). Why not cultivate a separate dance act with the same world building and attention to detail?
Fred already did the thing I would have advised him to do, which is lean into higher brow dance music culture like he did in his partnership with Skrillex and underground hero Four Tet. The trio’s headlining set at Coachella sacrificed surprisingly little in terms of underground credibility, despite catering to an enormous main stage (and mainstream) crowd. Fred would do well to further articulate the difference between his solo live performance and his DJ’ing, thereby maintaining credibility in both formats. Even his fans think so. Here’s a Reddit post from a die-hard fan complaining about almost every aspect of the Coliseum show from the aesthetics to the crowd control.
The moral of the story isn’t to say that Fred and Charli have exploited dance music culture so much as they’ve misappropriated it in a way that undermines both artists’ credibility. As an optimist, I think we can have our cake (cool, underground-driven pop music) and eat it too (experience it in a high-integrity public context), but the onus is on the artist to balance that equation. As polar explorer Ernest Shackleton once said, “honor and recognition in case of success.”
Bye for now.