Is the dancefloor a place of refuge? Of abandon? Of liberation? Or perhaps a place of obliteration? It’s complicated. In the four decades that he’s been clubbing, Chicago’s Jamal Moss has likely seen it all. He cut his teeth sweating it out at the Music Box to Ron Hardy, a pioneering house DJ known for the intensity and audacity of his mixing. He lived through the Reagan era, the “war on drugs,” the AIDS crisis. Poverty was rife and times were tough, but inside the club, it didn’t matter: “We were just there to be free of that shit,” Moss says. Over the years, the world that Hardy and his acolytes helped create, the alternate realities they helped foment, went global. The music spread, morphed, put down new roots. The formerly underground became commonplace. House music had always aspired to universalism; now, at last, the whole damn universe embraced house music. You’d think it might be cause for celebration. And yet inside the club, Moss says, “40 years later, it’s drastically different—everybody’s angry!”
To Moss, the DJ and producer best known as Hieroglyphic Being, there’s a paradox at work. Anti-harassment campaigns, no-camera policies, Narcan-toting DJs, seasoned bouncers to sift out the troublemakers and rubberneckers—all these measures are meant to ensure patrons’ safety and preserve the vibe. And yet, Moss says, “look around and a good percent of people in the club are not happy.” Dance Music 4 Bad People is Moss’ vexed response to the peevish mood.
His first album for Oslo’s Smalltown Supersound, it’s approximately Moss’ umpteenth record, once you factor in releases from aliases like I.B.M. (Insane Black Man), the Sun God, and Members Only, his seemingly limitless series of bootleg edits, and it’s entirely true to form: a surging maelstrom of machine music, synths swollen and drums bleeding into the red, ready to go off the rails at any moment. A nostalgic return to happier times this ain’t; more like an indictment of the current malaise via a defense of the dancefloor at both its holiest and most profane.
Polemics can only go so far in instrumental dance music; divorced from the context of Moss’ statements, you might never guess that this is an album about discontent. But then again, maybe you would. It’s surly, anxious, turbulent stuff, with unruliness coded right into its DNA. “U R Not Dying U R Just Waking Up” airdrops us into battle, as a stern, thudding kick drum and martial hi-hats carve out a clearing for a fierce rhythmic and textural workout. The chords are soothingly emotive, the drums hot to the touch. One-bar loops pile up, a relentless juggernaut of ideas that peaks with a rascally, pitch-bent synth solo before fading out in mid-beat, anticlimactic to the core.
There is no resolution in these bruising, brooding tracks; just a never-ending tug-of-war between tension and release in which tension usually has the upper hand. That’s not to say it’s not satisfying: The pleasure principle hits with every lovingly sculpted kick drum, every psychoacoustic frequency. The spectrum is awash in sounds that prod and needle in ecstatically confounding ways. “The Secret Teachings of the Ages” is powered by a drone as primeval as tolling bells. “The Map of Salt & Stars” radiates desperate hope, every bar pushing upward; the drums, mixed low, are the consistency of a fogged mirror, leaving the Atlas-shouldered bassline to carry the beat. In “Awakening From the Daydreams,” someone seems to have hooked up jumper cables to a screen door. Brittle tritones go head to head; the intervals telegraph the feeling of an ice-cream headache. Then, halfway through, a new chord offers momentary relief, as though someone had opened a fire door and sent a cool breeze flowing through the club.
But such respites are rare. Moss’ sounds are serrated, grinding, and they throw off sparks; jagged peaks rise where layers collide, like mountains from tectonic plates. Conflict is encoded into the music itself, as sequences go off piste, or off key, dissonance thickening in the gelatinous midrange. These are not songs that work toward cathartic resolution. Take “I’m in a Strange Loop,” one of the album’s highlights. It starts simply enough—for Hieroglyphic Being, anyway—with phased cowbells and angry crickets, cosmic synth flourishes, and a lithe, insistent bassline. But as a jammy Hammond solo flares up, the track becomes a roller coaster of competing intensities. The tempo dramatically slows; the song becomes a spooky dirge—until, unexpectedly, the tempo rises again. People are angry, Moss says, but he’s not here to placate us. This is not DJ-friendly music; it’s a bloodletting.
