Abstract
In this thesis I examine popular dance practice within contemporary UK Drum ‘n’ Bass club culture. Despite an active focus by cultural analysts on club and rave events where dancing is the central focus and ‘dance music’ is played, the dancing body is noticeably absent from previous discussion. I provide a discursive framework for the introduction of the dancing body into club cultural research by documenting and examining the dance practices in one specific genre of dance music: Drum ‘n’ Bass. Drum ‘n’ Bass is a sub-genre of electronic dance music that first developed in the UK in the early 1990s with its origins in US Hip Hop, Detroit and European Techno, and Jamaican Reggae and Ragga. In this thesis I argue that the intertextual, inter-generic and inter-cultural development of Drum ‘n’ Bass musical and clubbing culture is represented in the dancing body. I situate dancing as the central way in which Drum ‘n’ Bass club-goers construct, perform and reiterate specific personal and collective identities, which are informed, although not defined, by the musical genre’s history. Empirical research examining the popular dance practices within contemporary Drum ‘n’ Bass club culture reveals complex networks of association with, and dissociation from, other ‘dance music’ and Drum ‘n’ Bass clubbing crowds, which is demonstrated through the ‘appropriation’ and revaluation of specific racial, class-based and gendered identities. My central hypothesis is that the Drum ‘n’ Bass dancing body is heterocorporeal: a hybridized body where knowledge and beliefs about cultural groups, articulated in terms of class, race, gender, age and sexuality, actively intersect to create new meaning and significance through dance. The thesis is structured into two parts; in Part One I examine discourse regarding the construction and performance of identity in contemporary youth cultures and in Part Two I analyse fieldwork data from Drum ‘n’ Bass club culture.