Into the groove

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US stars embracing dance music are pushing America to dance to Europe’s beat, says French DJ David Guetta.

ELECTRONIC dance music with heavy bass, unknown vocalists and mixed by club disc jockeys regularly tops pop charts in Europe but in America such music has been an underground genre with little mainstream success.

While disc jockeys such as Moby, Fatboy Slim and Paul Oakenfold have had a string of mainstream hits in Britain, their success as artistes in the United States has been limited to the dance chart, with rare appearances in the Billboard Hot 100 chart which ranks the most popular songs of all genres.

Great strides: ‘If all those big American acts are interested in this kind of sound, I think it means it’s going to be really big in America in the next year,’ says David Guetta.

But French DJ David Guetta predicts that will change, saying US hip hop and pop stars featured on his new album One Love, which was released last week, so embraced the genre that they could boost its mainstream appeal in the United States.

“It’s my fourth album so I was looking for a new sound and a lot of people here in the hip hop industry and in R&B are feeling a bit like they are going in circles and using the same recipe,” Guetta said in an interview in New York.

“If all those big American acts are interested in this kind of sound, I think it means it’s going to be really big in America in the next year,” said Guetta, who also helped produce the Black Eyed Peas current No.1 US hit I Gotta Feeling.

“There is a real American brand embracing it,” he said.

Guetta’s new album features stars such as Kelly Rowland, will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, Akon and Ne-Yo.

It has already produced No.1 hit singles in Britain, Australia, France and other European countries, and two singles that made it into the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No.76.

“Guetta knows what he’s doing here. Bring America to the club? Nah. He’ll bring the club to America,” wrote Los Angeles music critic Mikael Wood.

Experts are split on why such dance music has failed to set the charts alight in the United States. Some say club music has been unable to compete with live music in America and others note US audiences find it hard to identify with an artiste who mixes music but doesn’t sing.

In the United States, dance music is classified as electronic and accounts for 1% of sales, according to The NPD Group, while in Britain, dance music makes up 8% of sales, according to British music industry group BPI.

“In America, it’s always difficult for ‘dance’ music to be popular in the mainstream,” said Keith Caulfield, a music analyst with Billboard.

“Songs that are dance orientated have always been popular, it’s just that dance often has to be disguised in different kinds of ways for it to break through.

“When I look at our current Hot 100 chart there’s a lot of songs that strike me as a dance song, but dance has taken different forms in order to reach the masses,” he said.

“Lady Gaga has been so successful and to American ears she is pop dance music.”

He said DJs are more likely to have mainstream US success teaming with well-known artistes from other genres, which essentially “disguises” the dance music.

Music expert and author John Swenson said dance music has always been popular in various forms in the United States for the past few decades “when technology first enabled DJs to be the real stars of popular music”.

“At a time when live music is becoming less and less relevant in New York City clubs I guess you can say it’s more popular than ever,” he said. “The real reason club music took over outside of the US is that the live musicians weren’t good enough to match it.”

Organisers of what claims to be New York’s first electronic music festival, to be held on Randall’s Island in the East River off Manhattan on Sept 5 and 6, said they had seen a growth in the popularity of dance music in the past few years.

“We have been inspired over the years by what happens in Europe each summer,” said Mike Bindra and Laura De Palma, organisers of the Electric Zoo festival.

“The realisation of this goal is another step forward for electronic music here.”