Dance Dance

Yesterday morning, inspired by hearing two dance songs back-to-back on the radio, I had the brilliant idea to devote an entire blog post to my favorite genre of music! That's right--lounge! ......... Haha, that was funny, wasn't it!? Hahaha!

Okay, sorry, I'm just having trouble finding a good lead-in. Let me try again.

I recently renewed my subscription to eMusic. It seems like a pretty good deal--24 DRM-free mp3's  for 12 dollars. But eMusic caters to obscure artists and minor labels, and thus doesn't have any of the music that you already know you want, and you have to use all your downloads within a month! The 30-second samples that they provide are wholly inadequate for helping you decide if you like a song enough to spend 50¢ on it.

Case in point: once upon a time, when I had some free downloads--they might have been from eMusic, or maybe some other source, I blew one of them on a track that I'd never heard before (except the 30-second sample) but had a promising name: "Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss."

Excuse me while I digress for a moment. Being a fanatic about both dance music and linguistics, I spend more time than your average Joe thinking about the proper verbalization and transliteration of the classic sound of electronic dance music. Thanks to Pandora, I now have a name for this sound: a "four-on-the floor drum beat (four quarter-note kick drums per measure, usually associated with an upbeat high-hat)." Unfortunately, I still don't have a word for the sound itself. Ever since I first heard it spoken (at summer camp, when one of my fellow counselors decided to sing a verse of a song "techno style"), I've been spelling it in my mind, "Nn-tsuh, nn-tsuh, nn-tsuh." Recently, browsing eMusic in a futile attempt to use up my remaining 17 downloads, I saw an editorial that introduced itself and the entire genre of electronic music with the phrase, "Oonce. Oonce. Oonce. Oonce." Which I guess is a fair way of spelling it.

But apparently you should not trust the people who spell it "Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss," because their song about it is boring. So boring, in fact, that after downloading it, I deleted it from my computer--something I never do. Even the most boring of songs, once on my hard drive, get relegated to a public folder where they may, perchance, enrich the lives of others who might like them better than I do. But not Uhn Tiss. It is gone forever. Except on YouTube.

I think I'm not done talking about this subject. But I labored long and hard over this post, and I'm tired of writing. I shall take a break. And listen to some lounge. Haahaha!