Laudate Omnes Raves

Eurodance for Pushkin, Goethe, and Chaucer. Hell is other people and rhythm is a dancer — that is the thesis; what follows is the evidence. There is a received wisdom that eurodance is fundamentally unserious, the musical equivalent of a gummy bear dissolved in vodka. This playlist exists to demonstrate that the received wisdom is, as received wisdoms so often are, wrong.

The Thesis

Each track is paired with its literary ancestor or twin — the text that makes the same argument, asks the same question, or inhabits the same philosophical territory, only without the benefit of a Roland TR-909 to carry the point home. The sequence moves from Plato’s ideal republic (Ace of Base, in Latin) through the wordless war elegy (Robert Miles answering Wilfred Owen) into the French existentialist corridor — Farmer channelling Cioran, and a decade later Kate Ryan performing Borges’s theory of the cover version on the exact same song. The middle runs through Nietzsche’s Dionysian, Rilke’s terrifying angels, Camus’s happy Sisyphus, and Pessoa’s insomniac heteronyms. E-Rotic is Chaucer. Scooter is Büchner. Blümchen is the teenage Goethe. And Gala, who closes the set, is the Buddha, delivering the Second Noble Truth at 138 BPM to stadiums that have never once considered they are chanting the Dhammapada.

At the exact center, the rave stops for a hundred and sixty-six seconds. Where the found records would carry a fourteenth club anthem, the label drops its own instead: Cassidy Diane’s “Purtroppo,” a solo-piano soul ballad whose title is simply the Italian for unfortunately — the Leopardian alas that all twenty songs are secretly about. Then the strobe comes back on.

The dancefloor has always been a more effective distribution mechanism for ideas than the lecture hall. Sartre locked his characters in a room. Eurodance gave them a kick drum and a strobe light and called it liberation. The only variable is the BPM.

Pairs well with a dog-eared copy of Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair, a strobe light, and the unshakeable conviction that philosophy peaked at 138 BPM.

Play it on the Turntable

The Concordance

Twenty songs, twenty texts. The pairing is the argument — each dancefloor anthem set beside the page that got there first.

Ace of Base — Happy Nation · Plato, The Republic — the ideal state, argued over a reggae skank instead of Socratic dialogue
Robert Miles — Children · Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth — the war elegy without rhetoric — Owen’s question answered with a piano
Mylène Farmer — Désenchantée · Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair — Romanian-French despair performed with intolerable elegance
Culture Beat — Crying in the Rain · Ovid, Tristia — the poet in exile, weeping where no one can see
Snap! — Rhythm Is a Dancer · Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy — the Dionysian dissolution of the self into the pulse, in four bars
2 Brothers on the 4th Floor — Dreams (Will Come Alive) · Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream — the prophetic tradition channelled through a Roland synth; the speech is the text
La Bouche — Fallin’ in Love · Rilke, Duino Elegies — every angel is terrifying; the terror of surrender (and, after 2001, an elegy of its own)
DJ BoBo — Freedom · Rousseau, The Social Contract — born free, everywhere in chains — the chains drop at the chorus
Ice MC — It’s a Rainy Day · Verlaine, Il pleure dans mon cœur — the pathetic fallacy as Italo-house
Haddaway — Life · Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus — rolling the boulder up the hill regardless; one must imagine Haddaway happy
Jam & Spoon — Right in the Night (Fall in Love with Music) · Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn — beauty is truth; the urn singing back, flamenco guitar as Attic shape
Masterboy — Feel the Heat of the Night · Dostoevsky, White Nights — the nocturnal dreamer’s reckoning, relocated to a Stuttgart dancefloor
Faithless — Insomnia · Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet — the insomniac as philosopher, the self fragmenting at 4 AM into heteronyms
Cassidy Diane — Purtroppo · Leopardi, Canti — the Italian “alas” — the label’s own still point, a piano in the strobe
E-Rotic — Max Don’t Have Sex with Your Ex · Chaucer, The Miller’s Tale — Frankfurtian fabliau; the low body and the high lesson, without apology
Scooter — Hyper Hyper · Georg Büchner, Woyzeck — inarticulate rage in a reunified Germany, given a kick drum and a platform
Blümchen — Herz an Herz · Goethe, Nähe des Geliebten — untranslatable German diminutives; tenderness discovered as its own philosophy
Kate Ryan — Désenchantée (2002) · Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote — the exact same words, a decade later, meaning something entirely different
Corona — The Rhythm of the Night · Lorca, Romance sonámbulo — green, how I want you green; the night-rhythm as sleepwalking duende
Gala — Freed from Desire · the Buddha, Dhammapada — the Second Noble Truth at 138 BPM, adopted by stadiums who never read the dharma