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LTC Eugene Chu
"One of the most successful scams ever perpetrated on Americans is the idea that dance music sucks. We have been convinced that it has neither merit nor substance, and that it cannot be serious. The conspiracy has gone so far that people somehow believe dance music isn’t American. In the odd case that dance music is so good that one can’t help but love it, it can be easily brushed off as ironic appreciation.

I get why this fraud has been so successful.

Americans are, at a very young age, taught to be suspicious of joy. Anything that makes you happy has to have a drawback. If that’s the case, then music that’s designed to be joyful and make you dance can’t be good, right?

Enter: Beyoncé, arguably the biggest superstar and greatest performer in music today.

Beyoncé is on the verge of releasing Renaissance, an album that’s dance-centric and reportedly will borrow heavily from disco and house. She released the first single, “Break My Soul” in June, which used a sample of Robin S.’s “Show Me Love” and incorporated house music elements.

It’s a moment, according to the press coverage surrounding its release, that may change the industry and shift the way we think about dance music, house music specifically. Her album comes on the heels of Drake’s dance-heavy album Honestly Nevermind, another signal that dance music is ready for its moment.

As a fan of Beyoncé and dancing (I make no claim to do it well), this is fantastic news.

But the narrative that dance music needs changing or revitalization goes back to that pesky, ever-prevailing idea that dance music is not good to begin with. But dance music is as American as rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop, country, or R&B and is just as serious and important a genre.

“Everyone knows about Bruce Springsteen, and everyone knows that jazz started in the United States,” Shawn Reynaldo, a music journalist specializing in house and dance music, told me. “So why isn’t it common knowledge that disco, house music, techno and electro, and all these other genres also came from Black American communities?”...