Tripping the Light Fantastic…
Click here to watch full-screen (at least some of) the history of Western dance music unfold
Music tourism (visiting a city or town to see a gig or festival) is on the rise. But why stop at gigs and festivals? Why not visit the birthplace of your favourite genre and follow the actual journey various music genres have taken as one style developed into another.
To make it easier to trace the threads of music history, we’ve created an interactive map detailing the evolution of western dance music over the last 100 years. [It’s actually from the late 18th Century to the present…] The map shows the time and place where each of the music styles were born and which blend of genres influenced the next…
One can (and surely should) quibble with the map-makers’ bias to Afro-Carribean-based dance music (what about the Virginia reel, and its antecedents? Or Latin dance music?) But then, that’s fun of artifacts like this– the challenge to make them “better,” to make them one’s own…
Watch the interactive history unfold and read the full background at Thomson Travel’s “Evolution of Western Dance Music.”
And lest one doubt that music is in fact contagious, consider this evidence from the PRC:
As we tap our toes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1990 that producer Frank Farian publicly admitted that the voices heard on the recordings of Milli Vanilli were not the actual voices of the duo (Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus). Shortly thereafter, the “Best New Artist” Grammy that the group had won earlier that year was recalled… In this age of wide-spread lip-syncing and Auto-Tune, it all seems so quaint…
