| My obsession with album sleeves that refuse to say anything at all is total. I cannot get enough of them. You’d think I’d be into dance music, since white-label 12” EPs are the ultimate in non-communicative sleeves: elegant, mute testimonies to nothing, blank slates that allow whole histories to be written invisibly on their surfaces. But the absence of lyrics in dance music gets in my way, as does the heavy focus on trends and fashions: who could care about anything that ‘s going to have no past within a month or two? How can one say anything about a music that has no common critical parlance? The whole question has turned me into something of a dance music curmudgeon, which is a little surprising, given that without dance music I’d’ve been dead by the end of 1985. |