For reals! The flyer and details are in this post!

Anyway, not a student or a scholar, just a woman, dancer and music lover who finds these things interesting since this is my life and not “merely” academic.

First of all, the racial dimension of booty bass sexuality cannot be ignored, though you note it in a footnote. I think that saying the “vast majority” of booty bass is produced by blacks is overstating the case, since many of the major success stories — Disco D, DJ Godfather, DJ Nasty, Starski and Clutch, Bitch Ass Darius — are white, not to mention the hipster takes on it — Diplo, Flosstradamus, A-Trak, etc. I think that having an “ironized” reading of sexuality partially comes from the knowing play of signifiers of blackness on the part of white DJs, producers, and fans. Original ghetto house and ghetto tech were just “raw” sounding — the emphasis on dirty lyrics came into it after whites caught on and the scene needed a branded sound for export. Listen to DJ Assault’s first volume of Straight Up Detroit Shit — it’s mostly just sped up techno.

The nature of sexuality at play is incredibly important as well. Disco and house were gay musics, or at least queer, and many of the important originators were gay men. Electronic music in general is seen in the U.S. as “gayer” than other types of music. During my ethnography for my thesis, I discovered that techno (made by straight black Detroiters) currently has a gay connotation in Detroit. Ghettotech and bootybass producers (all hetero) are quite consciously claiming dance music (their first love) for heterosexuality — they are not breaking down the walls of sexuality so much as shoring up a very traditional notion of heterosexuality, in tune with contemporary commodified sexuality such as porn and strip clubs. In effect, they are making dance music that allows audiences to NOT question their sexuality — they are comforting conservative hetero audiences. It is interesting, however, that the music seemed revolutionary to a liberal feminist such as yourself — I think that is worth considering further. To me, the queer and open sexual politics of disco are more revolutionary than the concentrated hetero domination in booty bass. In any case, I think we can safely say that the era in which flaunting bourgeois sexual values can be considered revolutionary is definitively over.

[There is the question of camp: that if by exaggeration and repetition, ghettotech somehow deconstructs its own sexual position — hard to say, and I haven’t come to any definitive conclusions on this.]

Pleasure complicates this, and booty bass has plenty of female fans, and even some female DJs. But we can’t forget that there is nothing inherently liberating, politically, about pleasure, sexual or otherwise. This was the great mistake of the 1960s counterculture. As that great bondage fan Foucault reminds us, repression creates its own pleasures.

Regardless, I appreciate your complex take on something easily written off as a novelty.

Booty bass is not just playing around with the idea of the dance floor being highly sexualized. In practice, it’s about serving the sex market and all about glamorizing and making palatable, laughable, and perhaps even justifiable everything that happens in that market.

Sometimes it’s not just about making fun of, toying with, or hinting at sexual domination in a safe context like the dancefloor but about creating, quite literally, a soundtrack for the real thing.

Something to keep in mind, perhaps.