Narrative Possibilities through Bodyness: Aesthetic of Dance Music and Affective Turn

Abstract

If the criteria for judging good and not good music correspond to the musical content or meaning, much popular music would not escape the judgment of yet being qualitatively low, and its representative genre is dance music. Compared with movies and dramas, pop music lacks clarity of reproduction and narrative structure. Dance music is more multi-layered and ambiguous than other pop music genres as it contains music, lyrics, and body movements as basic genre characteristics. To discuss the aesthetic aspects of dance music, focusing on the theoretical significance raised from the theory of affect, this study examines dance music (especially Korean dance music since the 2000s), the area farthest from meaning and narrative, as a process of acquiring “non-narrative narrative” based on physical sensibility and popularity.