Dance
How Red Bull Dance Your Style revives iconic hits in music's history
At Red Bull Dance Your Style, you'll hear hip-hop classics and cuts from electronic trailblazers. It's a soundtrack designed to allow the dancer to connect with the beat.
Just after the turn of the century, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo made music history. While crate digging, they'd unearthed a 1979 record by then-little known funk musician Edwin Birdsong. Inspired, they took a bouncy keyboard sample from his track 'Cola Bottle Baby' and built a song around it. To finish it off, the pair added crunchy, vocoder-filtered vocals that repeated and fragmented a few lines over and over: “Work it harder, make it better / Do it faster, makes us stronger.”
Bangalter and de Homem-Christo are better known as Daft Punk and the track they made was, of course, ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’. It remains one of the French duo’s best-loved tracks and has become one of the most iconic hits in music history – a song that, thanks to Kanye West, is equally as beloved by hip-hop fans as it is house heads. Before his death, Birdsong described being sampled by Bangalter and de Homem-Christo as a blessing.
21 years after Daft Punk released that immortal track, a new generation of listeners were enjoying it on the other side of the world. At the Sydney qualifiers for Red Bull Dance Your Style 2022, that instantly-recognisable riff blasted over the speakers. Immediately, the entrant on stage had to move to the music, freestyling dance moves to a crowd.
Red Bull Dance Your Style is a competition that sets out to find the very best freestyle dancers around the world, including here in Australia. It’s all about improvisation: no one knows until the moment a track starts playing what they’re going to be dancing to. The thrill and excitement of the competition comes from its spontaneity. Each dancer has to go with their instinct and the beat to burn up the floor in a way that feels right. It’s a challenge, but one designed to elevate dance's true talents.
'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger' was just one of the classic hits that Red Bull Dance Your Style tasked dancers with responding to. At other points, it was Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’ on the speakers, Busta Rhymes’ 90s hit ’Touch It’ or CHIC's 'Le Freak' -- the track that made Nile Rodgers a star some decades before he busted out the rhythm guitar to work with Daft Punk on Random Access Memories. Depending on your age, these tracks are either a trip down memory lane or a vital musical education.
From the noughties, this year's Red Bull Dance Your Style qualifiers hit a nostalgic chord with tracks like ‘Move Your Feet’, an earworm-y one hit wonder that blew up charts in 2002, bringing Danish duo Junior Senior a short burst of overnight fame before they more or less slunk off into obscurity. Timbaland popped up with ‘The Way I Are’, and another media-shy French duo, Justice, made their mark with ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ The playlist also included Estelle doing ‘American Boy’ -- a song written by the all star cast of Estelle, will.i.am, John Legend, Kanye West back in '08 (and featuring bars from Ye himself in his shutter shades era). Many of the musical selections are tracks you’ll immediately know. Others are undeniable bangers you might have forgotten about but are keen to revisit.
For the Red Bull Dance Your Style music curators, the competition isn’t just a chance to just platform great dancers and entertain a crowd -– it’s also a way to revive the most iconic hits in music history. Because while the event may be about dance first and foremost, there can be no movement without music.
And music is core to freestyle. As Sophie Giles wrote for Red Bull last year, when dancers are reproducing choreography, it’s easy to get caught up in remembering the steps and rush the moves in anticipation of the beat. That mental focus can disconnect a dancer from the song – but improv is entirely reactive to the music.
“The best freestyler, the best improvisation dancer is someone that connects with the music and is able to express that very freely,” Arisse Tauv, a hip-hop dancer, dance battle DJ and Red Bull Dance Your Style contestant, told Red Bull last year.
The best improvisation dancer is someone that connects with the music and is able to express that very freely
“There's a difference when you're watching a dancer and you're like, ‘Oh he's thinking about the beats, he's thinking about what move to chuck out next,' as opposed to someone who is just in the moment and just, ‘Oh they just somehow hit the beat really well,’ and you know it wasn't premeditated or anything, it's just coming from that feeling.”
But having killer tracks is essential for good dance. A propulsive bassline or some rhythmic drums gives a dancer something to tap into. It’s all the better if the track is a hit they already know, love and feel in their bones – something like Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’, Kendrick Lamar’s ‘King Kunta’ or N.E.R.D.’s ‘She Wants To Move’, a hit from a time before Pharrell was a solo artist.
Of course, there’s plenty of contemporary hits in the mix as well. In this year’s state qualifiers, Beyonce’s immediate classic ‘Break My Soul’ plus recent cuts from local heroes like OneFour, Tasman Keith, Genesis Owusu and Gold Fang all graced the speakers. (And if you’re in the crowd and don’t know every song, there can be no better introduction to hip-hop and electronic music’s very best cuts.)
And ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’ wasn’t the only Daft Punk hit to make it in. This year's state qualifiers also made use of ‘Robot Rock’ and ‘One More Time’ -- the latter of which also saw the Frenchmen sample a little-known 1970s record and turn into a globe-conquering hit; this time to some enduring controversy.
We don’t know yet what songs will be on the speakers when the national finals for Red Bull Dance Your Style hits the Overseas Passenger Terminal in Sydney on Saturday September 10 – but we can bet they’ll be stone cold classics. Have your Shazam ready.