2010s Dance Party Essentials

2010s Dance Party Essentials

A ’10s dance floor sounds like the experience of living in this fully plugged-in era: everything’s happening all the time. The song-to-song variety that ruled the previous decade’s parties morphed into one bottomless genre-well that each successive cut drank from. A riot of dance pulse spilled forth from collab-happy DJ/producers as varied as big-tent titan Calvin Harris and subgenre scholar Diplo. The indie floodgates broke as auteurs like Lorde made it cool to be arty and reflective. Rap absorbed new strains—emo, industrial, folk, UK dance, R&B—and spit out not only hybdrists like Drake but the inescapable trap snare. And all those forces bore down on the mainstream, where Beyoncé went from girl-group alum to multidisciplinary deity, and Justin Bieber found critical cred cooing about doubt over tropical house. The internet shrank the globe, uniting K-pop idols, Latin stars, underground outliers, and pop celebrities in one endless body-moving blowout.

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada