Albini was cool enough to agree to this:
http://thequietus.com/articles/18882-powell-vs-steve-albini
Here’s a post by Albini:
I will attempt to articulate my dislike for dance music.
In the form music appeals to me most, it is an attempt to express something. Not necessarily concrete ideas, and not necessarily even discernable content, but it expresses the creative impulse, and within it something unique about the people making it. I think this applies across the broad spectrum of my tastes, from Bill Withers to Converge. From Buddy Holly to Whitehouse. From AC/DC to Nina Nastasia. From Hank Williams to the Stooges. There is something in their music that while expressing their creative impulse captures something unique to them. I get the impression that the music (certainly the form of the music) is subordinate to the impulse to make it, and in many cases is irrellevant. The ideas or their expression are not bounded by the form.
Dance music is denied this sort of possibility, because it is functional music. It must function as a backdrop to a specific activity, dancing, for which there are fairly rigid boundaries. I know much is made of artists who “test” or “ignore” those boundaries within the genre, but that they are there to be tested is evidence I am right.
I find a similarly easy dismissal of jingles, video game music, etc. It is functional, bounded, and so incapable of provoking in me the feeling I get from music made for its own sake.
I guess that’s it. You can either make music for its own sake, or you can make music to serve a function. I find myself unmoved by functional music. I noticed this when disco as a genre came into being. Prior to that, people danced to music of many types that could be danced to. After that, an industry supplied music that was music only in the formal, dictionary sense. It was functional above any other consideration.
This music became the background sound for dancing in clubs, and from that developed a narcissistic, vacuous club culture that I found (and still find) repellant. The best thing that can be said about disco and the later club scene is that it gave the gay community a sense of vitality and greater cultural influence than it had been allowed previously. I think that is a great social development with an atrocious soundtrack.
The children and cousins of that scene are the roots of dance-oriented electronic music, and I find the family resemblance too much to bear.
As the idiom developed, the music became more and more about the novelty of certain sounds and treatments, ridiculously trivial aspects like tempo and choice of samples, and the public personae of the makers. It became a race to novelty. I find that kind of evolution beneath triviality. It is a decorative, not substantive, evolution.
Even the name is misleading. Dancing itself is unbounded. There are infinite possibilities for movement, pace, form, gesture, posture, etc. Many cultures exploit this in ceremonial dance music or traditional dance music. I find it ludicrous that, given such an open expanse of possibility, the genre “dance music” is so predictable and so hidebound. If I had an interest in dancing, it would not be limited to music that inspired bouncing in 4/4. The haunting nature of some waltzes, the awkward, tricky beauty of the Tarantella, and even the joviality of the Hava Negila are all evidence that there is more to be had from dancing than this, this fodder.
You may say that dancing is dancing, and it doesn’t matter to what. I agree, going that far. But the music danced to, in its own right, can be listened-to, and when I do that to dance music (contemporary electronic dance music and its variants), I find little else in it, and parsing its variants out is an un-stimulating taxonomic exercise for me.