A little gloom in his head is the only way he’s getting into my bed.  Innocence lacks sexiness, and happy hunks without a trace of a hue of hurt in the eyes feel like a liability. Because when passions get impassioned, I don’t want to be accountable for the rabid turned raunchy look in my eyes, or my ‘peculiar manner’. Bedrooms are the last place you should be my cross to bear or have you make my nature my cross to bear. The flip side to darkness, and to dark pop in general, is that if done right, it’s sexuality at its most liberated.

Songs that remix sweet original versions like Until the Ribbon Break‘s take on Tegan and Sara’s “Closer” and this remix of Jagwar Ma’s “Uncertainty” by Mssing No, are my absolute favorite type of music. They understand a dancefloor as a place where movement equals lewdness without judgment.  Music like this fuses industrial beats that swagger and spit in the same way they do on the idea of penance for the night’s fun.

The reason I hate and never cover happy pop, is that you can practically hear the moral dilemmas catcalling in the arrangement. Whether it’s the mandatory nod to love before lust (but tonight only lust is available!) or assertions that ‘Oh, I’m really not this much of a slut, honey’ as if being sex positive is the worst thing one can be, generally happy pop is all sorts of the wrong kind of twisted. But tracks like this “Uncertainty” remix  leave hangups strung up at the door.

What I like most about this take on “Uncertainty” is the complete lack of uncertainty on the part of the song’s protagonists.  The ‘stammering and stuttering’ is about being awe-struck rather than paralyzed by fear, and by 2:30 even that’s given up as the track melts into black bliss and bumping synthy bass. It gets that looking at the world in a peculiar manner can be a mating calling card–mine by the by– and that being tapped into your inner darkness means you can, ahem, prime the pump in all sorts of glorious ways once you’re willing to go out of sorts.

Follow Mssing No on Soundcloud.

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