"Music Sounds Better With You" at 20

Ryan Alexander Diduck examines Stardust's one-off hit for FACT.

It's funny to see which songs from a fairly lackluster year (1998) stand out twenty years later. 

As Diduck notes, it was completely out of step with the electronic music trends of the time.  Chemical Brothers and Prodigy were bridging the gap between rock and techno, making club music palatable for alternative nation fans who wouldn't have gone near the stuff otherwise.  Against that backdrop, Stardust released their unapologetically retro disco track. 

At the time, I didn't really understand if there were artistic undertones I was missing.  Why release something so simple and repetitive?  Why recycle old ideas when the talent involved clearly had the ability to push the boundaries of the music further?  IDM sort of poisoned us into thinking that techno and house had to be complex, thought provoking, worthy of dissection and careful analysis.  But sometimes a fun disco song is meant to be a fun disco song, best heard in a club.  In that sense, "Music Sounds Better With You" had more cultural impact than entire scenes did later on (e.g. electroclash).     

Diduck loses me toward the end of his piece.  Ronald Reagan was a simpleton and was therefore amorphous -- he was whatever voters wanted him to be, which is why he was so popular.  Similarly, the masks and "screens" worn by Stardust in the video allowed you to project your feelings on to them.  Who made the music and appeared in the video?  There were whoever you wanted them to be.  And yet he seems to claim that Reagan's popularity was nothing but cheap hucksterism, whereas Stardust boldly cultivated a sense of community.   Stardust united dance music fans from several otherwise separate spheres (because their song was so damned catchy), whereas Reagan tricked the masses and blurred the lines between parody and reality?