The Year's Top 10 Spiritual Dance Tracks

Dancing is and always has been a tribal ritual, an act of abandon, a form of active meditation. From Navajo tom-tom beating to flamenco foot-stomping and whirling dervishes, the group tradition of moving to music and finding transcendence through gesture and rhythm have long held societies together. It has served a number of communal functions, from mating and marriage to various forms of initiation and, of course, religious ecstasy. Is it any great surprise, therefore, that the institution of dance music today--specifically the driving house brand suggested by rock and soul and consolidated by disco--has grown exponentially during our spiritually hungry times?

The music we dance to is, accordingly, becoming more spiritual. The icons of pop, from Madonna wielding a peculiar brand of yoga-twisted kabbalah to Boy George blasting through smack addiction into Hinduism, are leading club dancing away from its self-consciously hedonistic roots toward a more healing, soul-nourishing groove. Listen to Sting, once a bad-boy Police-man, rhapsodizing on his new, rhythm-inspired album, "Brand New Day," and you'll be seeing visions in no time. In Spain, the groundbreaking, thoughtful dance mixes of DJ Jose Padilla have become megahits in a series called "Spiritually Ibiza."

While the advent of the millennium seemed to belong to the apocalyptic howl of grunge and heavy metal, many club music fans have turned away from the siren of too much sex (and too much of it unsafe and drug-fueled) to a more enlightened approach. The club kids have found that ecstasy need not come in a pill. Instead, they get high on spirits touching through synchronously moving bodies and raising consciousness through thumping vibrations, pumping unity into the air as hundreds dance to the same beat. This is love. After all, the beating of the heart and the pounding rhythm of a dance track are cosmically related.

The following is an eclectic sampling of dance tracks sure to raise your spirit and help you along the road to your particular address in paradise.

by Dawn Tallman, Nervous Records 2000

This gospel-flavored dance track from a full-fledged, full-voice diva will lift you out of your seat and have you clapping your hands to heaven, especially the inspired refrain of "Wake up, this is a brand new day..." The universal message here: Open your eyes and be alive.

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by Madonna, Warner 1998

This vocal techno-trance track asks the big question: "Isn't everyone just travelling down their own road watching the signs as they go?" When the reigning, shapeshifting guru-ette of pop music instructs her fans to find a path and stick to it, we know we're in a whole new age.

by Chicane, featuring Bryan Adams, Xtravaganza 2000

This uplifting high-energy pop tune points us to the god within with a luring subtext: Keep the faith, believe in yourself and never ever give up hope. "Dont give up, you know it's true, gotta do what you want to do."

by Cher, Warner 1999

Another shapeshifting pop goddess, only with a much bigger hairdo, Cher comes off her success with a song called "Believe" with a new mantra: a smooth-but-bouncy cover of Betsey Cook's 1991 dance classic with the unforgettable lyric, "Love is the groove in which we move."

by Diana Ross, Motown 1999

The once and always supreme Miss Ross takes the classic Christian Jesus theme (note the third-person masculine pronoun) to the limit in this tribal cover of the show tune from "The Lion King." "He lives in you/ he lives in me/ he watches over every thing we see." Not great poetry, we know, but true as a harvest moon over Detroit.

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