Credit: Dangerous Minds

Punk rock is viewed as the first kind of music to actively flirt with breaking the law. Meanwhile, hip-hop has been literally used as proof of intent to commit crimes in courts of law. However, there is no genre of music more legislated against than electronic dance music.

This might sound ridiculous. After all, musicians getting in brushes with the law is a tale as old as popular music itself. Musicians of all descriptions get arrested, so what makes dance music stand out? Well, it’s exactly that. Musicians get arrested, but actual dance music itself seemed to be the problem. That was the kind of music getting laws passed in the UK Houses of Parliament, outlawing gatherings of over 100 people to listen to music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”

Sure, whether the Sex Pistols were a corrupting influence on the youth of the UK was debated in the Houses of Parliament, but never whether music built around loud, rudimentary guitars and sneering vocals was the problem rather than the individuals themselves. I’m sure if someone felt like they could get away with outlawing drill music as a collection of sounds released as music, they would have tried over the past five years. However, possibly as a result of dance music having few recognisable public faces compared to other forms of music, it’s more difficult to make people the poster boys of the problem.

Instead, they targeted the actual music itself. This brings us to the curious case of Aaron Cogley, who in 2013 was working as a delivery driver and living in Bristol. While out on a job, he was pulled over for driving erratically when he took a sharp left turn that cut off a number of fellow drivers, before running two red lights in a row. Sensing that something was very wrong, the police officers who pulled him over gave him a breathalyser test and found the strangest thing.

Cogley was sober as a judge.

Did dance music get a man banned from driving?

Cogley was still brought in for dangerous driving, and while he was in the police station, he made the schoolboy error of conversing with the officers. While he was doing so, he let slip that he was driving like that mostly because he was in a hurry, but also because he was listening to his drum and bass music. Rookie mistake, the prosecution now had their core argument. In their mind, by listening to loud drum and bass music, Cogley became “intoxicated” and put his fellow drivers in danger.

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. This became the entire case against Cogley, which, in a strange way, was for the best. It was a reason for his faculties to be diminished and thus, a reason for him to not be entirely in control of his actions. If he was found to be simply that much of a danger to his fellow drivers by his very nature, he might have been banned for life. Cogley was a courier by trade, so that absolutely couldn’t happen.

The blame was pinned on his taste in music and, shockingly, it worked. The genre even took some strays during the trial, with the QC remarking that it was “intoxicating for some” and “very irritating for others.” Cogley was banned from driving for a year and, at the end of that period, as well as being ordered to retake his driving test.

Would the same line of argument have worked had he been listening to Spiritualized or the Cocteau Twins?