Perhaps nothing is so fundamentally queer about Springsteen as the pervasive feeling of dislocation that’s threaded through his work, the nagging sense that something has been plaguing him since birth, and that he’s dreaming of a place where he might finally fling it off his back.

Technically, ballroom refers to all the music played at vogue balls, from house and disco classics like MFSB’s “Love is the Message,” Todd Terry’s “Bango,” and Ellis Dee’s “Dub Break” to hard house staples like Junior Vasquez “X” and Kevin Aviance’s 1995 anthem “Cunty” [whose incendiary title happens to be the highest form of praise in the ballroom scene]. It’s a mix of these – plus the influences of hip hop, R&B, deep house, and the more aggressive sounds of Baltimore and Jersey club – that have spawned the first wave of dedicated “ballroom” producers: names like Vjuan Allure, Angel X, MikeQ, Divoli S’vere, Kevin JZ Prodigy, B.Ames, and DJ Chip Chop. And like almost every true underground dance scene, proper releases are almost non-existent, with the producers mostly releasing tracks via homemade CDs or file-share links.

A look at the curious history of the quintessential vogueing hit. --- These musical renderings speak to the innovative spirit of ballroom culture, and while the “Ha” came from a movie with offensive commentary – similar to Eddie Murphy's vulgar jokes in his famous 1980s stand-up sets like Delirious – MikeQ feels that it’s important not to center that aspect of its origins. “I want to say that the film had nothing to do with its [“The Ha Dance”] entering ballroom. The credit goes to Masters At Work for simply making a hot dance beat – for years you didn’t know that’s where it came from,” he says. The moral clash is ironic, but the evolution of the “Ha” and its longevity is symbolic of the importance of personal agency in the scene. Ballroom’s palette is enriched by the community’s authority over elements like space, identity, bodies and sound. DJ Byrell believes it’s in range for a track with a story like “The Ha Dance” to go off at the balls. “It’s not ironic to me that something with a problematic start would be turned into something good. Ballroom itself is built on problematic experiences and trying to escape them, mainly racism,” he says. That sea change in the track’s current significance echoes the genius of marginalized generations and black and brown people who’ve built cultural empires despite oppression or lack of sanctuaries and resources. “It shows that we work with what we are given and create gold from that. Like ‘The Ha Dance,’ much of ballroom is borrowed ideas that are turned into our own,” Byrell continues.

Shaking the Habitual, like most of the music The Knife have made to date — along with singer Karin Dreijer Andersson's solo album as Fever Ray — is, at its core, very goth in its tone and themes. Relentlessly morbid, intentionally unsettling, and alluring in its romanticized bleakness. But despite this, it's pretty rare that you see anyone label The Knife as goth, perhaps because they've avoided the most obvious signifiers of the subculture every step of the way. The Knife aren't about goth as living in a permanent Halloween; they're about that connection between romance and horror. And those feelings are a big part of being engaged with social justice issues: the outrage directed at oppressors, the frustration with cultures that refuse to change, the unshakable fear that the world is only getting worse, the loneliness of feeling like a hated outsider, the thrill of finding a like-minded community. They've done this better than pretty much anyone else in music; it's just too bad that they went a bit too far in advertising it.

When I think about the difficulty I’m having listening to Wolf, I remind myself that there are dozens, hundreds of albums that inflict similar psychic pain on people because of their race or gender or experience that I’d never notice on my first or tenth listen. Everyone’s flashpoints are different, whether they’re homophobic slurs or racial epithets or sweeping, harmful generalizations about a genre or culture or all three. As a critic and person, confronting such a flashpoint is an eye-opening, educative experience, and for that I suppose I’m thankful for Wolf, even if I might never actually hear the album.