I’d like to look at last Halloween as a sign of anti-doom.

While warming up for the late-night Neumo’s Diplo set at Moe’s bar next door, we noticed the music over our heads was suddenly excellent. Gone was the obvious cross-stitch irony of one of the Girl Talk albums and on came a stereo of all late ’80s and early ’90s. There was LL Cool J, if we remember right, and Mary J. Blige, Beats International, Soul II Soul, New Order, Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock, and loads more. Hits of the past floated in the air — songs of a time when dance music was an innate, almost subconscious floorboard for endless amounts of popular and relevant genres — passing between people dressed as unicorns, bananas, Ms. Pac Man, Alice Cooper In Wonderland, and transvestite robots.

Ignore the bad bits of nostalgia. At least for a second.

Dance culture, acid house culture, ecstasy culture, of the late ’80s and early ’90s was one of the rare times of widespread warmth, futurism, positivity, and a sense of a collective after years of dark politics and splintering music tribes.

The mix, then, whatever it was, took us back in time and eventually carried us into the Diplo show, which turned out to be touched a similar way.

Kicking off with “XR2,” the greatest M.I.A. single that never was, a song about the early ’90s rave era — “Imagine we’re at Glastonbury ‘92!” she says at her shows — Diplo made the place his platter. Ba-ba ba-ba! Ba ba-ba-ba-bah!

Every. Show. Should. Use. It.

While there was an interesting lack of Diplo’s usual baile funk, he swerved the set into Baltimore bass, heaps of squelchy house, the usual nods to Seattle (Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) and Halloween (Zombie Nation’s “Kernkraft 400”), as well as some Santogold, Danzig, thugged-out hip-hop, haunted-house screams, and a brilliant, blistering, sociopathic use of Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up”.

Neumo’s was packed all night but friendly and danceable, and it was reassuring after hearing the recent Crystal Castles horror stories.

But just as with grime and dubstep, what you took away from the set the most was this ripple of early ’90s acid house bouncing off the songs. All its synths and build-ups and breakdowns. Its influence and optimism. Diplo, like say, spiritual predecessor Fatboy Slim before him, helps prove that to listen to dance music is to listen to the birth of rave culture.

Earlier at the bar, the stereo played the Andrew Weatherall remix of Primal Scream’s “Come Together”.

An absolute classic of the ecstasy generation, released in 1990, “Come Together” and its long, pre-dawn dub, samples of Jesse Jackson, and gospel chorus didn’t just call back to an earlier time that night, which is easy, but sounded fresh and wonderful and significant again. With an election then days away, no matter what you felt about it, you couldn’t write off the way it focused people, brought them towards something, and you could imagine “Come Together” written for any big moment in time when things realign, and when cynicism and cool fades underneath a wave of intelligent positivity, or at the very least, the best of intentions.

When the national honeymoon’s over, I thought, I’m sure this will all start to feel ridiculous again, and it probably should.

For one night out, though, I was glad to choke up. I was happy to fall for the fantasy. And by November 4th, joining the swarms and celebrations, I had even more trouble getting these feelings and these ideas and the song out of my head.

But you know, I didn’t care.