How electronic dance music conquered America: a writer explains
From its humble American beginnings as house music in Chicago, techno in Detroit and rave music in England, the genre now known as electronic dance music (EDM) has become a billion-dollar business.
From its humble American beginnings as house music in Chicago, techno in Detroit and rave music in England, the genre now known as electronic dance music (EDM) has become a billion-dollar business. Superstar DJs earn tens of millions of dollars annually; corporations such as Live Nation have EDM departments run by first-generation ravers gone mainstream. In America, festivals such as the Electric Daisy Carnival, Hard and Coachella, all born in Southern California, draw hundreds of thousands to annual events. How did this cultural transformation occur? Writer Michaelangelo Matos explores this question in . A comprehensive history of a movement, rave culture, that sprouted in Southern California after its rise in England, the book traces the 40-plus year history of EDM in America. Matos talks to
Southern California is expat central. That's where all the Londoners go, and a lot of them started up the scene. There were American DJs playing that music, but turning it into rave culture per se is a very different thing. That's what the Brits brought … to Northern California as well.
The scene got bigger as the internet grew. They go hand in hand. Both are moving ahead in the United States at the same time. That core group of people that are passionate about it are online. In 1992 when the Hyperreal list-servs [which provided news of upcoming raves] began, that's obviously a cradle of Southern California thing too, because Brian Behlendorf [who created them] is a Los Angeles native. That's his work. The internet is the internet because of him. The fact that it's a raver doing it isn't a coincidence at all.
The fact the Daft Punk surge occurred is huge. It's the decisive thing. It's "the Beatles on " of dance music, and the reason is everybody can watch it. Everybody there had their phones out, and somebody there put a [YouTube] supercut together. Everybody saw that and thought, "I want to go see this". It made dance music cool again. Daft Punk, that's a show. You don't even have to dance if you don't want. You could look at the DJs, you could dance, you could do anything. They made something that was interactive the way a rave was but that was comprehensible to a mass audience.
The Brits saw it as pop music, and Americans couldn't get their heads around the idea that this might be pop music. It was such a different apparatus, and it sounded so different, and it didn't have the same characteristics. There was no front person. There was no star. But in the scene there became shame about it, because they didn't want this to be pop. They wanted to go back underground. They didn't want anybody to catch them taking drugs. And they were also like, "This music is expanding, and we want to expand with it". Not just mind expansion but the way the music was changing all the time and maturing at such a rapid rate. The '90s were the '60s for dance music, very much.
You're right about that. It's not just that dance music is becoming mainstream. Most of its juices are absorbed into the mainstream in some way, and most of its methodology has been adapted by the greater pop world, from the way the recordings are disseminated to the actual sounds on the recordings. Record labels sell singles now. They don't sell albums. It's a track at a time - let's throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks, which is very much what dance music was. That's always been dance music's methodology, and that's pop's now.
