The Null Device

A report in The Verge from a conference in Las Vegas about the business side of electronic dance music (EDM). EDM is not to be confused with the electronic dance music that older readers will remember; the 303-heavy acid-house played in underground clubs in Chicago and New York in the 1980s, the rave-techno that crusties dropped E to in illegal (and definitely undermonetised) raves during the Second Summer of Love, or even the glossier house/trance that superclubs played in the 1990s and 00s, but is a new phenomenon, as different as rock'n'roll was from jump blues. Having moved to Las Vegas, cut its name down, Diddy-fashion, to three VIP-worthy letters, and replaced the loved-up Goa-beach hippyisms with some high-octane all-American shock-and-awe, EDM has had an extreme makeover, and in doing so, not so much sold out as absorbed the whole concept of commercialism and monetisation and become one with it. The fans, apparently, couldn't be happier with it (or so the boosters of the brand synergies say, of course); on some level, being part of a super-hot marketing demographic is this generation's equivalent of the distinctly shabbier solidarity of being a Mod or a punk or whatever your grandparents did because there was nobody around to sell them energy drinks or LED jewellery.

Not surprisingly, people who love electronic music also love electronics. They have "a high propensity to purchase high-tech devices versus other genres, making them ideal for partnerships in the mobile and tech space," Simonian said. They’re more likely than other music listeners to purchase songs after hearing them in an ad. They’re also 50 percent more likely to buy energy drinks and 18 percent less likely to buy diet soda — presumably because they spend too much time dancing to worry about calories, Simonian joked. They spend more of their music money on live events, and they’re trendsetters — EDM listeners are generally regarded as "key influencers" among their peers.

Festivals also offer fertile ground for millennials, a generation entirely unfamiliar with the concept of selling out, to engage in "brand immersion." Swedish House Mafia pioneered the trend when they partnered with Absolut in 2012, releasing a single called "Greyhound" — named after the popular combination of vodka and grapefruit juice — that featured the trio behind a roboticized race dog on its cover. The move successfully cast the cocktail as an EDM staple, and the band incorporated the digital dog into its visuals for an Absolut-sponsored tour. Simonian says Nielsen’s research has revealed that electronic music fans "want brands to sponsor artists." If this concept sounds like "selling out" to you, your problem might be that you were born before 1990, or that you were raised on some form of punk rock ethos that requires strict division between creativity and capital (I’m guilty of both). Selling out is an alien concept in the EDM market — when Simonian says that fans want brands to sponsor artists, it might just mean that fans are happy to see their favorite producers making a decent wage to create amazing music.

So when I hear Skrillex in a Best Buy commercial, hear Calvin Harris teaming up with Rihanna, or a mediocre deadmau5 rip-off while I’m browsing through the underwear section of Target, I can only smile contentedly: finally, the sound I wanted to hear everywhere when I was growing up is actually everywhere. EDM has become the first "voice of a generation" that openly accepts a partner all other types of music bristled at: unabashed capitalism.

Well, there was such a thing as “commercial dance” in the 1990s, but the word “commercial” in that case cast it as a lesser form of dance music; something churned out by hacks in Germany and the Benelux countries to sell to mobile-phone ringtone companies, undiscerning preteens and those too hammered on flavoured vodka to know the difference. In this case, though, the big, well-hyped megastar DJs are the hypercommercial players, and the pervasive commerciality of EDM goes unremarked; the phrase “commercial EDM” would, indeed, sound awkward and ungainly, like “water fish” or something.

¶ authenticity commercialism culture edm music 0

John “Menk” Doran on the last 10 years in music genres; it's not pretty:

Even naysayers would have to admit that new rave was MDMAzing when compared to what we have now: EDM or Electronic Dance Music. Despite its utilitarian, almost sexy nomenclature, EDM is utter fucking neo-trance bilge for those who can’t tell the difference between a nightclub and the Stanford Prison Experiment. So we’re talking David Guetta, Afrojack and that cunt with the big metal rat helmet. Seriously, America, what the actual fuck? Your boys (mainly gay and/or black but still your boys) invented techno and house in the fucking 80s and you decide to wait 25 years until some spray-tanned berk from France who looks like Owen Wilson in Zoolander does this to it before you’ll dance to it? It’s a fucking disgrace.

(Previously on “EDM”.)

Weirdly, despite arguably being the most sonically progressive and inventive mainstream genre of the last ten years, R’n’B doesn’t really seem to have thrown up any particularly memorable or clearly defined sub-genres. Much to the dismay of fans of Usher and Ciara, the indie kids and hipsters have been getting in on the act to bring you PBR&B or R-Neg-B, a smacky, bro-friendly take on 80s/90s smooth music, with Gayngs, Destroyer and the Weeknd being the best and worst of the bunch, designed to give the bromantic a broner, which then may require the attention of bromide. Or a court-sanctioned brostraining order preventing you from going within 100 metres of her house.

Elsewhere, the class system is as entrenched as ever with cakeeating aristocrats and the upper middle classes (hypnagogic pop), the students (chill wave) and the lumpen proletariat (glo-fi) all having different names for the same genre, which is not dissimilar to listening to Hall & Oates on a Walkman with a head injury while throwing orange-tinted Polaroids of your 1982 summer holiday to Morecambe into a swimming pool. The rest of the feral underclass had shit gaze, which, oddly, didn’t trouble the charts much.

It's not all shit, though; Doran has some good things to say about hauntology, ironically possibly the most redeemably original phenomenon of the past decade.

¶ brostep class culture edm glo-fi indie music 0

As America discovers rave culture, restyled into the contours of a synth-driven nu-metal, with the drug elements toned way down, and renamed as “Electronic Dance Music” or EDM, VICE UK has an open letter to America's EDM enthusiasts:

For the last 25 years, while you guys were buying Learjets and listening to Creed, Europe has been double dropping, reaching for the lasers and constantly asking strangers if they are "having a good night". You thought this made all of us homosexual, existentialist drug addicts (which may be partly true) and for years you resisted the charms of Mitsis, Ministry Of Sound and the music of Paul Oakenfold. Your party scene was content with smashing "brewskis", smoking "doobs" and blasting the music of Kid Rock and 2 Live Crew.

The letter goes on to gently offer advice, from the Americans “doing it wrong” (by insisting on having live drums and saxophones on stage and favouring hard-rock-style stage spectacle over the subtle progressions of UK club music to being in denial about the drugs thing) to the whole term “EDM”:

When I first heard the term "EDM", I wasn't sure what it stood for... What I did not expect, however, was something as blitheringly obvious as "electronic dance music". It seemed like calling a genre "guitar rock" or "trumpet ska". All dance/house/bass music is electronic. Just say it to yourself; Electronic. Dance. Music. It sounds like somebody's great aunt attempting to talk about Moby's new album, or a clueless country police chief answering questions about a rave he's trying to shut down. It makes you sound like novices, and stupid novices at that. So go think of something else to call Afrojack.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this isn't nu-metal, guys. Bush is out of the White House, you're on the way to getting all sorts of European liberties, you don't need another Woodstock '99 and no one wants to see a bunch of gurning people getting trampled to death in a circle pit. I know getting pilled up and licking each other's ears doesn't fit in with that whole "rugged induvidualism" thing, but give it a try. The kinship you'll feel with your fellow man will come in handy when you're enjoying that socialist future you're all looking forward to so much.

To be fair, the article's assumption (that EDM is essentially British/European house/garage/dubstep/club culture repackaged for a new audience without significant changes) may be incorrect. There were rave scenes in the US (in the San Francisco Bay, for example) for decades, with blue hair, fluffy leggings, glow sticks and tonnes of MDMA pills washed down with energy drinks, though those didn't spread any further than groups of Anglophilic/Europhilic enthusiasts; partly because of the cultural difference and explicit exoticism (much like the way that Britpop, UK indie and swinging-60s Mod revivalism all tend to get mashed together into one sartorially immaculate Anglophilic scene when outside of Britain), and partly because of the War On Drugs, and the fact that doing anything that may construe probable cause of drug possession in the age of Instagram could be what they call a bad life choice. What made EDM ready for crossover to the mainstream was the fact that it is not your older siblings' rave culture: its presentation and format owe more to the live rock show than the communal rave, more the high-tech adrenaline-pumping spectacle than the pharmaceutically mediated collective experience in a darkened club or a field. And it took hard-rock veterans like Skrillex, the inventor of the American form of dubstep known as “brostep”, to successfully demonstrate that softsynths on a MacBook can rock harder and kick more ass than guitars through a stack of amps.

¶ brostep culture dance music edm music rave the war on drugs usa 0