Kat Says: “EDM Needs a Comeback, and So Do We”
We did the genre dirty, and it might just be the one sound that can “Save The World” tonight.
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This is me at peak EDM, Sept. of 2012
Hindsight is 2020—and in the case of EDM, well, maybe it’s 2022.
How many times have you taken a picture of yourself with friends or alone in front of some sign or whatever, and your first thought was “oh god, I look so fat. I looks shlumpy. I hate my hair today. Ah, don’t post that!”
Then, some five or 10 or 20 years later, you look back at that picture and you’re like, “what the fuck was I on about? I look amazing! I was so hot! Why did I always think I was so ugly?”
For me right now, EDM is that picture. It’s been haranguing me recently; this backward-looking, rose-colored nostalgia for a time when club’s were over-aggrandized and money was being injected into an aggressive youth culture at speeds with which the market had perhaps never seen.
The years between 2010 and 2015 were absolute madness. Clubs were bedlam, festivals were ferocious, the synth lines were explosive, the crowds were absolute fiends, the drugs were everywhere, the attitudes were up and—looking back—it was all pretty great honestly.
Of course, I didn’t think that at the time, at least not out loud. To be totally truthful, I was having the time of my life. I was riding the media wave toward a long-term career in entertainment and lifestyle journalism, getting paid miniscule amounts to go to the biggest clubs in the world and write about the debauchery I saw there.
I was living in Miami with my best girl friends, when the rent prices were seemingly a lot but not unmanageable, drinking myself into what thankfully did not turn into any real permanent damage. I was habitually single, existing in the eye of a hurricane that pit commercial interest and a lightning-strike of young energy in an eternal battle for power and control.
Absolutely I was loving it, but I had been there just before the big take off, had come to the dance floor as a means to escape the Chads and Jessicas who had made my grade school years a living hell. Suddenly, they were fist-pumping right beside me, looking fitter and prettier and richer than anyone who had been at the party some three hours (years) earlier.
I had to play the part of bitter critic, wondering where it all went wrong. Now, almost 10 years later, I can admit the truth: EDM was a fucking incredible moment, and while it was not perfect, it’s honest blend of stupid excitement and molly-sloppy smiles was fucking fun, and it deserves the respect of us all.
Most people who know me, read my work or follow me on socials know I align myself pretty heavily with the “bloghouse” movement. The term “bloghouse” is nothing anyone ever said during the bright and burning years of 2006 to 2010. It’s something someone came up with years later to describe what we were feeling, and so much of what made it exciting was that there was no name for it at all.
Crystal Castles, The Knife, Modeselektor, Midnight Juggernauts, Ghostland Observatory, Yelle. You could hear all these bands in one DJ set, mixed in with AC/DC and NWA and Earth, Wind & Fire. The rules were dead, long live cool. Boys Noize did not sound like Justice, and MSTRKRFT did not sound like Chromeo, but we knew they were all part of the same immaculate moment.
That’s what made EDM the enemy. It was the moment ineffable and uncategorical fun became something that could be coined, something that could be described, something that could be sold.
Me and my buddy Gianmarco living our best EDM lives in June of 2012, on stage at Grand Central (RIP).
The change didn’t happen all at once. It was gradual.
In 2008, a new novelty act appeared on the scene. LMFAO were an underground indie favorite, dressed in over-the-top skinny jeans with neon leopard prints and vibrant color block everything. It was the bloghouse look done to the highest degree, and the duo’s song “I’m in Miami Bitch” was a direct piss-take on the wild fun of Winter Music Conference, the electronic music world’s annual conference in, obviously, Miami.
“We made the song before we’d ever even been there,” Red Foo told the Miami New Times in 2008. “We made that song imagining what it would be like, and kind of saying to ourselves ‘regardless of what it’s like, this is what we want it to be like,’ because we’d heard so much about Miami. And it became our kind of mission statement -- drink all day, play all night -- and if someone was too hung over in the morning to drink, we’d just play them the song and say, ‘Yo, this is the mantra, man.’
By 2008, the slow tread toward EDM had begun. First came the term fidget house, a la Crookers. Then, there was complextro from Wolfgang Gartner. Then, you had dubstep from Rusko and soon Skrillex. Then you had Dutch House from Afrojack and more. Then, suddenly, someone came around the club talking about “EDM.”
Electronic Dance Music. It was supposed to be an umbrella term. It’s so vague, but to me, it means something extremely specific. To me, it means Avicii. It means Calvin Harris. It means Hardwell and Nicky Romero and Swedish House Mafia.
It means skyrocketing, anxiety-inducing builds and big, big cannon blast drops. It means songs that were meant to be played to no less than 5,000 to 20,000 people at a time; bottle service clubs with sparkler-capped champagne brought by women in fishnet and thongs; a downright devilish peak of absolute excess that only came to life between the years of 2010 and 2015, and anything else is just, well, something else.
I love pointing to the music video for “No Beef” by Steve Aoki and Afrojack as the pivotal moment that bloghouse died and EDM took over. It’s the perfect blended middle point. You’ve got two PrEDM stars yucking it up together in an incredibly low-budget, DIY video (DIY being a HUGE factor in the “bloghouse” era). They’re absolutely not famous enough to be noticed by anyone, but they’re running around in Las Vegas—the place that would soon become EDM HQ.
They’re playing pool parties and casino clubs, but the scene is still a bit dirty and low rent. It hasn’t yet become a Golden God scenario, but it will, as soon as this music video ends. There will be no going back. The chapter that is EDM has begun.
Technically, the “No Beef” video came out in 2011, but the seeds of EDM had already been planted. The EDM supertrio Swedish House Mafia came out with its debut single “One” in July of 2010, and Avicii first broke through with his hit “Seek Bromance” in September of that year, albeit under the name Tim Berg.
A year later, in October of 2011, he dropped his seminal hit “Le7els,” under the Avicii moniker that has since become a thing of legend. It immediately became the most overplayed and important single of its era. Within months, it had solidified the new sound and style that would define the next half decade.
This was around the time I moved back to south Florida, having graduated with my journalism degree from UF. In March of 2012, I hit Ultra Music Festival for my first official bit of EDM festival journalism (having impressed the Miami New Times music editor with my review of Deadmau5 at South Beach megaclub Mansion that January).
It was my third time at UMF, having popped my rave cherry there in 2005. Back then, it was a one-day festival and Tiesto headlined on the Main Stage, which is today’s small Live Stage. By 2008, it had become a two-day festival, but in March 2012, it was a full three days. Ultra went from a local favorite to a full-on international event—the most international of all the Stateside EDM fests, a big point of pride for UMF.
Covering Ultra that year was weird. It was the first time I got a front-row seat to what was happening; what was changing. Kraftwerk and New Order were on the lineup—at the live stage, which had once been the main stage—but the crowd was not full of pimply rave geeks and black-clad goths. It was full of hard bodies; beautiful, dumb Greek-life types that were absolutely popular in high school. They hadn’t come to escape anything. They had come to be around what popular kids are always around: the bright and shiny mainstream.
They weren’t just there. They were there wearing bright color-block tank tops and skinny jeans. They had on shutter shades and blew whistles. They had totally adopted my sub-culture, and I had a lot of complicated feelings. >_<
Ultra wasn’t the only festival benefitting from a bump in relevance. EDC, which had been kicked out of its native LA after a young woman died overheating while on molly in 2010, had found a new home in Las Vegas, where it remains today. That made it the largest footprint EDM festival in the land, and one of the largest in the world.
Investors were watching. By June of 2012, media mogul Robert Sillerman was in the New York Times promising to buy up $1 billion worth of EDM event companies. Money. Marketing. The total enemy of all things DIY and spur-of-the-moment had not only infiltrated that nerdy table, it had downright taken us over.
That injection of cash meant an explosion in sheer size—not just in the amount of people at the party, but the size of the spectacle itself. Year after year, festivals and touring artists engaged in a kind of stage production warfare. “My stage has 100 LED screens on it.” “My stage has a fucking water feature.” “My stage has 50 dancing girls hanging from the ceiling in spinning cages and a moving UFO and 20-foot fire spewers.”
Your stage is a fucking shit show.
All this distraction served to sever the fan from the music. It didn’t mean to do that. It meant to be engaging, to capture attention in the emerging worlds of Instagram and SnapChat. Really though, it kept people looking at the DJ without bothering to know what in the world was going on. Most people, to this day I’m pretty sure, don’t know what DJing even is. They think DJs are playing songs live up there or something, and when producers are playing live, they think they’re playing pre-recorded tracks.
In 2011, when Skrillex told the Internet his favorite song was Aphex Twin’s “Flim,” a young fan posted a comment under the attached YouTube click asking “where’s the drop?”
Meanwhile, EDM superstars became caught up in the rush to outdo each other for attention. It all became this sad parody of itself. Like, how many times can Steve Aoki throw a cake in an audience before you start to look around and think, “when did this party become lame, and why am I still here?”
Even SNL took shots at Avicii and David Guetta in a 2014 skit all about “where’s the drop?”
That’s where I got mad. That’s where it all felt rotten and hollow. What was anyone doing here? Drugs? Making out? What was the point?
EDM had become bloated, arena rock. EDM went the way of late-stage disco. Every pop and rap star, from Nikki Minaj to Katy Perry, needed an EDM hit. It all became a laugh, a lark, and eventually, the younger generation backlashed against it, moving to the grittier style of Soundcloud rap, trading champagne and molly for Codeine and Xanax.
The glittery excess of uppers was passe. Depression and downers were cool. Also, the daydream of the Obama era was on its way out, and the scary tyranicism of Trump was on its way in. It’s hard to dance like its the last night of your life when you start to feel like it really might be.
Maybe that’s partially why I miss it so much now. I miss the simplicity, the stupidity, the over-the-top fun for fun’s sake. I don’t miss the shallowness, necessarily, but I do miss the chance to sing at the top of my lungs about being young and carefree.
It really hit me when I covered Swedish House Mafia’s reunion tour kick-off in Miami last month. We were singing along to “Don’t You Worry Child,” a song about nostalgia that never made full sense until we were all old enough to be nostalgic for that very song.
Further Reading: Swedish House Mafia Kickoff Paradise Again Tour With A Rave In A Sold-Out Arena (Spin, 2022)
I realized that, having lived through the lowest moments of EDM, the peaks of that era had been truly golden and rare. We had tasted absolute peak ecstasy, and it hadn’t been fair of me to blame the cool kids for wanting to be a part of that. How dare I gate keep joy? I had been the real asshole all along.
“Mainstream EDM is a spectacle, but I think it does root from wanting to find community and feel part of a community.” NYC house DJ QRTR told me that a few months ago, for an interview I wrote in Output about being queer in the modern dance music scene. “It’s rooted in that same need for finding a space to connect with like-minded people, in the same way that these queer parties were necessary. It felt like a necessity to have a space to connect with people like you. It all stems from the same desire for connection, but it starts to get tricky when it gets exploited and turns into that capitalist spectacle that you’re trying to run away from.”
QRTR is fucking right. She’s smart, and all those things remain true.
Yes, things have changed irrevocably. Avicii, for one, is dead. We’re never going to hear him play “Le7els” or “Silhouettes” or “Wake Me Up.” That power now lies on the EDM DJs who remain. It lays on the shoulders of Afrojack, who I am delighted to say continues to play “classic” sets full of ear-splitting Dutch house synths and EDM explosions. It lies with Swedish House Mafia who are right now resuscitating the joy of EDM on an arena tour of their own. It even lies with Hardwell, whose comeback I don’t feel so emotionally moved by, but god damn it, if the kids wants Hardwell—or rather, some other subset of 30 somethings want Hardwell—then god bless them.
In 2012, I thought it was uncomfortable watching 6 year olds sing along to LMFAO’s “I Am Not A Whore” at the American Airlines Arena, and it honestly was, not because 6 year olds shouldn’t talk about sex, but because LMFAO was stuck in some weird middle-ground trying to decide if the band was a novelty act for adults or a mainstream pop band. I think they could come back now and make it work. Be themselves. Play “Party Rock Anthem” to a room full of jaded millennials who ache for a simpler time. I hope it happens.
In hindsight, we all celebrate and recognize disco for the important functional piece of music history that it is, and I think EDM can be seen in some similar way.
I think it’s okay to admit that it was kind of bad how commercial interest blew up an innocent youth culture movement until it became a bloated corpse, but that there was some kernel of truth in there, and it’s okay to own that and remember it fondly, because the world deserves to have that kind of fun, to let go of giving a shit and just sing along and fist pump and wear colorful glitter jeans, to not be so arty and and serious, because god damn it, shit suck right now, and we just wanna dance.
So go ahead and dance. Keep on dancing ‘til the world ends.
Alright! That’s the fucking essay this week. Another long one, thank you for (party) rockin’ with me.
Wednesday, I’ll send out my favorite EDM songs to those who are so generous as to pay me moniessss. Do you wanna get that list and join the ranks of those who help support me on this journey to write silly essays and bring EDM back to life? If so, click the button below!
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Absolutely Necessary
(This is the part where I share songs that are so good, they’re absolutely necessary to listen to. That’s it. That’s the bar.)
I made two Spotify playlists for this section that you can follow: one weekly playlist updated with just the new stuff every week, and one cumulative playlist that will host every song I pick ever (until Spotify tells me it's full). Check them out! I made them for you—and me, but mostly you.
This week’s essay is long, and it’s also late, so I’m not going to write up all the songs here. Just know that there are tunes from Jubilee and Pat Lok, Kah-Lo, Alan Braxe & Falcon, Sudan Archives, Bad Tuner and more on the Spotify playlists!
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PUR-REACH!!
Listen, I didn't participate in EDM firsthand because of a lot of reasons, some of which are that I want to keep my '90s rave memories unblemished, but reading this essay, I felt like I lived through a lot of things and I am all the better for it. #raveon