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Greg Kot
Rave mania swept Europe in the late 80s, but dance music has always failed to
take off in the United States until now. Greg Kot explains why.
Just when electronic dance music (or EDM) appears to be having its big moment
in North America after decades of neglect, along come Daft Punk to say, Not so
fast.
Daft Punk founders Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo are in many
ways the godfathers of the current EDM/dubstep surge, and star DJs such as
Skrillex and Nero owe them their careers. With a series of house-centric albums
and an awe-inspiring 2006-7 tour that situated the French duo inside a neon
pyramid, Daft Punk ushered in the third major wave of dance music since rave
mania swept Europe in the late 80s. But their latest album, Random Access
Memories, thumbs its nose at what Bangalter has called the personality-free
tropes of EDM.
On the album s track, Touch, Paul Williams plays a robot in search of a soul:
You ve almost convinced me I m real, he sings, but I need something more.
Bangalter has said in interviews that EDM also needs something more if it
expects to have staying power. For the last two years, it s been the
fastest-growing musical genre in North America, after decades as a pariah.
The animosity dates to the 70s, when Disco sucks T-shirts sprouted up among
the rock brigades greeting the arrival of Saturday Night Fever in North
America. In the 80s, Chicago house and Detroit techno helped spawn a huge
European rave scene which flourishes to this day but remained underground
back home. In 2000, the city of Chicago passed what became known as the
anti-rave ordinance, which made property owners, promoters and DJs subject to
$10,000 fines for being involved in an unlicensed dance party. In 2003, the
U.S. Congress passed the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act, which cracked
down on parties associated with drug use and authorised funds to educate
parents and kids on the dangers of Ecstasy, a drug associated with the dance
scene.
Going straight
What a difference a decade makes. The scene has shed baggage from its outlaw
days as promotion, security and crowd control have gone legit. With
professionals in suits now running the business, audiences have expanded and
corporate dollars have begun to flow. Massive dance festivals such as the
Electric Daisy Carnival routinely draw more than 300,000 fans for a weekend in
Las Vegas, and the franchise recently expanded to Chicago and London for the
first time.
Electric Daisy founder Pasquale Rotella says he s received offers as high as
$120 million to sell his Insomniac promotion company and is exploring a
longer-term partnership with rock concert promoter Live Nation, which could
expand dance music into stadiums and amphitheatres in most major North American
markets.
Rotella says the Internet played a huge role in expanding EDM s reach and
helped bring young fans out to American shows in record numbers. Clearly, the
electronic music scene radiates a glow stick energy that makes a lot of current
rock and hip-hop sound staid. At Lollapalooza festival over the last few years,
EDM acts such as Bassnectar and Calvin Harris have gone head-to-head against
rock bands on other stages, and have drawn huge, frenzied audiences numbering
in the tens of thousands.
Disco inferno?
Not since the brief blip of disco mania in the late 70s has dance music been
such a commercial force in America. But can it last? In a recent talk at the
South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, electronic music
innovators Richie Hawtin and Joel Thomas Zimmerman, also known as Deadmau5,
sounded some warning bells.
Deadmau5 lamented the cookie-cutter sound of EDM, citing the easy
availability of beat-making software that essentially allows just about anybody
who can afford $1,000 of gear to make a dubstep record in his or her bedroom.
Everything now is accessible, instantaneous, Hawtin said. Maybe the reason
EDM is so big is because it's homogenised."
The confluence of popularity, accessibility and affordable technology will do
that to any innovation. Club music avatars didn t know what we were doing,
Hawtin said. We taught ourselves how to use this cheap electronic gear and
invented a sound. Now that the sound has been absorbed and replicated,
risk-taking has slowed amid the revenue windfall. No wonder Daft Punk are in a
sceptical mood any dance music fan should be.
Ultimately, the staying power of pop music movements over the last century has
been built on fusing a new sound with a great song. On Random Access Memories,
Daft Punk s search for dance music s soul led them back to pioneers such as
Chic s Nile Rodgers and disco producer Giorgio Moroder, whose melodies have
resonated for generations. Will EDM be able to produce a classic on par with
Chic s Good Times, the Orb s Little Fluffy Clouds or the Chemical Brothers
Setting Sun, which defined previous eras of dance music? If not, EDM will be
more of a blip than a boom.
Greg Kot is the music critic at the Chicago Tribune. His work can be found
here.