EDM/House Music - Why the underground should drop the grudge

It’s Sunday night, and the Tomorrowland festival is in its final stages in the De Schorre National Park in Belgium. Berlin-based dubstep and techno producer Paul Rose, aka Scuba, obviously feels like stirring the pot a little. He retweets a photo from Nicky Romero, taken from behind the decks as David Guetta plays to a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands in in the final few hours of the festival, the Frenchman holding up a recording device up as a sea of punters raise their hands in the air.

Scuba’s posts are a little less effusive, though. “Could there be a more undeserving person on stage who records what he sees on a camcorder? If you’re on stage you’re performing, you’re not a tourist….perform, don’t take photos or video of the audience.”
Next, Scuba’s attention turns towards another of what he terms an “easy target”, Calvin Harris, the very same person the Wall Street Journal took to task in its infamous attack on ‘EDM’ culture for producing “cliché-riddled, white-bread house that don’t represent the best of the genre”. Scuba promises to share an “amazing story” about Harris for 100 retweets; within no time, he’s racked up over 150, he’s trending in the UK, and the revelation is dropped.

Scuba’s tweets are about as irreverent as they come, but they highlight one of dance music’s interesting dichotomies: the ‘Us vs Them’ tension between the ‘underground’ and the ‘overground’ (or what’s nowadays pretty much slapped with the term ‘EDM’). The argument is nearly as old as dance music itself: the ‘authentic’ underground steeling itself against the mass-market players responsible for polluting their subculture. It’s a contradiction that’s defined dance culture since its first peak of popularity in the late ‘90s.
Dance music embodies both the most creatively uncompromising and the tackiest elements that any music culture is capable of. On the one side, you’ve got the heads-down ‘underground’, driven by the supposed purity of its artistic integrity, producing music that’s impenetrable to anyone not already deeply entrenched in the culture. On the other side, you’ve got DJs popping champagne bottles and flying in private jets, surrounded by girls, glitz and glamour. They play a watered-down derivative, made by producers-for-hire and slapped with the name of the bankable DJ for mass consumption. Or so the story goes.
That narrative was given yet another whirl recently when Deadmau5 published his notorious ‘We all hit play’ blog post, later echoing similar sentiments when he graced the cover of Rolling Stone (who’ve all of a sudden discovered a newfound love of dance music, after pointedly ignoring it for decades). The comments actually ignited a fairly interesting debate, with everyone from A-Trak to Bassnectar weighing in with measured commentary.
What was more interesting, though, was some of the vitriol it inspired from the underground house and techno scenes. London stalwart Mr C had only recently lambasted DJs as “fakes & charlatans” for standing “with their arms raised in the air”, so it’s hardly surprising he was less than pleased. “FUCK YOU IN EVERY ORIFICE,” was the conclusion of his message to Deadmau5.
A Guy Called Gerald’s most recent Australian tour was in late 2011, though his history in dance culture stretches back as far as the ‘80s, and his response was equally as vitriolic. “You come into our system that we have nurtured for the last 25 years, trick hardworking people into giving you their money, con honest promoters, take large sums of money out of the system and then spit back into our faces that YOU are tricking everyone,” he wrote on his blog. “I agree there are loads of people like you who do fake it. It is easy with the software you are using. Don’t worry we are going to find ways of stopping you. You greedy rat head fuck.”

“Everyone is screaming for their little slice of attention”

Is the increasing commercialisation of dance music around the world actually posing a threat to the subculture? Looking beyond DJ Sneak’s ongoing war of attrition against the Swedish House Mafia, how much truth is there to these assertions?
To get some perspective on it all, inthemix sought out some of dance music’s most articulate players to weigh in on this feature. Last week we spoke to US mainstay and Ovum Records head Josh Wink, who was curating a stage at Tomorrowland. Wink has maintained a solid presence since rising from the American rave scene of the early ‘90s, with his own characteristic blend of house and techno that’s never gone out of style. He says he’s witnessed a shift in what motivates producers and DJs to get involved in the first place.
“I got into this music because it happened upon me, it was just something that I wanted to do, I didn’t know how to do anything else,” he told us. “The fame and the success was just a by-product mistake of doing something that I wanted to do.
“So many people now get involved because they solely want their face on a magazine, the champagne, the limousines, the models, the blowjobs in the booth,” he laughs. “It’s a different thing when you look at how people get into it these days, how they see it and what they want to emulate.”
Has social networking – the platform for breaking down the barriers between artists and fans – actually been responsible for transforming the way the music itself is produced? UK producer Matt Thomas, aka King Unique, told inthemix he’s witnessed dramatic changes in the past few years alone in the value attached to artistic output.
“It’s reflective of the whole Facebook culture, that steady stream of activity running past your eyes all the time,” Thomas told ITM. “If you have a YouTube link, there’s no need to own 90-percent of the music you’re hearing. There used to be a paradigm where you could make a fantastic tune, and rest on the laurels of that for a while. These days though, records have their day really quickly. There’s a living to be made in the studio, but you had better be prolific.”
It’s a trend that also highlighted by Australia’s own James Cayzer, better known as Jaytech, who just last week released his new Multiverse album on Anjunabeats. In some instances, he argues, social media actually affects the product. “It’s impacted music, via the fact that it’s encouraging the music industry, the producers and the DJs, to head in a musical direction that’s more viral and sharable,” he said. “Also because the scene has so much more attention now than it used to, it becomes about ‘attention grabbing’. There’s more techniques and tactics in place to try and win as much attention as possible… everyone is screaming out to get their little slice of attention from the overall populous.
“It’s quite obvious when people are making their music more about the marketing,” he adds. “The YouTube views, the Facebook fans, the hits on their websites and the results, rather than starting from the groundwork of the musical experience itself.”
Taken in this broader context of fame, fortune and Facebook, John Askew’s acerbic interview with inthemix last year starts to make a little more sense. “I have cut away all unnecessary and hugely time consuming online self masturbation that seems to have become so essential for those who care about ‘working their way up the ladder’,” he told us. “The attraction of making more money and getting a higher position in the DJ Mag Top 100 is a seductive prospect for a lot of impressionable young DJ/producers and I entirely sympathise with those who get sucked into it, but I’m not impressionable.”

“No one would think Rihanna is suddenly an electronic act”

There’s also the point of view that all the discussion centred around the ‘EDM explosion’ is actually a misnomer and misconception – the ‘underground’ and the ‘overground’ are in fact completely different things, with no tangible link. The latter is more a fleeting evolution of the standard pop market than anything else.
Paul van Dyk was another of the heavyweights hosting his own arena at the recent Tomorrowland festival. Though there’s many who’d lump him into the ‘EDM’ category, he’s always declared his own iron-fisted allegiance to ‘authentic’ underground music. In the current recent issue of the UK’s DJ Mag, he’s brought attention to what he labels as a fundamental disconnect in the discussion of the pop-dance phenomenon.
“Let’s put it this way. What I define as electronic music, it’s not any more popular now than it was two years ago. The stuff that is extremely popular in America is that danceable stuff that Rihanna produces; but I don’t think anybody would really think that Rihanna is suddenly an electronic act. It’s just basically the sound of the pop world right now,” he told DJ Mag.
“The fact that names like these are suddenly becoming representatives for American house music is a clear joke,” he went on. “Right now it seems to be acting like the normal touring pop market in many ways, and it’s not about a ‘scene’ as such. it still exists, and it’s still as big as it has been, but what people are referring to as the big ‘explosion’ of electronic dance music hasn’t much to do with that…I don’t really care much about Rihanna.” Or Calvin Harris, you’d assume; the regular tour DJ and We Found Love collaborator for the pop starlet.
It’s a topic that clearly gets PvD’s blood boiling, and near identical sentiments are expressed by Cayzar. However, he plays down any assertions that Guetta and co. are responsible for watering down dance culture on a grand scale.
“I have faith in the punter’s intelligence to discern between those two areas of music. I do feel the ‘EDM’ thing, the more pop-orientated house scene, and the more classic-style underground dance scene, are two very different things. Obviously it’s on a much bigger scale than anything that’s come before, but it also is a different classification of music. it’s a more commercially orientated style of music, and a more commercially orientated style of scene.”
Cayzer has a positive outlook on the possibility of the two zones to co-exist. “I don’t think there’s any reason underground dance music can’t thrive alongside the EDM scene…I never felt like it’s anything but a good thing, because it’s good to move things forward musically, and it’s good to move onto something else. If you don’t like where we’re at musically, you really only have to deal with it another five or so years, and the whole thing will disintegrate and put itself back together again, in another completely different form.”
Similarly to King Unique’s observations on the culture shock amongst his producer colleagues when looking at some of dance music’s big earners, Cayzer suggests those who’ve made their living in underground dance are somewhat resentful of the pop-dance success stories.
“You do have a lot of DJ/producers who are relatively new to the whole thing; even though their approach is quite similar to what people have done in the past, they’re being rewarded a thousand-fold more. I think that’s where a lot of the resentment comes from, but I think at the end of the day, everyone is just going out and making the music the way they want to.”
An event like Tomorrowland is the perfect example of where it becomes harder to lump the ‘underground’ and ‘overground’ into disparate camps. Guetta’s Sunday night performance felt much closer to a mass-scale rave than a pop concert; and meanwhile, on the same festival site, Chris Liebing and Dave Clarke led the Castle Stage, Richie Hawtin was manning his own dark and sweaty ENTER tent, and Steve Bug was getting ready to hand it over to Josh Wink at his Ovum Recordings arena.
While Scuba might enjoy hurling grenades on Twitter, there’s a well-placed sense of irony in his own work that’s seen him explicitly exploring these tensions himself. The opening of his 2012 album Personality sets itself up as an obtuse exercise in dubstep purism, with a grumpy opening monologue decrying the lack of substance in modern music; before subverting these expectations with his most melodic and accessible work to date. Ne1butu, Scuba’s old-school rave tribute, comes complete with piano riffs and high-pitched MC samples. The summery vibes and dizzying synth stabs of July, in turn, are more euphoric than anything Armada Music’s 30-strong posse of record labels could hope to manage.

“I look at it as a positive now”

Josh Wink has often enjoyed more of a natural affinity with Europe over the past decade than his home country. He’s not overflowing with affirmations that the pop-dance revolution will result in a considerable “trickle down” effect for underground dance in the USA. However, he remains positive about the potential for listeners to be guided in the right direction.
“Fads and trends run their course,” he says. “But if someone gets interested in electronic music through hearing a Swedish House Mafia track, and next thing you know they dig deeper, go to Discogs and see that Steve Angello had a release on Subliminal Records; then they check out Erick Morillo, who had a remix on one of his albums from Josh Wink. Next thing you know, someone getting into music for its commercial dance appeal will find somebody else like me, Jeff Mills, Joey Beltram. You never know. So I look at it as a positive now.”
Equally, there’s artists who successfully straddle the divide. “Tiga went from being an underground name, to a more pop-orientated vocal artist, though he’s kept his underground credibility,” he says. “Luciano is someone who has an underground record label, and puts out underground music, but so many people know about him now. He becomes more of a commercial name, though the music that he releases and plays is still really cool and raw.”
And for all the artists like Sneak who view the pop-dance brigade as a genuine musical menace, there’s others who view it in a more positive fashion. Australia’s Rick Bull, aka Deepchild, departed Sydney for the techno capital of Berlin in 2009, and has become one of the country’s most successful exports on that end of the spectrum. Talking to inthemix for this feature, he admits he’s impartial to a bit of commercial hip hop and RnB, something that’s worked its way into his music via the distorted vocals that make a reappearance on his upcoming Neukölln Burning album.
“I don’t think exposure to a more diverse range of music, in any realm, is ever a bad thing,” Bull told inthemix. “I’ve benefitted so greatly from listening to a lot of commercial hip hop and RnB. I don’t think that’s damaged my own music, or narrowed my appreciation of different forms; I’d say it’s definitely widened it. A particular style of music might not be my thing, but I don’t think it’s helpful to judge other people because it is their thing. I think the renewed interest in pop-dance has been a great thing. It’s certainly no threat to me.”
Placing ‘authentic’ dance and ‘EDM’ in opposing camps might be missing the point, Bull adds. “I’ve never found the definitions to be useful ones, let alone reflective of the reality. When you have a club like Fabric releasing amazing mix compilations featuring so-called ‘underground’ music…and it’s a really popular club. How do you define it? It’s just a bit of a red herring. It’s kind of like the whole ‘vinyl vs CDs’ debate, all of a sudden the quality of the music becomes a secondary issue. Let’s just talk about the music we’re playing and listening to.”

Credit : In The Mix

DENNIS FERRER SOUNDS OFF ON THE STATE OF THE DJ CULTURE

Even as Dance music and DJs are enjoying their brightest moment in the spotlite in almost two decades, it is struggling with an internal turmoil that can bring it all to an end.
The topic of course boils down to authenticity. There are two schools of thought more or less. The old school which believes in tradition and the continued use of real turntables and preferably vinyl whenever possible. This school dislikes the ease with which anyone with a passing fancy can call themselves a DJ and abhors the sync button.

The other is the new school. The new jacks who are able to pick and chose from equipment their disco forefathers could have only dreamed of. With access to more music at their fingertips than the previous generation could expect to see in a year, and which they would have to walk uphill both ways just to get a glimpse of.

It is a hot topic indeed, an ongoing conversation with no sign of dissipating anytime soon. It's talked about everywhere from blogs to meat-space publications available on newsstands. You can even take a ringside seat and watch as DJ Sneak and Deadmau5 fight it out online via Twitter. Unless you’re talking about Deadmau5, who sometimes seems to be more enemy of the state then the actual participant he is, it’s rare to hear anything more than a blurb from actual big name DJs themselves. Thank God for the Internets, cuz Dennis Ferrer is in yer base killin' button pushing new jacks this AM.

Dennis Ferrer must be feeling some sort of way. Perhaps someone pushed his button -and you can bet it isn’t a sync button- because at the crack of dawn this AM, he posted a lengthy 2-part post on his Facebook page about this very issue. In it, he shares his feelings on the use (or abuse) of DJ controllers and sync buttons, on the lack of skill and real deep know how coming from this new school, and it makes for a very good read (as do the comments that invariably followed). With Dennis Ferrer's permission, we have posted both parts in their entirety here, for your reading pleasure - or displeasure.

Agree with him or not, keep in mind Ferrer has been doing this a long time. So, his opinion comes with a lot of weight. Listen not only with your ears but with your heart.

Please let us know what you're thoughts are in the comments below. What is your stance in the battle between old school and new school DJs?
From the pen (keyboard) of Dennis Ferrer, we bring you:

Robots and Controllers:

So I've been in the studio tinkering and a thought came racing across. I had someone ask my opinions on controllers and their blatant visible use by dj's only selecting and auto sync'ing the tracks while the paying customer is non-the-wiser. Push-button dj'ing or "Controller-ism" I suppose is the term for it now. Every time I see this happen when I arrive at an establishment I cringe. Why? Well here it goes....

You see there's a funny thing about dj'ing. Anyone can do it...it's true. The problem is not everyone can do it well. There is a certain skill set that you must learn, hone and retain in order to at the bare minimum be passable. It's not easy. Beat matching isn't the only requirement. Proper tune selection, crowd control, emotional timing, situational awareness, some sort of technological know how and pride in your craft are some of the many skills you need to acquire in order to do well. AND THIS is STILL no guarantee that you will do well in this business. There are still many a bedroom dj out here who can run circles around the best dj's in the biz.

SO when I see someone up on stage with just a pad controller and a laptop I sorta see this as taking the piss on every aspiring dj out there. Look. We get paid to play records...this is true...it's just not that serious..BUT to those who put in hard work..who take pride in their craft..this is just BULLSHIT. You're being lazy and you're crapping on everything that legitimizes our business. This reeks of being afraid of risks....such as train-wrecking because it just might wind up on youtube etc. AND this is coming from someone who came up as a producer and HAD to learn how to dj so I've really got no business saying this. LMAO!

Technology nowadays is mind-blowing...but so is 5 grams of blow.....It doesn't mean you should do it..right?!

So, folks, i find myself in a conundrum here. I don't usually make waves and I'd like to say that I protect my own...but in my mind right is right and wrong is wrong. God gave me a voice for a reason.

We are entertainers that are hired for having a particular skill-set. I take great pride in this. I have never cheated anyone out of their money...give me the chance and i'll make my own. If all we are reduced to is button pushers than what comes next? The return of the jukebox with an automated dj who throws his hands in the air? Spelling the end of the very thing you guys basically dreamed and begged to get into?

The whole world is watching you.....
and you're slinging excrement where you eat.
Have some gatdamn pride....

that's my story...f**k it I said it.

Robots and Controllers Part deux:

I suppose a little better clarification is needed for those who immediately have jumped on the defense.

Laptop dj'ing is ok in my book as long as you use controller cd's OR you have your time code on a stick and your using CDJ-2000's to play the timecode in each deck. There is still tactile control there. THIS is using technology to its advantage. I condone technology in this way.

I do NOT however condone it in order to exploit a loophole in the system and business model.

If all you do is use a pad controller to trigger tracks while everything is synced perfectly and only trigger loop points on and off.....Ie: using only an NI X1 to dj...then that's taking the piss.

IF you have 120 loops half of them your own records and the other half of them totally unrecognizable. Manipulate them live..add fx..play some synths via triggering the pads THEN that is called a LIVE show....Props to you!

There is some honor in what we do....
it's not just about.."..as long as I rock who cares?"
that statement alone makes mockery of the craft.

Credit : 1200 Dreams

Bill Brewster Weighs In On The State of The Nightlife Culture

The latest mania for US electronic dance music takes its cue from stadium rock rather than the spontaneity of club culture.

Singer Rihanna performs with Calvin Harris at the 2012 Coachella Valley music and arts festival.

Back in the mid-90s, an act from the record label I ran at the time was selected to appear on Top of the Pops. But when we went to meet the American duo at Heathrow, neither of them got off the plane: they had decided to stay at home. Eventually, we hired two actors to play the role of DJ and keyboard player. They looked the part and no one seemed to notice. I was reminded of this episode yesterday when reading that DJ Calvin Harris has threatened legal action against the BBC for quoting him in a Radio 1 Newsbeat programme in which he appears to endorse prerecorded DJ sets.

Like wrestling in the 1970s, there's always been an element of knowing subterfuge in dance music. Since much of the alchemy of the 12-inch mix is often down to one person and a bunch of machines, it does not always translate well to live performance. The real magic is when a skilled DJ and a box of records – or laptop or memory stick, as it increasingly is today – take those solitary studio moments and turn them into something communal and occasionally transcendental, with the assistance of a packed dancefloor.

But where there's brass there's muck and the latest mania for EDM (an acronym for electronic dance music) in the US has brought with it a whole new set of rules. EDM has effectively bypassed the club culture on which house and techno were founded and gone straight for the stadiums and festival jugular. Judging by the many clips on YouTube, its stars have taken their cues from rock stars rather than the clubbers who helped to create dance culture around the skill of DJs such as Frankie Knuckles. This new breed of star DJ is not content to be hidden away in a booth with a tiny slit, like Junior Vasquez was at New York's seminal Sound Factory. Instead they mosh and crowd surf (DJ Steve Aoki was hospitalised after an incident involving a trampoline last week: he's clearly no Nils Lofgren) from their elevated stage, while the crowd look on, shuffling and whooping. Worse still, some of them are alleged to perform to the kind of pre-mixed sets that have caused the Calvin Harris controversy.

Prerecording sets is a curious phenomenon, because it's the live interaction between DJ and dancefloor where the real fun occurs. Without the ability to change the mood, change the tempo, change the style, you're nothing more than a jukebox that needs a toilet break every so often. It's what makes DJing more elastic and versatile than, say, a rock band, whose members are tied to their audience by the songs they know and have rehearsed. Good DJs have the world of recorded music at their disposal. Half the pleasure of playing is to seamlessly go from an Underground Resistance tune into a Queen B-side before anyone realises what's happening. Prerecording misses the point entirely. Like the trend towards ghostwritten tracks (as documented in the latest issue of Mixmag), it's all part of the same culture that has grown up around, but not truly connected to, the roots of club culture.

Two seasons ago, I spent a night checking out all the big clubs in Ibiza and was struck by how surprisingly dull a lot of it is these days. Tiesto's performance at Privilege looked like 10,000 people waiting for the world's largest bus to arrive. Those supernatural nights where the DJ appears to be communicating personally with each member of the dancefloor were nowhere to be seen. What marks out these events is how little interaction there is between DJ and audience. The audience consumes rather than participates, foregoing any form of empathetic experience in favour of bland ingestion (and usually faithfully documented by the cancerous presence of a thousand camera phones held aloft). A great DJ can coax you into places you didn't know you wanted to go until you get there. It's what marks them out from a ninny with too many tattoos playing a CD.

Credit : The Guardian

EDM : Dance Dance Revolution

The biggest thing in music this year? A supercharged version of something that nearly died in the '90s: the rave. Gideon Lewis-Kraus reports from the Electric Daisy Carnival, a three-ight (and surprisingly polite) bacchanal where international DJs spin for 100,000 wasted hedonists scantily dressed in furry underwear

As Friday fades into Saturday, the night remains young and beaded.

Outside the gates of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, along the dusty perimeter road, party kids mass in the flat glare of the dusk sun. They're here for the Electric Daisy Carnival, hyped as America's largest rave—though it's unlikely anybody here would describe it that way. "It's not actually a rave," says Peter, a cloud programmer in his late twenties from the Pacific Northwest I'd met in the hour-long cab line back at the Strip. "It's a massive. A rave is at a warehouse, and it's noncommercial. EDC is a hundred thousand people at a racetrack." EDC is such a massive massive that it takes us twenty minutes to rush across the interior staging ground of the Speedway, from
The entrance past the six satellite stages to the main stage, kineticFIELD. Though the biggest DJs aren't on until 1 or 2 A.M., some of Peter's favorite acts are on early, and our special wristbands—his VIP, mine media—hadn't gotten us out of the long line to be frisked.

At this rate, they're gonna need more Red Bull.

That hundreds of thousands of kids would fly and drive across the country to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to spend three days in the desert dancing to the beats of some 150 DJs would have seemed rather unlikely even, say, three years ago. Somehow the thing that everybody had predicted circa 1995—that electronic dance music (hereafter: EDM) would take over pop—had been delayed a mere seventeen years. In 2012, a gentleman named Skrillex, whose music sounds like a computerized raccoon fight, took home three Grammys, sweeping the electronic categories, and was the first EDM act to be nominated for Best New Artist. Deadmau5 appeared on the front page of The New York Times in his signature mouse head. Forbes estimated that Tiësto was averaging $83,000 an hour for his DJ sets. No corner deli went unthrobbed by a Calvin Harris beat. Why was this happening now? Was this really the rave scene's triumphant return, another retro craze for a culture increasingly addicted to accelerated nostalgia, or was this something different? There at the Speedway, the scene had grown so inclusive—Greek-letter tank tops and athletic jerseys—that it was hard to tell if it was a scene at all. I put the question to Peter, who was dressed in a symphony of gray: "When you look out at these people, do you see anything like a coherent style or culture?"
"You can tell sometimes by how people are dressed what genre they're into," he says. He gestures at a little flock of scant-vested people who could be parking attendants at a busy nudist colony. "Like, those kids in the Day-Glo neon, they're probably into house. And the kids who are in black or goth are probably into dubstep, and I guess the people who are into trance, like me, are harder to pick out."
According to Peter, we're "living in a house moment now." The biggest DJ here this weekend is Avicii, Peter says. Avicii is Swedish and is 23. He first got big at age 18 when the Swedish House Mafia started picking him up and playing his tracks. The Swedish House Mafia is a group of three DJs who perform separately and together. Their name isn't meant to be ironic. "He was all of a sudden number six in the world last year. Now suddenly everybody's gotta be house. Like, Deadmau5 is huge now, and he's house. Tiësto was a trance DJ forever, and he switched from trance to house. Like, Armin—"
"Armin van Buuren?"
"Yeah, Armin. So Armin used to be the number one DJ in the world for four consecutive years, from 2007 to 2010." DJ magazine publishes the numberings, which are based on reader votes. "And Armin plays trance, but in 2011 he got knocked to number two, after David Guetta, who's a house DJ." David Guetta helped do the thing where the Black Eyed Peas had a feeling.
"Can you explain why trance used to be popular and now it's house?"
"The tastes change quickly because music is free and so widely available, so it's easy to know what's the most popular, and there's this constant drive for novelty. Free music leads to quick evolution, and the music is like a virus." What I think he means is that the music feels somehow less sought out than pervasively insinuated. It's beating in our circuitry.
Here's a thing: I like electronic dance music. For a brief period in what feels like a bygone life, I used to go out to clubs in Berlin, to hear Modeselektor or Ellen Allien or Apparat or Richie Hawtin. We'd get to Berghain at three thirty or four, wait two hours for the tattoo-faced doorman, Sven, to pass judgment, maybe get inside at six, newly flushed by that moment of door acceptance. The old exclusivity, as arbitrary as it could be, I totally get: Artificial scarcity can make anything desirable.
In the early '90s, the rave was an in- the-know scene: All-night parties took place in remote warehouses that, even if a thousand people showed up, billed themselves as underground. Increasingly frequent police raids on clandestine venues, along with the potential for real money, drove raves into licit clubs. Then the RAVE Act was passed, allowing police to treat the clubs like crack dens—that is, thinly costumed drug-abuse bazaars. Rave culture assumed the quaintness of a curious historical trend. Neon orange parachute pants went the way of white bell-bottoms, and the music went back to Europe, where it belonged. American teens discovered emo, wore more eyeliner. A decade passed. Now, somehow, rave culture has come back, and its appeal appears to be more mass than the rave kids of the '90s could have hallucinated—or, for some of them, desired.

Afrojack mans the DJ booth at kineticFIELD, the festival's main stage.

Peter and I round the corner to kinetic-FIELD just as Hardwell is ushered out to the decks. Hardwell is the DJ name of a 23-year-old from the Netherlands—the ranks of the DJs swell with the barely postadolescent Dutch—named Robbert van de Corput, which makes him sound both fatter and fancier than he seems to be. Hardwell has been playing clubs in Holland since he was 14, or so his particular origin myth goes, but it wasn't until 2009 that he broke out "onto the scene" with a bootleg remix of a 2007 remix of Robin S.'s classic '90s dance track "Show Me Love." Breaking out "onto the scene" seems to mean massive instant Internet popularity followed by great Ibiza-Vegas-Istanbul-circuit IRL demand.
He presses play just as we're getting to the thick of the crowd. At the beginning of DJ culture, what made a good DJ was the ability to direct the energy of the crowd in front of you, to react to and manipulate the ebb and flow of its specific enthusiasm. On the scale of one of these massives, though, it's just impossible to get that sense of a specific crowd with its specific mood. We're close enough to the stage that we can just barely make out Hardwell's more extravagant gestural exhortations to continue enjoying his music, though we can't see his facial expressions. Mainly what a DJ seems to do is egg us on to a collective dance victory, which he celebrates by putting his arms up in a great V, usually just after he's pumped his right fist for a bit. A big part of the effect seems to be the display of the decks' hands-free technology. You can put your arms up in a wide, helpless V and the music goes on; this technology seems precisely what is, after all, being celebrated.
The DJ area itself is the size of a long card table, the only thing around on a human scale, and it's at a low stage level, dwarfed by six rectangles of mesh LED screen. The screens stretch the sixty or seventy yards across the stage and reach perhaps another five or six stories up. Nested and inset, the stacked screens give an illusion of depth. The first images that roil with icy precision across the deep screens are giant Hardwell branding devices, not dissimilar in font from the original Nintendo logo. They spin silvery and clean against a black background as Hardwell continues pressing buttons and making V's. The next images are his professional head shots, recognizable from the billboards that line the fifteen miles of highway to and from Vegas.

As Hardwell presses more and possibly different buttons, the sun begins to set at our backs and the crowd fills in behind us. Insofar as a unifying motif presides, it's flesh, graced by fur and emphasized by tattoo. There are a lot of pasties. Pasties in taped crosses, pasties in duct-tape bars. Bikinis sprouting plastic daisies. Body gems in stars and rainbows. Scant lacy gothic corsetry à la '90s Japanese tweens. The particularly tacky look of a Dacron bandeau over a lace underwire bra. One would hope that Instagram filters were doing something for the colors, because the contrasts are hideous: pink and green, orange and purple. But the range of neons pales in comparison with the dazzling range of flesh tones. There are black people with Hispanic people, Hispanic people with Asian people, black and Hispanic people with white people. Tie-dye tank tops, Indian headdresses, and arms beaded with chunky bracelets from wrist to shoulder, bead-mail gauntlets cuffed against a coming Zelda insurrection. A frankly surprising array of your basic polo shirt. Spirit hats: panda heads, tiger heads, shark heads, wolf heads. Neckerchiefs. Beaded neckerchiefs. Beaded Pac-Man neckerchiefs. Gone, apparently, are the days when hippies home-embroidered their Turkish-shepherd kits. There's not a single costume in evidence that hasn't been purchased, recently and disposably. "Fluffies," the knee-high canisters of fake fur, sell for $18.99, some with matching wrist cuffs. UV-pink micro-tutus run $11.95, foxtails $13.99, and all are available at raveready.com. There are lizard-irised color contacts. Cursive text tattoos spidered across lats, written in such fine calligraphy that they're less like actual words than word-shaped impressions, too blurry to communicate anything, like coins with the relief rubbed out. Most of them might as well just say TEXT TATTOO or FOREIGN-TEXT TATTOO. There are emoticon tattoos. A man decked out in mirror shards. Not a single beard except mine. Whole teams of people wearing matching neon so as not to get lost. In, I suspect, the most profound possible sense.

The more enthusiastic fans, or perhaps just those least afraid of panicky trampling, push past us toward the front. Figuratively speaking. They don't actually push. What they do is more like a caress. This is a crowd of more than 100,000 people packed into a desert speedway, enjoying massive amounts of alcohol and what's presumably a limited but potent array of psychoactives, bouncing and pulsing to beats that are being beaten anywhere from 85 to 180 times each minute, and what a person does when he or she wants to move past you in the crowd, to take a cell-phone photo from a different vantage or to meet his or her friends or to get back to the concession stands or the bathroom or to throw up behind a chain-link fence, is pat you gently on the back.

Not only that, but people are constantly ducking out of other people's Instagrams, waiting patiently to avoid interrupting mobile uploads. And that's the least of the near parodic levels of gentleness and etiquette. As the screens behind Hardwell turn to this Star of David warp tunnel leading us into an architecture of DNA beehives, a little futuristic wood nymph—naked but for a few strategic patches of nylon, some illegible French tattooed under her right breast—steps on the fringe of my big toe; she stops dancing, turns to me, and with a sweetness matched only by her clarity and crispness of pronunciation, apologizes. Shortly thereafter she kickstyle-dances my shin a good bark, but I wave off her follow-up "Sorry" as she ramps to feudal-Japanese heights of self-abasement.

All danced out.

Some non-negligible factor in this neighborliness is the aforementioned drugs. I'm not going to say everybody is on drugs. Peter, for example, is not on drugs. But most of the people are on drugs. I say this not strictly based on lollipop vending and/or consumption but on the fact that the world's only groups of five people passing around menthols as though they were initiatory chalices are people on Ecstasy. On the matter of drugs, what Peter has to say is that smart people buy them in advance and take them before they enter, in case they're not up to defeating the joke of an entry frisk. What less smart people do, Peter says, is buy inside, a good way to pay $20 or $30 for an aspirin.
Insomniac, the producers of EDC, have got to have complicated feelings about the drugs. They're well aware that horror stories of drug abuse were part of what killed '90s rave culture, so everything they do here is organized to prevent the kind of teen drug death that, along with allegations of managerial misconduct, helped get this event kicked out of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. There's no mere infirmary tent; there's an entire on-site hospital. Still, Insomniac will get all the terrible press it feared when a young woman on Ecstasy falls twenty stories from her special EDC-rate hotel room the morning after the event ends.
Onstage Hardwell pushes the buttons to play a few bars of a new song, and the crowd raises its lever arms in mass approval. (The raised-arm gestures would unnerve if this crowd seemed to have even the remotest political potential.) This is his remix of a really popular Avicii track. The song is called "Fade into Darkness." Peter explains to me that he and most of the people there use a service called SoundCloud, which lets you listen to tracks, post tracks, and comment on tracks, often with useful links to other tracks. The most popular receive lush attention. Search SoundCloud for "Avicii Fade into Darkness," you get 500-plus hits, everything from Avicii's original to Avicii's remixes to the remixes of other famous DJs, such as Hardwell, to the posted-this-morning remixes of precocious 11-year-olds from Malmö to Maastricht.
The only really crucial thing to note here about the music is that the whole thing is about the bass. People who know a lot about electronic music will disagree with me, but knowing a lot about electronic music is, these days, entirely beside the point. The progression of a house track, and one plausible reason for house's ascendancy, goes like this: There's some twinkly pirouetting melody in the higher registers, then some bass for a while, and then the introduction of a soaring, optimistic vocal track about saving the world or, for the slightly less ambitious, having a feeling re tonight's bestness, then the simultaneous near-crescendo of the twinkles and the all-out vocal redemption, and then, right at the moment of presumed climax, the bass goes away for a few beats, everybody misses the bass so much and can't wait for it to come back, maybe the snare reintroduces itself after a few seconds to remind you to get excited for the prodigal bass's triumphal homecoming, a good DJ takes just longer than expected to bring the bass back, 20,000 or 50,000 hearts stop as one, lever arms hanging anxiously in midair, and then, when the bass kicks back in, the crowd goes out of their motherfucking minds, just like they did the time the bass disappeared and came back four minutes ago, pumping their right arms in genuinely exhilarated unison, survivors all of the briefly yet catastrophically lost bass.
The edc attendees wake up, put on their pasties, and by then it's once again dusk and Peter and I are walking back across from Gate A to the kineticFIELD stage to see Sander van Doorn (number eighteen) play his early set. There's a light wind, and even for people like me, who remain not on Ecstasy, it feels we're being taken care of by the desert. The mountains in front of us glow in sleepy pink, and we can see the helicopters from the Strip queuing to deliver VIPs who've paid $800 for the privilege. Spirits everywhere seem irrepressibly high as we make our way through the windy nightfall to the stage.

Sander is Peter's favorite DJ. "I like him because he's really versatile," he's told me. "He'll move from trance into house into dubstep, totally smoothly." Peter also happens to be an acquaintance of Sander's publicist, Sara. She's agreed to set up an interview for me with Sander as long as I agree to her rules. Her e-mail read: "Please focus your questions on his new single Nothing Inside, EDC and make no mentions of genres." I ask Peter why.

You know what the Electric Daisy Carnival could totally use more of? Exposed flesh and furry leg warmers.

"Because of everything I was telling you yesterday about trance and house." The house of house is ascendant; trance has been sliding out of fashion, and a rising DJ such as Sander isn't keen on being identified with last year's category, even if the sounds themselves remain debatably distinguishable.
"This is trance now. Hear it? Wah wah wah wah. The song is called 'Renegade.' "
The song I'm allowed to ask about, "Nothing Inside," is not bad at all. For an upbeat house track, it's mournful; in an arena where most sentiment is dedicated to such nuanced declarations as We are your friends / You'll never be alone again, it's got some emotional sophistication. It's pretty clearly about drug use—there's a line about keeping up the rush, and stuff about cold blank stares—but it seems even better as a comment about EDC. Any culture that can be so widely shared can't be asking, or offering, too much.
At the artist-relations gate, Peter and I find some officious staffer to take us to the trailer of Armin van Buuren, where I'll be interviewing Sander. Inside, Sander sits on a couch, elbows on his knees. He's a young-looking 33 with short tousled hair, a thin V-neck T-shirt with a graying Marilyn Monroe print, fitted flat-front khakis, and red Adidases with red laces against red skin, sunburnt from a set at one of Vegas's increasingly popular dayclubs. He asks if I mind if he smokes. He shakes a cigarette out of a pack of Marlboro Reds, offers me one; in his other hand is an iced cup of a viscous liquid the sickly jaundice of a vodka Red Bull.
"So, okay," I say, after we introduce ourselves and I tell him that his set was awesome, which isn't a lie. "This was a huge culture in the '90s, and then it seems to have largely gone away, and now it's back, and it's bigger than ever. What happened?"
He explains about the government and the drugs, says that U.S. political culture seems more tolerant now. "But it's also, you know, the role of social media."
The whole event, especially in the context of the ubiquitous DJ rankings, does seem like an Internet phenomenon. The most bananas I've seen a crowd go over a track all night was for Knife Party's "Internet Friends," whose lyrics go: You blocked me on Facebook / And now you're going to die. A lot of these kids are here because it's so easy to know about each day's new tracks as they roll onto SoundCloud, which helps everybody keep abreast of what's most popular right now. You can even see which specific part of which specific track everybody's most excited about. And they can see that kids just like them are uploading their own remixes and getting thousands of listens and comments.

For all we know, she's just high on life.

"The timespan of a track used to be a couple of months, and now it's just a couple of weeks. The technology makes it so much easier. We producers are able to make music more quickly. What's important is that it gets out, that everybody gets to hear the tracks.
"If I make a track today," he continues, "people know it tomorrow. It's really fresh."
"Does that get exhausting?" That must get exhausting.
"It's a different generation out there now. The kids are wiser than we were; there's so much more information. There are 16-year-olds producing tracks I couldn't have made until I was 25. It's just so easy to download the software." I ask what's ahead for the kids who download the software and want to be DJs. "I think they just make music because they like it, but they run the risk of getting into a harsh industry. You have to perform every single weekend, move around the world commando-style. These young kids who want to be DJs, it's a pretty intense job."
He looks over at Sara, and she winces a little. "But don't get me wrong, man. It's the best job in the world. I love what I do. I love all of this."
Later, back on the kineticFIELD stage, Bassnectar's telling the crowd how much he fucking loves his job. The guy standing next to me says, through the accelerating wind, that these are the only days a year he gets off from the grind—he's a computer technician—and he'd fucking kill to have a job like Bassnectar's. From what I can tell, the main differences are that this guy stands at a computer during the day while Bassnectar stands at a computer at night, that this guy stands at a computer in an office while Bassnectar stands at a computer in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and that Bassnectar's skill or, more probably, luck at computers has put him in great in-real-life demand, such that he gets to stand at his computer in a different city each night to be revered for a few hours by people who, in all likelihood, have been less lucky at computers.

We are in a bowl whose perimeter is a series of giant screens. We all stand together politely, our hair whipping back in the wind, worshipping a man whose luck at computers has given him a brief fan-polled tenure at these screens. It could happen to us, just as long as we keep posting comments with links to the remixes we've made with stolen software.

It takes some effort to stand out at the Electric Daisy Carnival. Success!

Because what's important now is not where or how you heard a track first; it's that it's heard repeatedly and by as many people as possible. It's the opposite of hipsterism. Where hipsterism is about being part of the few in the know, the EDC scene is about being a part of the many. Insofar as it's a scene at all, it's one geared toward the universal coalescence that the focus group of the Internet makes possible. This is a youth phenomenon that has submitted to the fact that access to knowledge—the secret location, say, of a warehouse party—no longer sets one particular group off as a special vanguard. They've forsaken the secret-remote-warehouse culture for the understandable reason that it defines itself by whom it leaves out, and from the standpoint of lunchroom sociology, the Speedway feels downright utopian. Distinctions obtain, but frivolously: Whether you look cool at the door has been replaced by which subgenre you've allied yourself with. It's less a scene than an indistinguishable panoply of micro-scenes. But it's hard to tell if anybody worries that when you have so many "friends" that you'll "never be alone again," what constitutes friendship—its texture and specificity, its content—might have been diminished. In a world where the highest compliment you can pay a piece of music is to compare it to a virus, where the Internet seems to function as an all-encompassing and largely inexplicable lottery, it's easy to see how the effortful things become secondary, and why we might just be glad to concede that we're all athrum in these beats together.
Bassnectar cedes the stage to Calvin Harris. Harris is best known for two recent tracks: one called "Bounce," with a peppily distinctive goombah-rallying eight-bit melody, and that terrific Rihanna dance track that played on a loop in every indoor place last winter. Behind him, on the screens, a human braid lacquered in gold spins and multiplies. He's playing remixes of all the hits of all the recent years, starting with Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At?" and then moving into Swedish House Mafia's "Save the World Tonight." On-screen behind him is a spiked boulder rolling toward us with the ever rising wind, and as it gets closer we can see that the boulder's spikes are actually the dark spires of an infinitely dense and dark city, and that densely spired city is rolling toward us faster with the beat, now faster, threatening to smite the crowd with a rolling planet dense and dark with us.
And as that spire-crowded planet nears us, the stage goes dark and the music stops. After a few seconds, a deep bureaucratic voice from nowhere comes over the public address and says that there is too much wind; they have to wait a few minutes before they restart the show. The man next to me sighs that this sure means there won't be any fireworks tonight. And after a few minutes they announce, in a relaxed, matter-of-fact way, that the wind is still too strong, that it's threatening the stage, and that they might ask the crowd to begin slowly walking away from the stage, please. The wind blows from the empty desert and might bring down the towering stage, but nobody panics, nobody pushes, nobody runs, nobody yells. A serene technorationality prevails. The screen wouldn't fail. The desert wind wouldn't blow down the screen. The crowd collects itself in slow, measured, obedient retreat to wait for the wind to end and the screens to start up again. After a few minutes I leave, hitchhiking away with some chemical engineers from the Rand Corporation. Just as we're getting back to the Strip, we hear on Armin van Buuren's EDC Sirius XM channel that the winds are too high, that the night will probably be called off. The next morning I get a text from Peter. He'd stood with the crowd in the wind in front of the blank screens for hours, waiting for the bass to return.

Credit : Gideon Lewis-Kraus For GQ Magazine