Reddit reviews The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America

Ranted about this in the discord but some thoughts.

The history lesson is simple but decent. Matos also wrote "The Underground is Massive" which is a great historical review of electronic dance music in America. Highly recommend this one

However I think there are a few things off about his analysis on the current state of things. "Big room house" might have fallen off the map and the Billboard charts compared to 2012 but American-style dubstep (which also was popularized in the post-2011 era, noted by Matos as he mentions Skrillex) is just as big as ever in terms of popularity. It's weird for him to cherry pick CRSSD as a festival that caters to Yaeji/Amelie Lens (conveniently forgetting to mention Kaskade was on that lineup), and completely ignoring Lost Lands and its 36,000+ attendance. Electric Forest anyone? Bass Canyon?

Dubstep (and other slower or downtempo styles like trap/future bass/midtempo bass/etc. - the "bass music" family if you will) is huge in terms of representation on festival lineups. If Matos wants to talk about EDM as being separate from traditional rave circles because of its drop-heavy hype culture, then he should point out that bass music DJs/artists/festivals carry on that banner into 2019 and likely beyond. And why link an article about ResidentAdvisor as having anything to do with the pop EDM scene? RA has been writing shit like that for a decade+ now. And namedropping Discwoman - who are awesome, but also hardly relevant to the big EDM scene in general. 99% of people on the Illenium rail are not going to know that Frankie had a Twitter spat with Nina Kraviz about racism and white privilege. Anyways I think he's cherry picking a bit about what's going on nowadays, to make it seem like "smaller festivals" are the modern landscape - but often they are only "the move" after people have been pushed through the massives initially.

> Going big, in fact, is increasingly frowned upon in dance music.

Could have fooled me. Business techno memes are rampant in 2019 lol

Books:

Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America

Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk

Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House

All Crews: Journeys Through Jungle / Drum and Bass Culture

Keyboard Presents the Evolution of Electronic Dance Music

Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany

Last Night a DJ Saved my Life

Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and The Culture of the Night

https://www.amazon.com/Underground-Massive-Electronic-Conquered-America/dp/0062271792/ref=nodl_

I haven’t finished it yet but I’m loving it so far. There’s so many old school track names that he drops and are a blast to listen to. Shit got real crazy in the 90s

You should also check out Michaelangelo Matos’ [The Underground is Massive: How EDM Conquered America](The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062271792/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_bzYUAbRPDH9GP), which has a very thorough discussion of rave & DJ culture in the 00s. It includes lots of quotes from the early-online regional mail lists so you get an idea of what the ground floor dialogues about the scene were like during that period.

You do know house music was created by African-American people in Chicago and Detroit who made music out of disco and soul records that white Christian America deemed as evil and bad, right? House music was originally played in clubs that mostly catered to the African-American and LGBT communities in the Chicago underground because it wasn't considered radio-friendly at the time.

Based on this thread you need to go watch some documentaries and do some research, because you just sound incredibly ignorant with your "my genre is the holy grail of genres and is immune to criticism" shtick. Could the criticism have been more civil? Yes, but it doesn't mean that you should ignore it without consideration.

And while not all big room ever was made for strictly commercial reasons, you can't discount it as a factor for many of the producers who got into the genre later. Sure, the original artists who created big room house weren't necessarily aiming to be millionaires when they made the first tracks, but after so many tunes from Spinnin', Musical Freedom, and Revealed sound the same, you can't help but wonder if some of those songs were simply made because the producer knew they'd be successful if they followed the pack. I think this infamous clip is enough to prove that I'm not entirely full of shit. Sure, not all tracks sound like this, but a lot of them sound way to similar to seem like original art and not cash grabs.