Or 'If Steve Aoki jumps into a rubber dinghy in one part of the world, can it be felt on a dancefloor in London'?
Clubbing is cool. Guitars used to be cool, girls used to want to be with boys in the band, but now DJs are cool. Rappers were cool for a while too, but now it’s all about ‘EDM’. If you want to be cool, be a DJ.
At least that’s the idea we’re currently being fed by record companies and the mainstream media, who have taken a culture nurtured over decades, born in the clubs of New York and Chicago, allowed to flourish in the UK via the Balearics, and sloppily repackaged it as EDM (electronic dance music) for their own commercial means. Across the Atlantic they’re throwing more PR campaigns and sponsorship deals at EDM than your average Olympics, creating DJ rockstars out of Guetta (will remix your doorbell and sell it back to you), Aoki (won’t play a gig without a rubber dinghy to crowd-surf in) and Deadmau5 (wears a massive mouse head).
Even here in the UK where we pride ourselves on being musically discerning, dance music (I hasten to say ‘house’, but the lines are often made blurry) and clubbing has become so mainstream that we have X-Factor judge Tulisa chatting to Lorraine Kelly about her latest single being all about “Ibiza baby”, as the once hallowed Balearic island slowly becomes a by-word for tacky trance-pop and cringe-worthy ‘sleb group holidays.
If any further proof was needed of our club culture becoming part of the establishment, EDM poster boy Skrillex is not only doing the music for Disney’s new film Wreck-It Ralph, but also starring in a club scene as a DJ (Disney are no stranger to musical bandwagon jumping however - see 1979’s Mickey Mouse Disco, but we’ll come to that in a second).
We can all sit here and laugh at Middle America and the major labels totally missing the boat culturally again, but there does seem to be a darker side to ‘EDM’ and the globalization of club culture which sets a worrying tone for future generations. In a recent feature on RA, three industry bigwigs discussed the rise of EDM in the US, showing unmistakable contempt for dance music pre-EDM, citing the general perception of it as “trance-y shit from Europe that you hear when you're shopping for girls' clothes” or “shiny shirt dance-y euro.” One of the interviewees, Interscope A&R Dave Rene, described by Billboard as one of EDM’s ‘power trio’ said, “Yeah, there started to really be some personality behind this music, some attitude and not a gay one.“
To anyone with a bit of background knowledge in music culture, sentiments like this smack of the underlying homophobia which drove mainstream America’s attitudes towards disco (which was, up until industry investment, an underground, predominantly black and gay culture) in the late ‘70s, beginning with a whitewashing of the culture in order to maximise saleability, and culminating in a ‘Disco Sucks’ backlash campaign and a mass burning of records at a Chicago baseball stadium.
Not that I’m suggesting we’re due a large scale destruction of Nu Groove 12”s anytime soon, but the attitudes displayed by the three ‘key players’ interviewed mirror that time when the driving force in club culture became controlled by people with no knowledge of its background, even showing disdain for its roots, with interests solely in profitability; one question later and they’re flippantly discussing buying a beach house off the back of EDM’s success. This is bad news by anyone’s book.
It goes further: secretly recorded tapes last week sensationally revealed new superstar DJ Paris Hilton to be astonishingly thick and narrow minded, even by her standards, complaining that gay men are "disgusting" and “probably all have AIDS”. So much for clubbing bringing people together - these attitudes are one huge dent in the ideals of equality and tolerance which form the foundations of the modern club scene.
DJs have been vocal about what they either see as the evolution or destruction of house and club culture (usually depending on how much they profit from it): Sneak had a public Twittch-fight with one of Swedish House Mafia (the one with slicked back hair and sunglasses) over it all, Deadmau5 said he hates DJs while boldly declaring “fuck dance music” (probably while downing a can of beer and crushing it on his head) and they were out in droves to condemn Alf Garnet, sorry, Paris Hilton after she somehow managed to balls up a pre-recorded set at the Sao Paolo music festival.
In my eyes, this is just gossip column stuff – fabricated publicity to bait attention to an issue which shouldn’t merit discussion. Seriously, who cares whether some reality TV star has made a house record or David Guetta played to seventeen billion people last night dressed as Christ on a cross, as long as there’s real talent producing top quality music and a healthy underground club scene? What’s all this got to do with real house anyway? Nothing according to Frankie Knuckles, who summed it up when I spoke to him earlier this year: "House music has not been re-branded as ‘EDM’” he said defiantly “It's just another tag that's being used to kill off house again. I see no connection whatsoever to house music.”
But forget record company bigwigs and their shiny-shirt phobias for a second - what effect, if any, will all of this have on the club scene here in London? How big will the knock-on effect of a huge commercial drive and a surge in mainstream popularity be? Will it become harder to put on a good party as clubs become sterile, shiny (sorry, shiny is bad, I forgot) Disneyland versions of their former selves, designed merely as places for DJs to pump their fists while the masses unload their cash?
Giles Smith, whose secretsundaze parties have set the bar for decent clubbing in London for over a decade, doesn’t think so. “I think it's so far removed from what underground clubbing is about, and musically so different, I don't see it affecting the credible scene” he says. “There has always been this exploitation, or attempted exploitation, of cool things when the corporate world thinks they can make money out of something."
In fact if history teaches us anything, the sickening over exposure and inevitable backlash could prove to be a positive thing, motivating those with a real passion for clubbing and electronic music to dig deeper and look for new ways to enjoy their scene. In a similar way, the years following the disco backlash forced the creation of a more underground club scene, allowing for the commercially unsuccessful but creatively rich post-disco period and eventually house itself.
Someone who knows the ins and outs of London's clubland is veteran DJ Terry Farley, co-founder of the influential Junior Boy's Own and Faith record labels / fanzines, who goes some way in agreeing:
“Kids who would sadly have ignored house because it was considered gay, black or their uncle’s music, will eventually get bored with cheesy breakdowns and DJ's wearing masks, and those that stay in the trenches will start checking where it all started. While I don’t expect too many of them to be doing back flips or shaking baby powder on the floor at Shelter on a Sunday afternoon, enough will stay the course and get schooled. That’s what has always happened”
So relax, ‘EDM’ may be a vile moneymaking machine which attempts to exploit four decades of musical and social progression and turn it into some kind of aural McDonalds, and it may be all over your tele and your radio for a while, but it’s going to go away, and it'll take a lot more than a bloke in a rubber dinghy to kill off house music.
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