Electronic Dance Music has seen an overwhelming craze in the past few years amongst youngsters. It has been growing bigger and bigger since it kickstarted between 2007 and 2008. It can be said that EDM is the trendiest signifier of dance music at present and an entire generation’s pop music. There have been live festivals in innumerable numbers all over the world, making today’s youth go bonkers over artistes like Skrillex, Avicii, Swedish House Mafia, David Guetta, Calvin Harris, Major Lazer, Afrojack and Zedd. Tomorrowland in Belgium and Electronic Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas are two of the most celebrated dance music festivals in the world. It is just not a genre. It is a lifestyle!
A series of stomping, whomping, fritzing and tempo shifted compositions are categorized within the acceptance of a certain populist culture. The youth today is entranced with illusion and fantasy. EDM, being the perfect vent out for it. It takes one to a little world of daze and fantasy with the ambience that it creates. But the youth on a wider canvas,never speaks with one voice. In a group, there’d always be some who loathe EDM, echoing that it is just noise!
Precisely why, when Dylan followed up classic hits as “Like a Rolling stone” and “Maggie’s Farm” with an electronica set composed of atonal drones and hyperactive drumbeats in the Newport Rock festival,1965, it was difficult for a large section of people to accept him like that. When EDM and say, the stratocaster guitar guy from the blues rock band, are associated, foreheads frown. There has always been a tiff between how one kind of music is better than the other. Nevertheless, when Dylan was asked about his transformation, it is funny that he had nothing to say about the beats he programs, and that, he just programs them.
The cultural arguments, in fact, thumbnail EDM to hip hop, just as hip hop was to rock or what rock was to jazz! We need to accept that it is never a complete overthrow. Rather it indefinitely suggests that perhaps we really have entered a new era. Nevertheless, this is what continues to make EDM such a vivid flashpoint : the friction. The youth is always full of energy, passion and curiosity and that is integral to the core of an individual’s soul. None can deny that sometimes it feels great to forget all our problems, surround ourselves in an array of laser beams, or maybe stream a latest EDM video on air when at home, dance and simply let loose!
EDM is that relief!
