Electronic Dance Music Really Could Be the New Rock?

 Anyone who follows pop music knows, those two years have seen Skrillex, Deadmau5, and peers like Avicii, Swedish House Mafia, and more rise to celebrity status on a tidal wave of brutally physical, subtlety-free dance music that's come to be called EDM (electronic dance music) by the press and fans alike. The industrial incessantly pounding sounds of EDM have also been popularized on Top 40 radio by superstar producers like David Guetta, RedOne, Dr. Luke, and Calvin Harris, but the music's real home, according to its youthful fanbase, is in warehouse raves, DJ sets at not-particularly-upscale clubs, and increasingly at live festivals, where both attendance and excitement has been upending the previous two decades' conventional wisdom about the preference of American youth for rock, hip-hop, or country.

EDM could be thumbnailed as being to hip-hop what rock was to jazz: not a total overthrow, but a paring down of ideas that had been present from the beginning.

Like anything new or perceived to be new in popular music, the rhetoric around EDM has quickly gotten overheated. The New York Times recently quoted a concert promoter as saying, "If you're 15 to 25 years old now, this is your rock 'n' roll," and breathless profiles in even the nostalgia-peddling Rolling Stone have encouraged that identification. Meanwhile, the chorus of voices declaring that EDM is the worst musical movement in history, the ultimate proof of the decadent know-nothingness of American youth, and the end of culture itself, has only grown—especially online. A lot of that, of course, is the usual grumbling of 30-and-older-somethings that music has changed since they were 15 to 25. But even better-informed arguments that it's all been done before, and that the new crop of EDM superstars don't measure up to the past glories of electronic rave, sound familiar. The cultural arguments over the meaning of EDM, in fact, mirror those of previous generations in pop music, from jazz to rock and roll to hip-hopsuggesting that perhaps we really have entered a new era.

Music journalists are only now beginning to understand  how EDM seemingly sneaked up on them unawares. The narrative of new music has so often been one of building from a despised underground after years of struggle, rip-off, and hustle to mass popularity. But EDM came in by no back door but right through the front gate, with Lady Gaga's "Just Dance" in late 2008. The sound didn't take long to spread: the takeover was complete by the time Ke$ha's unutterably dumb and technologically astute "TiK ToK" began 2010 at the top of the charts. Gaga and Ke$ha, of course, are pop stars, and "TiK ToK" was co-written with Max Martin, who engineered Britney Spears's career 15 years ago: It applies the sound structural principles of popcraft to the aggressive forward momentum of EDM, and features a pure-pop bridge where Skrillex fans might expect a drop. But only year later, Britney's "Hold It Against Me" (also with Martin and Dr. Luke) had a gloriously scuzzy drop in place of a bridge, and ever since, the "dubstep bridge" has become practically synonymous with pop radio; if "TiK ToK" was written today, it would almost certainly have one.by jonathan bogart