The Underground Is Massive (M. Matos)
This book was written to chronicle what is known today as EDM, or Electronica Dance Music, which started in America, influenced Europe, and is the now the bedrock of most of today’s Pop music. The range of years covered is from 1983-2015. We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to understand the history of EDM and how it shapes current musical trends.
“House music is Disco’s revenge” (Frankie Knuckles). What, essentially, is an outgrowth of Disco, has now become America’s mainstay of current music production. “Now that it dominates our concert business- which essentially is the music business now- we still consume it differently than other countries…This is a story about a culture forming, taking over every part of the world except its creators’ own- only to rear up and take center stage after mutating into something its inventors barely recognized…America knows now what many of us have for decades: Electronic dance music is not a fad but a staple. Country stars use detonating dubstep bass. Pop and R&B and hip-hop radio are awash in synths that sound like they could have been on a Ministry of Sound compilation anytime in the late nineties or early 2000s- and sometimes feature music that was. There are DJ-themed reality competition shows.”
It wasn’t always this way, however. A member of one of EDM’s pioneer groups, Kraftwerk, once said, “America is very shy when it comes to electronics. It’s still a highly schizophrenic situation. People have all the latest state-of-the-art technology, and yet they put wood panels on the front to make them feel comfortable. Or they develop new plastics and try to imitate the appearance of wood. They use modern technology to try to re-create the Middle Ages. This is stupid.” (1982)
In Chicago (1983) Juan Atkins had a great idea: “take what Kraftwerk, the German synth-pop group, was doing, but make it funky.” As a DJ, he added a Roland TR-909 drum machine “underneath the records he was spinning, to keep the groove going.” As a DJ, he would make edits, like Frankie Knuckles (another Chicago DJ), using “edits of the B-52’s ‘Mesopotamia’ and Prince’s ‘Controversy’ and ‘Private Joy.’ The tempo of these ‘re-mixes’ was as important to the style as anything else. “Knuckles beats-per-minute (BPM) would peak around 128- fast for disco, but not too fast.”
There came to be a division in the Chicago neighborhoods, those who liked ‘house,’ and those liked ‘trax.’ “House was soulful and had lyrics; trax…meant ‘kick drum, snare, and 808s,’ and little else.” Bass and drums were important to these mixes, synthetically created. Groups like Fantasy and others used a Roland TB-303 “the single-octave bass synth…began turning the knobs to undulate the pitch. It sounded crazy- pure machine music with an obviously human touch.”
Other cities in the United States were experimenting with expanded DJ work, and began to be known for their own unique style of compiling dance mixes. “‘Just like New York rap is about rap and Washington go-go is about go-go,’ Spin’s Barry Walters wrote in 1986, ‘Chicago’s house is about house.’”
“Even though their records were blowing up overseas, most of the Chicago producers were still living hand to mouth. Some U.S. artists began frequenting Europe. “But May’s career, like Atkins’s and Saunderson’s, had picked up so much momentum overseas that he began missing weeks at the Music Institute.”
San Francisco launched a gathering named ‘UFO’s Are Real,’ in which “New Yorker Moby, who’d hit the British top ten the previous October with his song ‘Go,’” was a participant.
“The rise of the U.S. rave scene and the rise of the Internet, besides being concurrent, mirrored each other in many ways. Both mixed rhetorical utopianism with insider snobbery. Both were future-forward ‘free spaces’ with special appeal to geeks and wonks. (It’s hardly a coincidence that dance music’s instruments of choice are referred to by their model numbers: 303, 606, 808, 909.) Both took root in the eighties and emerged in fits and starts through the mid-nineties, at which point both became part of the social fabric.”
In San Francisco, “The Bay Area was undergoing its biggest psychedelic explosion since the sixties; street availability of LSD, DMT, mushrooms, ever more intensive strains of marijuana, and of course ecstasy, pure MDMA.” The use of drugs at Rave gatherings became so much a part of the experience, that it was a statistical anomaly for a participant not to be high.
Even though these events would eventually become ‘concerts,’ they didn’t start out that way. They were known as ‘parties,’ in which the artist/DJ would be off to the side creating the musical experience for the dance-crowd. In New York (1992) “Frankie Bone’s first renegade party in his hometown was deliberately small-scale. ‘We were doing fifty people in a gutted-out apartment on Coney Island Avenue,’ says Adam X. But word spread rapidly. ‘It happened so quick. By ’91 we were doing generator parties in the junkyards down by Foster Avenue, by the freight tracks, with four hundred people showing up. By winter of ’92, Staten Island; fifteen hundred. By [fall] ’92, we’re doing five thousand people on Maspeth Avenue. That’s how fast it grew.’ In late 1991, Bones formalized his parties’ structure, dubbing them Storm Raves.”
“By the mid-nineties New York house music was a whole lot smoother. Much of that was due to its state-of-the-art studios, which offered a more professional sheen than what came out of Chicago.”
Even though the music was gaining some class, the parties were still wild. “Ravers made for easy criminal pickings. In October 1992, a warehouse party in Newark ended with two people beaten and three stabbed. In Philadelphia that summer, a party on North Fifth Street culminated with a mugger shooting a twenty-seven-year-old woman.”
Eventually, business entrepreneurs began to see a potential market. In Los Angeles (1992) “The city teemed with competitive, over-the-top promoters. ‘One of the marketing terms they would always use was ‘virgin location’’…A rave might be at a water-slide park (Grape Ape- August 10, 1991); a casino on Catalina Island (Gilligan’s Island- August 10, 1991); a Hollywood storage unit with a basement full or nitrous oxide; a Native American reservation near Compton freeway; or the high desert north of L.A. ‘These lake beds- that’s nature’s dance floor,’ says Aldo Bender, who played several times at new Moon Gatherings there.”
“Raves were attracting more attention from adults and younger kids in the crowds… ‘I felt like the scene was getting rinsed out,’ says Richards. It became a place for little kids to party- it really wasn’t about the music.’”
The artist Moby became one of the most important artists in the Rave scene. “Born Richard Melville Hall in New York City on September 11, 1965, Moby got his nickname at birth, a joke on his diminutive size and family history: Herman Melville was an ancestor…Moby took classical piano lessons early and played hardcore as a teenager. He experimented with everything he could lay hands on, followed by an extended period- ongoing during the rave years- of abstinence form alcohol and drugs.” By 1993, “Moby had crafted not just a string of tracks, but a string of anthems; ‘Go,’ ‘Rock the House’ (as Brainstorm), ‘Voodoo Child’ (as Voodoo Child), ‘Drop a Beat,’ ‘Next Is the E’ (he swears it’s not a drug reference…After seeing Sven Vath play ‘a record that went from 130 BPM to 160 BMP, I went home and made a record that went from 130 BPM to 1,2000 BPM’ – ‘Thousand,’ his traditional show-closer.” We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to understand the value of Classical music as a springboard into any genre, as it provides foundational skills that are applicable to all styles of music.
“Moby’s gift was for taking dance-music production tricks and turning them in to pop songs- shorter, tighter, more classically structured with each release.”
Europe was becoming a greater influence in 1994. After the Berlin Wall had come down, “Berlin became a home of all the Detroit techno guys for business, rather than Detroit, where they were all making records but not selling them.” Paris also gained a new taste for Chicago house music. (Daft Punk originated from France.)
Meanwhile the Midwest United States was undergoing its own revitalization. “One of Chicago house’s prime disseminators was Terry Mullan- MW-Raves’ favorite Midwest DJ of 1995…Mixtapes were the lifeblood of the scene, its ongoing soundtrack outside of the parties themselves- and many times the mixes were recorded at those parties.” Mullan used a lot of Daft Punk in his mixes which brought them to prominence, “Everybody in the Midwest had become familiar with Daft Punk through New School Fusion Vol. 2.” (This was Mullen’s latest mix tape.) Daft Punk is a good example of merging stagecraft with musical production, which is a subject we share with our students in our music school in Odessa, Texas.
Music marketer Gerry Gerrard acknowledged, “It didn’t’ matter how much I loved the act: If they didn’t’ make it in Europe, they wouldn’t make it in America, either. American or English, they have to be discovered and established there before America pays attention. It’s been that way from Jimi Hendrix onward.”
“By the mid-nineties, drum and bass had largely replaced ambient in the parties’ second rooms. But the style of electronic dance music that caught the typical collegiate Yank’s ear tended to be what Mixmag, in 1994, dubbed ‘trip-hop’: ‘Slow and crunching hip-hop beats, no vocals, just strange swirling noises over the top…a deft fusion of head-nodding beats, supa-phat bass, and an obsessive attention to the kind of other-worldly sounds usually found on acid house records. It comes from the suburbs, not the streets, and with no vocals you don’t need to be American to make it sound convincing.”
“Trip-hop was an arty, bohemian version of rap music minus the ghetto-bred personae and lyrics that made much of the audience (not just whites) shift uncomfortably.”
This music wasn’t yet mainstream, however. “The best thing we can do is guide the expansion of the rave scene into its mainstream direction with as much positive influence as possible,’ an SF-Raver posted. ‘If we do not make our presence known, the mainstream will eventually [phase] us out completely.’”
“‘The Electronica Revolution,’ trumpeted the top strip of the cover of Spin’s October 1996 issue. The record world needed something to tag all this music with, and with ‘rave’ over, ‘acid house’ too old, and ‘techno’ too severe, ‘electronica’ functioned the way ‘new wave’ – Sire Record’s president Seymour Stein’s less-scary substitute for ‘punk’ – once had. The Spin cover solidified it as a convenient catchall…With retrospect, electronica has become- a la new wave- a convenient term for commercially minded late-nineties electronic dance music, usually with block-rockin’ breakbeats.”
Even with the success of upcoming groups like the Chemical Brothers, the American audience was still not ready for an electronica takeover. “For all the critics’ positivity, many American reviewers remained deeply suspicious of the Chems’ background. ‘Electronica’s appeal is, let’s face it, inherently limited: Synthesized bleeps set to rigid computer thwacks will never have the mass appeal of pop songs with singers and hummable choruses.’ Entertainment Weekly harrumphed.”
Electronica’s musical sub-culture still had much of its distasteful roots to overcome. DJ-producer Jimmy Edgar spoke of his first rave scene in Detroit, “There was a lot of shady *** going on, a lot of dudes selling drugs. The guys that threw the parties carried guns. It was normal- I didn’t realize how *** up it was until I left Detroit…A number of Detroit raves were funded by the Russian Mafia, which had taken root in the U.S. through the seventies and eighties. One group operated out of a Detroit chop shop that also did business as a party locale. ‘They were running the nitrous, a lot of the cocaine in the city,’ says Edgar. ‘They were in with the cops…Once you get political motivations involved, that’s when the weird violence starts happening…The parties were turning into flagrant drug markets, says Edgar: ‘you’d turn a corner, and see people with bags and bags, hundreds of pills. Some of those parties that we did, the money was made by basically going into the gay bars and selling drugs. Once you started expanding, more drugs came.”
The way the music was being made started to change. “The first CDJs- a compact disc player that worked like a vinyl turntable, introduced in 1994- were buggy and unreliable; besides, most DJs wanted music that was available only on vinyl. But by 2000, CD burners cost less than $150, and aspiring producers wanting to play their tracks out- without having to cut acetate vinyl, pricy and only good for a couple of dozen plays- had warmed to it. After July 2001, when Pioneer brought out the CDJ-1000, its first fully successful model, vinyl-vs.-CD ceased to be an issue.”
“The entire apparatus of DJing was changing…The laptop held a working prototype for FinalScratch, first developed by three engineers form Amsterdam in spring 1999. The system included a special vinyl record that played digital sound files generated from the laptop; the delay, one designer boasted, was ‘about twelve milliseconds’…The digital future was reducing objects to data, and storing that data in ever-smaller retrieval and playback systems. Not only was vinyl less necessary, so were CDs. ‘It had a lot of bugs, but I tried to fight right through it,’ says Kevin Saunderson of FinalScratch…Equally transformative was Ableton Live, which debuted in October 2001. Much of the time it is used as a composition and performance tool, its sequencing interface allowing enormous flexibility. Visual cueing is enabled with a waveform display pattern. ‘You can rearrange songs completely on the fly,’ says Darshan Jesrani of the duo Metro Area.” We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas how to use Ableton Live’s capabilities in a wide range of applications.
“Ableton Live was equally impactful on DJing, completely automating the matching of separate records’ tempos in order to blend them seamlessly. Now, one didn’t even need to know how to physically mix records- once the most important skill of the trade- to become a successful DF. It also limited the physical performance aspect of live electronic music. Instead of wrangling tables full of gear, a live PA could become an inert experience.”
Even with this burgeoning technology, the music scene was finding difficulty staying alive, due to 9/11 along with legislation prohibiting drug use. “On June 18, 2002, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) introduced to Congress the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy- R.A.V.E.- Act…It basically extended the Crack House Law, levying fines up to $250,000 and prison time up to twenty years…in 2002, use of LSD in the nation’s high schools had dropped to less than one-third of the previous year.
“After moving to Manhattan from Avenue U, Brooklyn, in the mid-nineties, Adam X, the manager of Groove Records, was forced to shut the business in October 2004, after profits plummeted to one-fifth of their peak. ‘It was all happening at once,’ says Adam. ‘You have 9/11, you have the advent of high-speed Internet, you have Final Scratch, you have the Euro getting so much higher than the dollar, [all] within a two-year period.”
There was also antagonism among respected Electronica artists. Moby and Eminem had controversial exchanges which made headlines, and all-the-while Berlin began to look like a better place to go. “In 2003 it became the capital of Germany again…But Berlin never turned into an economic powerhouse, so it remained not just affordable but cheap…By 2006, it was a set pattern: If you were an underground U.S. dance producer of DJ beginning to attract serious attention, you either moved to Berlin or endured endless questions about when you were going to move to Berlin.”
“By the fall of 2005, streaming video online had become faster than ever, and now there was a one-stop portal for it all: YouTube, which launched that Valentine’s Day.” A party held at a private ranch in Utah featuring EDM had neglected to “get the hundred dollar ‘legal gathering license’ and was raided by the police. The whole thing was captured on camera and uploaded to YouTube. The video went viral instantly.
At the Ultra Music Festival in Miami (2007) Daft Punk continued to rise in influence. “Daft Punk had been dressing as robots for years, so their outfits weren’t exactly a surprise. But the suits lit up spectacularly…The stage setup was even mightier: a three-dimensional pyramid-cum-spaceship…served as a set of screens for vivid projection-mapped colors and patterns.” The show used the most cutting-edge technology available.
The technology was explained over a year later in Spin Magazine: “Bangalter and Guy-Man…communicate with one another via mics and monitors built into the helmets, remixing on the fly from inside the pyramid. Wireless Ethernet links the Minimoogs and virtual synths at their metallic fingertips to offstage custom computers that have the processing power of nine tricked-out Mac G5s. While the musical and visual elements are scripted and pre-sequenced, both Daft Punk and their lighting director can improvise around set cues.”
Electronic Dance Music shows still were still having difficulty getting noticed by the American music industry. But the music wasn’t going unnoticed. “You didn’t have to go to an event to hear electronic dance music, though- more and more, you could just turn on the radio. Daft Punk might not have hits, but Kanye West sampling them did- and was only part of a larger wave of R&B, hip-hop, and pop acts starting to pick up on dance-music tricks and grooves for source material. ‘You had the Lady Gagas of the world coming out,’ said Estopinal. ‘If you look into pop radio, you heard the beat changing behind most of the songs- a big dance influence going on.’ Look no further than Rihanna’s singles catalog. ‘S.O.S.’ (2006) was an electro record (based on Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’) that hit right as L.A. electro blew up, and she went to number one six years later with ‘We Found Love,’ a collaboration with the ascendant Calvin Harris.” We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas the basics of sampling technology.
“Guetta’s production of the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘I Gotta Feeling’ became the biggest-selling song in iTunes history. ‘It was the first dance-crossover song where people were like, ‘What is this music?’ says Afrojack, who was inspired by it. ‘I thought, ‘I want to make a commercial radio dance song, just to try it.’ Pitbull called me and said, ‘Let’s work together.’’ The result, Pitbull featuring Ne-Yo, Aftrojack, and Nayer’s ‘Give Me Everything,’ went to number one in 2011.”
“By 2011, there was a wedge between the way the hardcore electronic-dance audience perceived dance music- contemplation-worthy, the locus of a cabal-like subculture- and how the pop audience thought of it- fun party music, the epitome of a mindless good time…The epic-trance synths that dominated late-nineties super-clubs were all over 2011’s top Billboard hits: LMFAO’s ‘Party Rock Anthem’ and ‘Sexy and I Know It,’ the aforementioned ‘Give me Everything, ‘ Britney Spears’ ‘‘Til the World Ends,’ and Rihanna’s ‘Only Girl (In the World).”
After EDM had seeped into the American pop culture, the live event venue was now primed. “The alias of Toronto producer-DJ Joel Zimmerman, Deadmau5, performed (still does) wearing a giant, instantly recognizable light-up piece of headgear…Over the next two years, Deadmau5 would amass a veritable cult- able to sell out stadiums all by himself, no festival necessary.”
“Born Sonny Moore in Los Angeles on January 15, 1988, Skrillex had discovered punk rock in tandem with Warp Records…with his screamo group…began messing around with sample-filled, bass-heavy dance tracks on Ableton Live…Skrillex’s brand of music would become branded as ‘brostep.’ ‘It just skyrocketed across middle America so huge,’ says Johnson. ‘A lot of kids who were listening to metal appreciated it.’ The grotesquely warped bass lines were analogous to the bowel-scraping detuned guitars of Black Sabbath a generation earlier. He’d caught not the audience sired by the Bassnectar/Burning Man scene, but their younger siblings.” In 2012 Skrillex accepted his first Grammy Award.
The live shows for EDM finally hit the big-time with its newest talents. But the negatives of the sub-culture still hadn’t gone away. “One thing promoters had learned to do was to avoid the word ‘rave.’ ‘When you see the word, the police are not having it, the city’s not having it…No one wants to be involved in an event where underage kids do bad things.’ Adds Estopinal: ‘We knew what we were doing: We sold [them] as electronic music festivals of DJ concerts.’
One of the negative spin-offs: young girls would go naked to concerts. ‘Prostitots, we call them here- girls who dress up like prostitutes, who go to the events.’ In one EDC in L.A. (2010) “a fifteen-year-old girl, Sasha Rodriguez, had snuck in. So had a lot of others- many kids jumping over an eight-foot fence. Rodriguez had taken an MDMA pill and then been separated from her friends…She’d been drained after dancing on E, gulped down cold water to counteract it, and started hallucinating…by the time she arrived at the ER, Rodriguez was comatose; she experience multiple organ failure before dying at the hospital.”
Daft Punk continued to stay in high esteem in 2007, winning two Grammys, for Alive 2007. Producer Estopinal is still hopeful, looking beyond U.S. markets. “Beyond the U.S., he says, is still untapped territory. ‘I’ve been in Mexico for almost ten months and it’s been a learning curve for my local partner and myself. But it’s a serious growth market. There are twenty-five million people in Mexico city. I can combine fifty of my markets and not hit that. The potential is exponential.”
“January 26, 2014, Los Angeles, California- It was obvious the minute the nominees were announced that Daft Punk was going to sweep the Grammy Awards. ‘Random Access Memories’ is a comeback album, (which the Grammys love)…The Grammys…distance from the cutting edge signals when something is acceptable to the music business, whatever form it takes. Dancing till four in the morning on a psychedelic floor at a party for two men who’d heard the future in house and techno music played in warehouses, the dance-music underground and the big music biz, entities that had circled one another for a generation, finally embraced and said: Welcome to the machine.”
The story of EDM is just like the Bar-scene of ‘60’s and ‘70’s Rock-n-Roll, except the depth of hedonism is more extreme. With higher tech and high-end pharmaceuticals, the same spirit of an older generation is now more acute. A young generation seeking an emotional/spiritual ‘high’ with synthetic drugs and synthetically derived hypnotically repetitive beats characterizes EDM. We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to be aware of the pitfalls of the drug scene, regarding musical performance, and to set their course based upon healthy models of cultural influence.