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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
It may not be on the radio, but it's the most influential -- and unifying -- force in pop music today.
Jun 19, 2002 | In 1997, at the height of the so-called big beat invasion, I walked into a Foot Locker store in Beverly Hills to buy a new pair of shoes. I may have been looking for some Air Max 95s. At some point, house music came thundering over the in-store sound system and strobes began to flash. I dropped whatever sneaker I was holding and waited for smoke to billow into the room while everyone pumped their fists in the air and danced.
Instead, everyone kept shopping.
Five years later, the big beat invasion is a distant, failed media meme. As exemplified in the work of Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers, big beat was electronic music squeezed into the familiar, easily digestible song structures of rock music. The DJs knew how to party and some of them even looked like rock stars, like Keith Flint from the Prodigy (you know, the "Firestarter guy," the one with the weird mohawk?).
No single genre of electronic music since has received that kind of mainstream attention. Apart from a handful of anomalous acts with catchy signature sounds, like the Chemical Brothers or Moby, both of whom appear to have broken through for good, you won't find electronic music on American charts and you won't see electronic music videos on MTV.
Madonna just doesn't count.
For the past decade, the mainstream and electronic music industries have tried to turn electronic music into a pan-cultural worldwide phenomenon. Globally, this effort has been indisputably successful. Electronic music is pop music in Europe. Kids play with Roland Grooveboxes, not Stratocasters, and dream of being the next Paul Oakenfold, not the next Paul McCartney.
But not in the States, even though house and techno were of course invented in Chicago and Detroit. Electronic music -- dance music -- did have its moment in the mid '90s. And American record companies signed acts, MTV aired some Chemical Brothers videos and Billboard created a dance music chart.
But then the commercial prospects seemed to fizzle all at once. Serious electronic music fans turned against the acts that were promoted to major label status. And at the same time, the record-buying populace decided that they preferred teen pop, jiggy hop and nu metal. How definitive was the flop? On his current single, the biggest-selling act in pop music, Eminem, slams Moby and points out that no one listens to techno.
He's wrong, not just because the techno underground flourishes, but because while no one was listening, electronic music truly attained commercial success in America -- TV commercial success. And soundtrack success. Indeed, you can't turn on the television or go to the theater without hearing electronic music.
Famously, every song from Moby's last album, "Play," was licensed for commercials or soundtracks or both. The French post-house duo Daft Punk act as shills for Palm computing and the Gap. And although you couldn't name a track by the house act Dirty Vegas, you've probably heard their music in a commercial for Mitsubishi automobiles.
Meanwhile, every weekend, thousands of kids across the U.S. strap on leg-swallowing JNCO raver gear, pull on fuzzy backpacks, adorn themselves with kiddy candy jewelry and head to sports arena massives -- giant raves featuring dozens of DJs and sometimes as many as 50,000 partiers. In some parts of the country raving has become as much a rite of passage for teens as high school football games and trying to get laid at the prom. Consequently, an entire generation of Americans has grown up dancing all night and hugging strangers.
Substantial, globally influential electronic music scenes flourish in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles. Many feel the latter city has become the epicenter of the electronic music universe because of its proximity to the mainstream music industry and because of its proliferation of clubs, massives, festivals and illegal one-off events in a multitude of electronic music sub-genres.
Mix CDs from the top DJs who play these clubs sell well, if not well enough to earn gold certificates. Paul Oakenfold's 1998 release "Tranceport," for example, sold 222,000 copies and a recent independently released continuous mix by relatively unknown New York DJ Louie DeVito has sold 315,000 copies according to the Village Voice. Electronic music is even starting to catch on in the heartland, where cutting-edge DJs pack clubs in Kansas City, Mo.
And finally, with the success of Radiohead and groups that use electro-beats, elements of turntablism and loops, electronic music production techniques have now become the norm in rock music. The digital and computer-based recording equipment long used by electronic artists is now the industry standard in pop music as well. In this respect at least, Americans are now listening to electronic music almost every time they turn on the radio or television. - - - - - - - - - - - -
In April, at the Coachella music festival in Southern California, Microsoft passed out thousands of glowsticks bearing the X-Box logo during a set by British progressive trance/tech house duo Sasha and John Digweed. So if American corporations are so fond of electronic music, why don't we hear it on the radio? See the videos on MTV? And popularly speaking, will the music ever amount to more than sonic cotton candy for watching movies, shopping at the mall and waiting for "Survivor" to come back from a commercial break?
Part of the problem is that electronic music still faces the same old prejudices that have plagued it from the start. You've heard them all before: Electronic music is repetitive; it's empty fluff; it's soulless; the people who make it play with computers, not instruments.
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