Because these criticisms continue to come up after more than a decade, it's worth addressing some of them. As with all other genres of music, of course, there are good electronic music tracks and bad ones. Whether you like an electronic song or electronic music in general is wholly dependent on context. Just as a certain intellectual context makes it possible to appreciate John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen, so dancing is the key to the electronic aesthetic.

The most important thing to remember about the most globally prevalent strains of electronic music, house and trance, is that the purpose of both is to keep people moving on a dance floor. That repetitive four-four beat is supposed to be repetitive. At the same time, that steady kick drum leaves room for endless rhythmic variance and progression, just like the four-bar blues structure leaves room for endless innovation in rock.

Empty fluff? Yes, there's plenty of that in electronic music. But so what? Some of the greatest rock songs, from "Blue Suede Shoes" to "Yellow Submarine," have been deliriously fluffy. And an aversion to brainless meringue hasn't stopped millions from buying Garth Brooks or Destiny's Child.

As for the charge that electronic artists are not musicians, computers and digital tools are merely that. The music does not write itself. The artist, however, does enjoy a few advantages that he or she might not get with traditional instruments. Because electronic music is usually (but not always) digitally based and is frequently created on computers, it is unusually elastic. Electronic musicians compose with palettes of sound limited only by their imaginations and their patience. If they want to drop some tablas into the middle of a song or use a sample of breaking glass as the rhythmic basis of a song, their dream is often only a double click away.

A related problem is the ongoing confusion between DJs and the people who actually make electronic music. Although more and more high-end DJs are releasing full-length albums of their own work, such as Timo Maas' "Loud," the most prevalent form of electronic music on the market today is the continuous DJ mix, which approximates a live set, with the DJ picking tracks by other artists and mixing them together.

A DJ is still best appreciated as a live performer. When top DJs perform at clubs or massives, even the most educated listeners in the audience probably won't recognize many of the tracks, because such DJs often drop ultra-rare records that are made available exclusively to them months ahead of the listening public. DJs of this caliber also often use dub plates, records that will literally wear out after a very limited number of plays, which they produce themselves or are floated to them by the best producers in the world, and which the public might never even be able to buy.

All but the most savvy of electronic music consumers, then, are clueless about who the people are who actually produce this music, how they do it, what they look like, what they wear, how they party or any of the other details that make celebrities out of rock stars. A slightly larger number of music listeners and consumers know the names, styles and techniques of top-tier DJs.

DJs don't speak. Most don't produce their own full-length albums. When they perform, their only motions are precise hand movements and brief shuffles to record bins that are obscured from view and confined to a 5-foot square area. There are no David Lee Roth jump kicks, synchronized boy-band dances, Michael Jackson moonwalks or Janet Jackson ass-shaking.

For American consumers, this is a problem.

The average American listener is used to going to performances featuring vocalists and instruments that are recognizable and produce the kinds of sounds that they've spent decades listening to. They expect these sounds to be accompanied by the visual spectacle of singers, rappers and dancers on stage doing their damnedest to entertain and otherwise get them fired up. To people who have only experienced music this way the concept of the electronic music DJ and the dance experience must be utterly perplexing.

If you're used to live music as entertainment -- in the sense of watching performers make spectacles of themselves as they create music while you passively consume the sonic byproduct of their efforts -- then enjoying electronic music requires a shift in aural expectations, synthesis, digestion and physical participation. While there are certain branches of electronic music, such as the intelligent dance music created by producers like Boards of Canada, that are made for listening rather than dancing, by and large electronic music is made to make people dance. And when you dance, the DJ takes you on a journey, but he or she is usually not the focus of your experience at a club or festival or wherever you hear the music. Dancing is.

Most Americans still have a hard time relating to this.

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Call it the soccer problem. America remains pretty much the last country on earth that doesn't really care about the sport. (And even the unexpected success of the U.S. team at this year's World Cup is unlikely to change that permanently.) As with electronic music, you could argue that we don't really like it because it doesn't really jive with our cult of individualism. We believe that history is made by great men and women, whether in politics, sports or the arts.

In spite of their homogeneity, rock and hip-hop are still the music of the individual. And both rock and hip-hop, with their alternately boastful, self-deprecating, uplifting and emotionally self-destructive lyrics, masquerade as the music of the rebel. The fact is, both genres have been bought and sold and recycled so many times that it's hard to connect with most pop music on an emotional level. Who feels the pain of some multimillionaire who had a bad childhood? Still, the ideologies espoused in pop music are far more in line with the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, me-against-the-world myth that dominates America's vision of history, a kind of romantic ideal perhaps best embodied by the image of Ted Nugent hunting elk by his lonesome with a large gun. And for the most part, electronic music, without words, cannot forge this ideological connection to American listeners.

So electronic music remains invisible. But at the same time, it's the sound that keep everyone cheering at monster truck rallies and baseball games, dancing on the weekends and cruising the Gap. Whether we know it or not, we love this music. Advertisers wouldn't use it otherwise.

Will Americans ever admit it?

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