Probably. For a number of reasons that have largely been overlooked by champions of electronic music in the popular press, electronic music's success in America has taken longer to happen than it has in Europe. But it can happen. Here's why.

The omnipresence of electronic music in advertising and films continues to prime listeners. Dirty Vegas' "Days Go By" was only an import record when it debuted in that Mitsubishi commercial with the woman dancing in the front seat. Weeks later, it was playing on commercial radio, identified by New York DJs as "the song from that commercial."

Further, like the fans of Phish-style jam bands who chronicle every move of their favorite groups and follow them across America, the electronic music listenership is loyal and dedicated, and until this music is everywhere, they will travel to find it wherever they can, turning on others along the way. When the music industry finally wakes up from its decade-long slumber and wraps its tendrils around electronic music, the fan base will already exist to ensure its commercial success.

There remain two problems: Electronic music songs mostly don't have lyrics, and electronic music artists don't have public images. But just because the music doesn't have lyrics doesn't mean that it's not smart or complex.

Further, electronic music is constantly evolving. Even critics who get this aspect of electronic music fail to understand that some electronic music artists and DJs who are hugely popular aren't content to continue to pump out the same styles of beats over and over. A review in the June 6 Rolling Stone criticized Sasha and Digweed for spinning undynamic, heavily repetitive tunes at a show in San Francisco.

This San Francisco performance happened to be the same weekend that I saw the duo at Coachella. Over the course of the past year, I've noticed that a lot of trance producers and DJs have shifted from the histrionic, arpeggiated synths that have dominated progressive trance for the past several years toward a far more stripped-down sound that relies on broken kick-drum beats, long, minimalist builds borrowed from the tech-house genre (as often heard on Digweed's own Bedrock label), tribal hand-drum samples, and strange, simple breaks in lieu of snare roll orgasms.

This is the kind of music that Digweed has been spinning and producing since at least the time of his 2001 Global Underground performance in Los Angeles, so to criticize him for not playing the same records that they did in 1996 is to fail to understand that these artists aren't the Rolling Stones.

More generally, what some critics of electronic music don't (yet) understand or acknowledge is that the absence of words provides the opportunity for narratives that transcend the boundaries of language to be built in much the same way that narratives are built in jazz and classical music. Trance, house and jungle, for example, all use builds, instrumentation and sampling to greater and lesser degrees to create powerful transporting narratives. In this way, dancers in such disparate locales as the Moroccan desert, the beach in Tel Aviv, Ibiza, the Ministry of Sound in London and Giant in Los Angeles are all able to connect to the same track. Language and image are no longer barriers; the only musical language that matters is the language of tension, release and dynamism implicit in the construction of electronic music.

Ultimately, then, the factors that seem to be holding back electronic music from succeeding in America are some of the same reasons that its widespread commercial success may very well be inevitable. Record companies don't understand why mass groups of strangers get off on congregating in dark rooms to dance their asses off to records made by invisible artists from around the world. Sooner than later they will -- or, in the grand tradition of the record industry, they'll simply buy a record label that does.

What corporate America can't completely commodify or sell, though, is the experience of hearing this music on a dance floor surrounded by people who are going off. At its best, the electronic music experience brings together people from all walks of life to celebrate and move to the same unifying rhythms. And that is its power, especially in a Balkanized era of global strife, terror and paranoia. The beauty of it is that it is born again every night in dark rooms, open fields, beaches, forests, warehouses and desert dunes around the planet -- wherever people mass around sound systems and celebrate to the pulse of electronic music.

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