A runner whizzes past me with music blaring. It is What Is Love (Baby Don’t Hurt Me) by Haddaway. I remember hearing this song and liking it before. It was released in 1992. What I didn’t realize was the genre of the song. It is classified as electronic dance music. According to Wikipedia, it is also known as dance music, club music or simply dance and is a broad range of percussive electronic music genres made largely for nightclubs, raves and festivals. It is generally produced for playback by DJs who create seamless selections of tracks, called a mix, by segueing from one recording to another. EDM producers also perform their music live in a concert or festival setting.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the emergence of raving, pirate radios and an upsurge of interest in club culture, EDM achieved widespread mainstream popularity in Europe. In the United
States at that time, acceptance of dance culture was not universal; although both electro and
Chicago house music were influential both in Europe and the United States, mainstream media outlets and the record industry remained openly hostile to it. There was also a perceived association between EDM and drug culture, which led governments at state and city level to enact laws and policies intended to halt the spread of rave culture.
Subsequently, in the new millennium, the popularity of EDM increased globally, largely in Australia and the United States. By the early 2010s, the term "electronic dance music" and the initialism "EDM" was being pushed by the American music industry and music press in an effort to rebrand American rave culture. Despite the industry's attempt to create a specific EDM brand, the initialism remains in use as an umbrella term for multiple genres, including dance-pop, house, techno, trance, drum and bass, dubstep and trap, as well as their respective subgenres.
Dub
Author Michael Veal considers dub music, a Jamaican music stemming from roots, reggae and sound system culture that flourished between 1968 and 1985, to be one of the important precursors to contemporary electronic dance music. Dub productions were remixed reggae tracks that emphasized rhythm, fragmented lyrical and melodic elements, and reverberant textures. The music was pioneered by studio engineers, such as Sylvan Morris, King Tubby, Errol Thompson, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Scientist. Dub producers made improvised deconstructions of existing multi-track reggae mixes by using the studio mixing board as a performance instrument. They also foregrounded spatial effects such as reverb and delay by using auxiliary send routings creatively.
Hip hop
Hip hop music has had some influence in the development of electronic dance music since the 1970s. Inspired by Jamaican sound system culture Jamaican-American DJ Kool Herc introduced large bass heavy speaker rigs to the Bronx. His parties are credited with having kick-started the New York hip-hop movement in 1973. A technique developed by DJ Kool Herc that became popular in hip hop culture was playing two copies of the same record on two turntables, in alternation, and at the point where a track featured a break. This technique was further used to manually loop a purely percussive break, leading to what was later called a break beat. In the 1980s and 1990s hip hop DJs used turntables as musical instruments in their own right and virtuosic use developed into a creative practice called turntablism.
Disco
In 1974, George McCrae’s early disco hit “Rock Your Baby” was one of the first records to use a drum machine The use of drum machines in disco production was influenced by Sly and the Family Stone’s “Family Affair” (1971). Disco producer Biddu used synthesizers in several disco songs from 1976 to 1977, including "Bionic Boogie" from Rain Forest (1976).
Acts like Donna Summer; Chic; Earth, Wind and Fire; Heatwave and the Village People helped define the late 1970s Euro disco sound. In 1977, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte produced "I Feel Love” for Donna Summer. It became the first well-known disco hit to have a completely synthesized backing track. During the early 1980s, the popularity of disco music sharply declined in the United States, abandoned by major U.S. record labels and producers. Euro disco continued evolving within the broad mainstream pop music scene.
Synth-pop
Synth-pop — short for “synthesizer pop,” also called “techno-pop,” is a subgenre of new wave music that first became prominent in the late 1970s and features the synthesizer as the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s and early 1970s by the use of synthesizers in progressive rock, electronic, art rock, disco and particularly the "Krautrock" (broad genre of experimental rock that developed in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s) of bands like Kraftwerk. It arose as a distinct genre in Japan and the United Kingdom in the post-punk era as part of the new wave movement of the late 1970s to the mid-1980s.
The development of inexpensive polyphonic synthesizers, the definition of MIDI and the use of dance beats, led to a more commercial and accessible sound for synth-pop. This development, its adoption by the style-conscious acts from the New Romantic movement, together with the rise of MTV, led to success for large numbers of British synth-pop acts — including Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet — in the United States.
Dance music in the 1980s
The emergence of electronic dance music in the 1980s was shaped by the development of several new electronic musical instruments, particularly those from the Japanese Roland Corp. The Roland TR-808 notably played an important role in the evolution of dance music, after Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” (1982) made it popular on dance floors. According to Slate, "Planet Rock" "didn't so much put the 808 on the map so much as reorient an entire world of post-disco dance music around it."
Post-disco
During the post-disco era that followed the backlash against "disco" which began in the mid to late 1979, which in the United States lead to civil unrest and a riot in Chicago known as the Disco Demolition Night an underground movement of "stripped-down" disco inspired music featuring "radically different sounds" started to emerge on the East Coast. This new scene was seen primarily in the New York metropolitan area and was initially led by the urban contemporary artists that were responding to the over-commercialization and subsequent demise of disco culture. The sound that emerged originated from P-Funk the electronic side of disco, dub music and other genres. At this time creative control started shifting to independent record companies, less established producers and club DJs. Other dance styles that began to become popular during the post-disco era include dance-pop, boogie, electro, Hi-NR, Italo disco, house and techno.
Electro
In the early 1980s, electro — short for "electro-funk" — emerged as a fusion of electro-pop, funk and boogie. Also called electro-funk or electro-boogie, but later shortened to electro, cited pioneers include Ryuichi Sakamoto, Afrika Bambaataa, Zapp, D. Train and Sinnamon. Early hip hop and rap combined with German and Japanese electropop influences such as Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra inspired the birth of electro. The early 1980s were electro's mainstream peak. According to author Steve Taylor, Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock serves as a "template for all interesting dance music since.”
House music
In the early 1980s, Chicago radio jocks The Hot Mix 5 and club DJs Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles played various styles of dance music, including older disco records — mostly Philly disco and Salsoul tracks, electro funk tracks by artists such as Afrika Bambaataa newer Italo disco, B-Boy hip hop music by Man Parrish, Jellybean Benitez, Arthur Baker and John Robie, and electronic pop music by Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra. Some made and played their own edits of their favorite songs on reel-to-reel tape, and sometimes mixed in effects, drum machines, and other rhythmic electronic instrumentation. The hypnotic electronic dance song "On and On", produced in 1984 by Chicago DJ Jesse Saunders and co-written by Vince Lawrence, had elements that became staples of the early house sound.
"On and On" is sometimes cited as the 'first house record', though other examples from around that time, such as J.M. Silk’s “Music is the Key” (1985), have also been cited. House music quickly spread to other American cities such as Detroit, New York City and Newark — all of which developed their own regional scenes. In the mid-to-late 1980s, house music became popular in Europe as well as major cities in South America, and Australia. Chicago house experienced some commercial success in Europe with releases such as "House Nation" by House Master Boyz and the Rude Boy of House (1987).
Techno, acid house, rave
In the mid-1980s house music thrived on the small Balearic Island of Ibiza, Spain. The Balearic sound was the spirit of the music emerging from the island at that time; the combination of old vinyl rock, pop, reggae, and disco records paired with an “anything goes” attitude made Ibiza a hub of drug-induced musical experimentation. A club called Amnesia, whose resident DJ, Alfredo Fiorito, pioneered Balearic house, was the center of the scene.
By 1988, house music had become the most popular form of club music in Europe, with acid house developing as a notable trend in the UK and Germany in the same year. In the UK an established warehouse party subculture, centered on the British African-Caribbean sound system scene fueled underground after-parties that featured dance music exclusively. Also in 1988, the Balearic party vibe associated with Ibiza's DJ Alfredo was transported to London, when Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold opened the clubs Shoom and Spectrum, respectively. The success of house and acid house paved the way for Detroit Techno, a style that was initially supported by a handful of house music clubs in Chicago, New York and Northern England, with Detroit clubs catching up later. The term Techno first came into use after a release of a 10 Records/Virgin Records compilation titled “Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit” in 1988.
By the late 1980s interest in house, acid house and techno escalated in the club scene and MDMA-fueled club goers, who were faced with a 2 a.m. closing time in the UK, started to seek after-hours refuge at all-night warehouse parties. Within a year, in summer 1989, up to 25,000 people at a time were attending commercially organized underground parties called raves.
Festivals
In the 1980s, electronic dance music was often played at illegal underground rave parties held in secret locations, for example, warehouses, abandoned aircraft hangars, fields and any other large, open areas. In the 1990s and 2000s, aspects of the underground rave culture of the 1980s and early 1990s began to evolve into legitimate, organized EDM concerts and festivals. Major festivals often feature a large number of acts representing various EDM genres spread across multiple stages. Festivals have placed a larger emphasis on visual spectacles as part of their overall experiences, including elaborate stage designs with underlying thematics, complex lighting systems, laser shows and pyrotechnics. Rave fashion also evolved among attendees, which The Guardian described as progressing from the 1990s "kandi raver" to "[a] slick and sexified yet also kitschy-surreal image midway between Venice Beach and Cirque du Soleil, Willy Wonka and a gay pride parade.” These events differed from underground raves by their organized nature, often taking place at major venues, and measures to ensure the health and safety of attendees. The photo above shows an EDM festival in 2013 in Plainfield, Austria with over 100,000 attendees, exhibiting the large crowds and dramatic lighting common at such events since the early 2000s.
Ray Waddell of Billboard noted that festival promoters have done an excellent job at branding. Larger festivals have been shown to have positive economic impacts on their host cities. The 2014 Ultra Music Festival brought 165,000 attendees — and over $223 million — to the Miami/South Florida region's economy. The inaugural edition of TomorrowWorld — a U.S.-based version of Belgium's Tomorrowland festival, brought $85.1 million to the Atlanta area — as much revenue as its hosting of the NCAA Final Four earlier in the year. EDC Las Vegas boosted the Clark County economy by $350.3 million in 2015 alone, with over 405,000 attendees across three days (June 19–21).
Comments