RE: {blog} The Maturing Of Electronic Music
Wow. This is an in-depth post. Gives me about a weeks worth of content to work through. It should be fun walking through some old tracks and mixes I haven't heard in years.
This whole thing hits on something that fundamentally bothers me about the whole EDM scene which is a complete lack of any concept of the history of electronic music. I can distinctly remember a Facebook post from Skrillex a few years back where he posted his favorite track of all time (Aphex Twin's Film) and the comment section was lined with "where's the drop?" and I was really taken aback by the amount of people who didn't know anything about his legacy. I was also recently an observer in a conversation where the term rave was being used to describe EDC and I knew if I tried to make an attempt to correct his use of the term I would be described as some old elitest shitting on the younger community.
I don't really know where I'm going with this, but I'm glad to see posts like this geared towards some education of how dance has evolved. There isn't much in here that is new to me, but I hope at least one EDM fan sees this and uses it as an opportunity to learn a little bit more about the culture and how it evolved. Once again, great post.
Oh yeah, I remember when the Flim thing happened!
I think the post was a need to exorcise what I’ve seen happen over the years. I’ve watched genres get killed off and creativity stifled as labels were stuck on things and rules put up. I’m just loving that, right now, anything goes.
More of a cautionary tale to not put yourself in a corner.
But yeah, hopefully the documentaries are fun later viewing and the mixes are interesting listening. It’s nowhere near exhaustive but there is only so much space!
Honestly, I think about that Film situation a lot. I've always been a bit younger in the Techno scene (well, not anymore as I'm in my 30s) but I still had a good sense of history about the music that I loved. I think a lot of it came from record digging in shops in my teens where I tried to buy as much used as I could used since it was cheaper and not coming of age in a time where everything new was accessible online. I grew up in the country where I had to learn about the culture through import magazines and books which gave me a sense of where the culture originated in. That whole Skrillex/Film thing really made me take a step back and see what direction the new scene was heading in and how disregarded the history of electronic music was. It was eye-opening. But you can't bring that up without sounding elitist and condescending to many of these kids. I personally don't even mind some EDM, I just want younger audiences to respect the people who developed the culture when attitudes weren't so open to this music.