The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music

Ewa Mazierska, Tony Rigg, Les Gillon, Ewa Mazierska, Tony Rigg, Les Gillon

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501366376
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Thema: Música

The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music establishes EDM's place on the map of popular music. The book accounts for various ambiguities, variations, transformations, and manifestations of EDM, pertaining to its generic fragmentation, large geographical spread, modes of consumption and, changes in technology. It focuses especially on its current state, its future, and its borders – between EDM and other forms of electronic music, as well as other forms of popular music. It accounts for the rise of EDM in places that are overlooked by the existing literature, such as Russia and Eastern Europe, and examines the multi-media and visual aspects such as the way EDM events music are staged and the specificity of EDM music videos. Divided into four parts – concepts, technology, celebrity, and consumption – this book takes a holistic look at the many sides of EDM culture.

Part I

Discursive and technological production of EDM

1

The meanings of ‘electronic dance music’ and ‘EDM’

Anita Jóri

The terms ‘electronic music’ and ‘electronic dance music’ have taken many different meanings. Often they are used interchangeably – especially in journalistic texts. This chapter seeks to reconstruct the evolution of the term ‘electronic dance music’ and its acronym ‘EDM’. To do so, first of all, I take a closer look at the etymological origins of the term ‘electronic music’ and its roots in the German heritage of Elektronische Musik. Then evidences for the usage of the term ‘electronic dance music’ are searched in three main sources: (1) journalistic and (2) academic publications, and (3) online discussions of the discourse community.¹ Within the category of journalistic writings, I analyse the most well-known sources from the 1980s until today, such as Reynolds 1999 and 2013 and Brewster and Broughton 1999, and fanzines and rave zines. I also search for evidence in scholarly literature (Butler 2006; Redhead 1993; Thornton 1995) from the 1990s until today. Here, my main methodology is discourse analysis (in a broad sense) with emphasis on the terminology usage. Furthermore, a web discussion forum from 2006 is examined with the help of qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2014), in order to reconstruct the historical milestones of the terminology usage.

Just to highlight some stages of the etymology, the US fanzine Project X Magazine announced the first (and last) Electronic Dance Music Award in 1995 that was an underground celebration of the readers’ favourite musicians. Later the US music industry and press adopted the term to describe commercial electronic music in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Therefore, it has now a negative connotation within underground electronic music scenes and associated with ‘push-button DJs’ and musicians who use the ‘press-play approach’, as epitomized by the broadly received parody of David Guetta’s performance at the opening ceremony of UEFA Euro (2016).

One cannot find references to EDM in early academic texts. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the terms ‘rave’, ‘dance’ and ‘club culture(s)’ were more popular among academics (Thornton 1995; Bennett 2001). However, EDM is now used as an umbrella term in academia – for example, the e-journal Dancecult is dedicated to the study of ‘electronic dance music culture’ and other early sources are Butler 2006 and St. John (2006) – to describe different genres of electronic music popularized after the late 1970s. According to the above-mentioned negative connotation of EDM, some scholars have also raised their voices against the usage of this term. One of them is McLeod (2001) who proposes ‘electronic/dance music’ with a slash. His main argument is that not all genres of EDM are danceable.

But what is the problem with this genre name among the scene’s members? Why do they use other terms such as ‘dance music’, ‘dance’ or ‘club music’ instead? Why does academia not have a more precise solution?

In order to answer these questions, I take a closer look at the sociocultural, etymological and linguistic background of this term and its alternatives such as ‘dance/dance music’ and ‘techno’ or ‘Techno’ in German-speaking context. In German, the term ‘Techno’ is widely used with the same meaning as the English ‘electronic dance music’. One can find references to it in both journalistic (Rapp 2009; Denk and von Thülen 2014) and academic sources (Feser and Pasdzierny 2016a; Hitzler and Pfadenhauer 2001; Kühn 2016). On the other hand, Techno (or in English ‘techno’) is also highly problematic, since this genre has an important tradition in the history of electronic dance music, especially in the early Detroit scene. Thus, using it as a collective term causes confusion within the discourse community.

After analysing these cases, I will speculate whether these terms will survive or change their meanings in the future.

Etymology of ‘electronic dance music’

It is difficult to trace back the exact historical origins of the term ‘electronic dance music’ because of the ever-changing trends of terms in the terminology of electronic music in general (see more on these terminological issues in Jóri 2018). However, there are some sources that helped me to reconstruct a speculative timeline of the popularization of this term. These were academic and journalistic writings, fanzines and other online sources such as web discussion forums. But before I describe my findings, I will take a closer look at the roots of the term ‘electronic music’, since ‘electronic dance music’ is based on it.

According to Holmes (2020), one of the first mentions of the term ‘electronic music’ as we understand it now is in Miessner’s article ‘Electronic Music and Instruments’ from 1936 (Miessner, cited in Holmes 2020). According to Collins, Schedel and Wilson’s technology-focused definition, ‘[t]he term electronic formally denotes applications of the transistor, a specific electrical compon ent popularized from the mid-twentieth century onward that enables the substantial miniaturizing of circuits’ (2014: 1).

Simultaneously, starting in the 1940s, the German term Elektronische Musik was coined, which was likely translated from the English version, then popularized by the engineer and musician Werner Meyer-Eppler and his colleagues at the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio (‘WDR Studio’) in Cologne. Meyer-Eppler’s (1949) pioneer work Elektronische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und Synthetische Sprache focuses on the idea of synthesizing music entirely from electronically produced signals. In this way, Elektronische Musik differentiated itself from the contemporary French school Musique Concrète, which used recorded sounds (Holmes 2020). Therefore, Elektronische Musik is also a specific school of music composition which was later, based on my findings, translated into English as ‘electronic music’, without specifying the difference between the Anglo-Saxon tradition of electronic music and the German Elektronische Musik (Iverson 2019).

The confusion around the term was raised in the 1950s when the US American stream of Tape Music did not really differentiate between the techniques of the German and French traditions (Holmes 2020). Consequently, by 1960 ‘electronic music’ was adopted to describe ‘any and all music produced using recorded sound, tape, machines, and sound generators, whether for movies, television, stage, dance, or in the halls of academic music studios’ (Holmes 2020: 7). In this sense, the English term was a much more opened one, without any specific limitations in the tools of production techniques. Later, new technological developments (e.g. synthesizers) simplified the music production and by the 1970s ‘electronic music’ was used to denote a style of music instead of the instruments which created it (Holmes 2020). Nowadays, it is especially challenging to give a comprehensive definition of electronic music when many music genres involve electronic components in their production and, culturally, it also incorporates different traditions. This happened to the German ‘Elektronische Musik’ too, as it became a general term with similar meaning, like its English version.

To sum up, the English ‘electronic music’ was already used in the 1930s, or maybe even earlier, but probably in limited circles of experts. Then with the boom of the German Elektronische Musik as a school of composition the term became more popular also in English. However, the meaning of the English ‘electronic music’ was already a different one than its contemporary ‘Elektronische Musik’.

I did not compare early literature on Elektronische Musik and ‘electronic music’; my findings are only based on secondary literature. I will leave this task for future research because the main focus of this chapter is on electronic dance music. However, what I wanted to illustrate with the case of electronic music is to show that the confusion around the terminology of electronic (dance) music started early on in the process of terminological dissemination.

Electronic dance music: A historical overview

From a sociocultural point of view, electronic dance music is ‘[e]lectronic music intended primarily for dancing at nightclubs and raves’ (Dayal and Ferrigno n.d.). Collins et al. (2014) focus on music production in their definition and state that ‘electronic dance music (EDM) features electronic synthesized and sampled instrumentation, with at least some parts of a percussive nature, in tracks designed for dancing’ (2014: 102). However, McLeod (2001) brings our awareness to the fact that electronic dance music is not necessarily danceable. Therefore, he suggests the usage of ‘electronic/dance music’. McLeod’s argument is valid, especially if one thinks of genres such as braindance, intelligent dance music (IDM) or experimental electronic music. However, his suggestion of ‘electronic/dance music’ with a slash has not been established and used either in academia or in journalism, and since the article was written in 2001, I assume that it will not be widely applied in the future either.

Another important point here is that ‘electronic dance music’ is an umbrella term for very diverse musical styles. McLeod (2001) also describes the motivations behind the rapid and ever-evolving processes of subgenre naming: it can be seen as a response to genuine stylistic evolution, a merchandising strategy, an accelerated consumer culture, a cultural appropriation or a subcultural gate-keeping service.

As mentioned earlier, the etymology of ‘electronic dance music’ is not fully known, but in journalism, according to critic Joshua Glazer (2014), it was already used in 1985. The next date that is often remarked (e.g. in Glazer 2014) by journalists is 1995 when readers of the New York fanzine Project X Magazine voted for the winners of the first (and only) ‘Electronic Dance Music Awards’ (Alig 1995). In the ceremony, organized by the magazine and Nervous Records, award statues were given to the following artists and labels: Winx, The Future Sound of London, Moby, Junior Vasquez, Danny Tenaglia, DJ Keoki, TRIBAL America Records and Moonshine Records (Alig 1995). They all used to belong to underground circles and played or produced very different genres within electronic dance music. This also evidences that there must have been a need for a collective noun including diverse music styles. Therefore, the connotation of the term ‘electronic dance music’ could not have been negative or mainstream around this time.

I checked every issue of Project X Magazine and could not find any articles mentioning the term ‘electronic dance music’ (Project X Magazine Archive n.d.), except for Alig 1995. Fanzines or rave zines are generally excellent sources for identifying early terminology adoption by practitioners (e.g. journalists and musicians) and fans, since they give active voice for the consumers and one can easily identify the characteristics of the subcultural communication in them (Thornton 1995). I used the archival data of Rave Archive (n.d.), which was launched in 2007 with the expressed aim to save the 1990s rave cultures’ sources. There are 251 fanzines uploaded into the archive, including the most important ones from Canada (e.g. Trance 5000, Communic8r), Germany (e.g. Frontpage, Groove, Raveline), the UK (e.g. Blaze, Ete rnity, In-Ter-Dance, Underworld, The Sce...