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How rave music conquered America

After 20 years, electronic dance music has made it big in the US. And big means big. With Las Vegas’s Electric Daisy Carnival grossing $40m, and DJ Skrillex commanding rock-star fees, the scene is leaving its druggy underground roots behind and being reborn as bombastic super-spectacle

After 20 years, electronic dance music has made it big in the US. And big means big. With Las Vegas’s Electric Daisy Carnival grossing $40m, and DJ Skrillex commanding rock-star fees, the scene is leaving its druggy underground roots behind and being reborn as bombastic super-spectacle

For anyone who lived through the 90s, the electronic dance music (EDM) explosion in America has an uncanny air of history-repeats about it. Massive gatherings of dancing youths dressed in garish freakadelic clothes? DJs treated like rock stars? Teenagers dropping dead from druggy excess? Didn’t this all happen once already? But the phenomenon isn’t so much deja vu as a rebranding coup. What were once called “raves” are now termed “festivals“; EDM is what we used to know by the name of techno. Even the drugs have been rebranded: “molly,” the big new chemical craze, is just ecstasy in powder form (and reputedly purer and stronger) as opposed to pills.
The main difference between then and now is the sheer scale of the phenomenon. Earlier this summer Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), the most famous of the new wave of whatever-you-do-don’t-call-them-raves, drew 320,000 people to Las Vegas Motor Speedway over the course of three days. The crowds are lured to EDC and to similar dance-fests like Ultra, Electric Zoo, and IDentity not just by the headliner-piled-upon-headliner bills of superstar DJs but by the no-expense-spared spectacle of LED graphics, projection mapping and other cutting-edge visual technology.
Why did it take so long – 20 years – for techno-rave to conquer the American mainstream? Commentators sometimes compare the delay to the 15-year gap between Never Mind the Bollocks and Nevermind: 1991 as the Year Punk Broke America. But in both cases that’s a simplistic view of history: the Clash were stars in America by 1980 along with other New Wave acts, and likewise electronic dance music made a series of incursions into the US pop charts over the last two decades, only to be returned each time to the underground.

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How rave music conquered America | Music | The Guardian