Around 2010 I saw David Guetta with to turntables and a microphone bring the roof down on a waiting for Black Eyed Peas audience at Madison Square garden, spinning house tracks, the Will I Am confrere had to be dragged off stage. It felt like the moment EDM, the industrial housebeats I’d been hearing since the mid-80s, came of age. No turning back, EDM was the new rock and roll. Around the same time, Drop The Lime were opening for Boyz Noize at Summerstage. Two bass players, a drummer, protools, lead singer, that was it but it sounded like the new, it sounded how EDM formatting itself for world domination.
That isn’t what happened.
Blame Calvin Harris’s Rihanna track “We Found Love” -it taught the world of DJs a world where they weren’t hired guns like Max Martin or Dr. Luke, weren’t sample addicts like Deadmau5, weren’t cutting edge agent provocateur… they were mainstream MOR rock stars. Avicii and Harris leading the way for Disclosure, Rudimental, tons of others, taking Amy winehouse and removing winehouse.
The result was not EDM’s death but the end of EDM as a serious popular music genre. When EDM connects to a song now, it doesn’t change it in any fundamental sense. It doesn’t change the way sound sounds in your ears the way rock and roll does. It is parasitic, not giving birth to different sounds but sucking dry every single thing it touches. It seems to eat music, eat ballads, pop, rock and provides you with a sort of facsimile of sounds.
The great sorrow of pop music in the 2010s was the inability of EDM to become something of its own, it is the sideplate not the main dish, it is to the side of a sound it is central to because it can’t find where tracks and songs organically meet and it could have, I see the end as BEP’s The Beginning. It kinda tanked and nobody cared… a more cost effective way needed to be found… and thatw as that.