EDM Is Ceasing To Exist

Wake-y wake-y

EDM has taken over the world, right? From Imagine Dragons to EDCP to Katy Perry, Avicii… everywhere. All the charts. It is all based upon computer generated music. It is all electronic.

But if it is all digital, then what does it mean?

To claim EDM rules popular music is like claiming guitars or drums rule pop music. It has as much to do with the type of music being played as streaming has to do with the type of music. An instrument, a piano, can be used to play ragtime as easy as Baroque, doesn’t  that mean that piano is either? Is it jazz or rock or anything else? Obviously not.

To claim computers, Pro-Tools, Midem or Moogs  are a type of music is asinine. They are no more a type of music than streaming is. EDM is essentially about a type of instrumentation by now and streaming is about a form of distribution; neither of them are soul or blues, neither of them have a position or a form or a concept outside their use.

Electronics in music and streaming of recording don’t have life outside their utility; mixing a song is about a mixer not about a soundboard. Electronics is all over the new Springsteen, surely the principle advocate (not named Young) of an analog world.

The truth is Bruce wanted a sound and he couldn’t do it without manufacturing it; not unlike the movies, recording has always been sleight of hand; if you are using more than one track, if you are editing more than one recording, splicing and dicing, if you are, in a word, producing your material, you are already playing in electronics and so really, everything is electronic music.

In 2014, the term is beginning to blur into invisibility. It is ceasing to exist