Everyone has their own tastes in music, but it’s important to know about a genre of music before having a solid opinion on it. Electronic dance music, affectionately termed EDM, has been an underground set of hundreds of genres for decades before surfacing. The term EDM is now used to cover a list of several hundred genres and subgenres of electronic music, some of the most well known being trap (Bauuer – Harlem Shake), dubstep (Nero – Into the Past), drumstep (Pegboard Nerds – 20K), techno (Dog Blood – Next Order), moombah (Skrillex – Bangarang), and especially electro house (Ylvis – The Fox ).
Are you listening to music that has connections to EDM? Yes. No matter what genre(s) of music you listen to, every one has either influenced EDM or has been influenced by it. Without a doubt, you have heard Gangnam Style, the only music video with over one billion views. This song, and many other K-Pop tracks, is heavily influenced with its electro house roots. The largest company in Korean music, S.M. Entertainment, has created a group (S.M. The Performance) devoted solely to dancing to different genres of EDM. The company has realized that the electronic music industry is a great investment, and even offered the German producer Zedd several million dollars to gain rights to his electro house track, Spectrum.
Other examples between connections of EDM to other music include almost every single pop song using EDM instrumentals, and several artists influenced by electric guitar riffs. (e.g. Boys Noize – Shred Sled) Savant has mixed in 8-bit Nintendo styled sounds, jazz, and baroque music with various genres of EDM to create a bravely unique style. Groups like Pendulum actually have a singer in them (Rob Swire), who sang the vocals for deadmau5 – Ghosts n’ Stuff. Skrillex’s music was influenced by his days in the rock band “From First to Last.”
Zedd played a huge role in bringing EDM to the mainstream, as his newer songs (in Clarity LP) are more radio friendly than some of the other EDM tunes. Rap and Hip-hop have influenced the growing genre of “trap” which surfaced mainly because of just one song, Bauuer – Harlem Shake.
Though EDM is embedded in or contains elements of almost every other genre of music, not everyone has positive opinions on it. Many describe it as being “talentless” with no real instruments – made with the push of a few buttons. Others, though supportive of the genre, claim to be fans of only the most mainstream (Various Skrillex) EDM, which is a poor representation of the musical class as a whole. Even worse, some self-professed EDM fans will tell you “Skrillex is terrible noise; listen to some real electronic music.”
Each of these opinions really disappoints me for their own reasons. First of all, EDM is extremely difficult to produce. Some artists work for a few years before finding their signature sound, only to later find out “it was getting old”, and that they would have to make a new one.
Secondly, EDM is not entirely Skrillex. Though he is with no doubt a talented producer, there are so many other great EDM artists out there; many of them have not yet surfaced. Lemaitre, Savant, Mitis, Exige and Uppermost are only a tiny fraction of these talented underground artists.
Lastly, for the people that claim EDM to be “harsh noises,” most of EDM is not harsh, but the harsh sounding ones were the first to go mainstream (pre-Harlem Shake). If you realize this, but still have problems with Skrillex in particular, try listening to some of the older tracks he made under the names “Sonny Moore” or “Twipz” (Bells EP, Make Things for Smile, Follow Me (Cloud) etc.). In addition to these, there are three whole albums (LPs!) of material that Atlantic Records would not let him release, solely because his “dubstep” (not actually dubstep) was more popular.
Moore (Skrillex) initially had no intention of making music without his vocals in them. It wasn’t until his vocal surgery when he was forced to give up singing. If it were up to me, I’d rather have had Sonny’s solo singing career take off, not even letting Skrillex be born. Though I appreciate the EDM released under the name Skrillex, I feel that the works from his solo singing career are better in many ways (all of them also consisted of electronic instrumentals).
According to deadmau5 however, misunderstanding fans are only a part of the problems for EDM, and the bigger threat lies in pop music “watering down” EDM to the nonexistent genre it was twenty years ago. This however, I don’t agree with, since mainstream pop music using EDM instrumentals only makes EDM more well-known, actually helping it more than hurting it.
Whatever your opinion is on this category of music, or how you feel its future will be, EDM has, with no doubt, had a heavy impact on the music industry as a whole. Learn more about any genre of music before you make judgments.
