by Jasper Gilley
EDM isn’t actually dance music. It’s a tradition/style of meta-commentary on other music. Dance music, in contrast, is the original music that’s designed primarily for its club value/rhythmic ingenuity and secondarily for its ability to convey emotion. 10 years ago, when EDM was synonymous with house music or variants thereof, EDM might indeed have aptly been dubbed a kind of dance music, since there was essentially only one beat (four on the floor) and producers were evaluated on their ability to make a track sound good within the constraints of that beat. In contrast, today’s EDM often blatantly steals beats from hip hop, late rock (e.g., metal) and elsewhere, in addition to continuing the legacy of disco-derived four on the floor. Because the beats are interchangeable/expendable, producers must distinguish themselves with meta-attributes (melody, harmony, songwriting, sound, etc.) For this reason, EDM isn’t actually a genre in the same way that rock or hip hop are genres: the latter two have characteristic beats that are essentially synonymous with the genre itself, while EDM doesn’t (you’d be much better off comparing rock or hip hop to house or dubstep.)
This is actually directly analogous to every instance of great music that Western society has ever produced. Jazz isn’t a genre either, for instance: swing, Afro-Cuban, and funk are (since each have characteristic “beats” that every jazz musician will know.) Indeed, the closest jazz comes to a sonically/rhythmically cohesive genre is in its meta-commentary on the standards, which are old (early jazz) songs that jazz musicians have artistically dialogued with since the 1950s or 1960s. Importantly, the standards were, when written, of musical value not vastly greater than the popular songs of today – they only became great music in the hands of meta-commentators, beginning in the post-war bebop era.
It’s harder to draw analogies between EDM and historical Western meta-genres that weren’t directly derived from dance music (i.e., the various national styles of European classical music), but one can still observe the common theme of meta-commentary. In addition to the less directly observable meta-commentary of artistic dialogue between composers, classical music also produced direct dialogue from time to time (consider Dvorak’s New World Symphony or Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan, for instance.)
Because EDM has proven itself to be a meta-genre like jazz, don’t be too surprised if it develops a catalog of standards in a similar way. I think it’s not too unlikely, for instance, that producers will still be remixing Avicii and Seven Lions in 10-20 years (in addition to Mr. Brightside, of course.)
Darwinian Harmonic Complexity
Additionally, if EDM continues on its current trajectory, it may be only a matter of time before producers begin to commonly incorporate more advanced harmonic material out of a necessity to sound unique. What might the ceiling on EDM’s incorporation of advanced harmonic material be? Consider the context in which advanced harmony developed in classical music and jazz: one goes to a classical or jazz concert with a desire for the music to make them feel emotion. This is a very loose requirement that allows for harmonic innovation as quickly as listeners will learn to enjoy it. In EDM (especially that of the melodic/progressive variety), the context is this: EDM must make its listeners feel euphoric through the use of large-scale dynamic contrast, and secondarily must make its listeners feel emotion. This doesn’t immediately allow for harmonic complexity as easily as the context of classical/jazz does (for instance, if the harmonic complexity distracts listeners from the dynamics of the track, it starts to no longer be an EDM track), but it doesn’t prohibit harmonic complexity, and as soon as a more complex harmonic motif is common enough that it won’t distract listeners from the track’s dynamics, you have a green light to get as complex as you want.
Contrast this with popular music since the dawn of mass media in the mid-20th century (rapped, sung, or otherwise), where the goal of the music is at some level or another, with few exceptions, purely to function as a vector for transmission/promotion of the singer’s Darwinian fitness. Shoutout to Britney Spears and Lil Pump for kindly providing such excellent demonstrations of this:
Obviously, my point goes beyond the music videos: Britney Spears sings about her Darwinian fitness in the form of promiscuity and sexual availability, while Lil Pump raps about his Darwinian fitness in the form of monetary security and ability to choose from between multiple partners. And of course, 90% of female pop stars project some version of Britney Spears’ message, while 90% of rappers project some version of Lil Pump’s message. Even before the era in which explicit promiscuity was allowed in mass media, this was still the case: the Beatles were clearly popular (at least in their early days) for their (slightly dog-whistled) sex appeal, and secondarily for their music (it just so happened that 1.5 of 4 Beatles were good musicians, which is why their later music was often good. But clearly Beatlemania wasn’t about their music, which was arguably bad at the time anyway.)
This is a very long-winded way of pointing out that neither Britney Spears nor Lil Pump nor really any popular musician since the era of mass media has any incentive to do anything musically interesting, since doing so would just detract from their advertisement of Darwinian fitness. (An important sidenote concerns why Darwinian dog-whistle content proliferates in a mass media environment: it’s a simple optimization of viewership in such a context, since people are different in their refined interests but alike in their basal ones. If you do the math, you realize you’ll reliably generate the most viewership/money appealing to basal interests, hence the incentive for Darwinian content to proliferate.)
The key difference between Lil Pump and Avicii as musicians is what medium their music is designed for. Lil Pump makes music videos primarily, and performs live secondarily (and poorly at that, from what I’ve heard.) Avicii performed live primarily and made music videos secondarily. (Importantly, Avicii was also designing his music to stand out on crowded music streaming platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud.) The difference in incentives leads naturally to the end result. Lil Pump performs generic-sounding rap but has a wacky, unique persona, while Avicii made unique-sounding EDM (a country-EDM mashup?!) but had almost no public persona whatsoever.
In short, it may now be becoming possible to create compelling music on a large scale for the first time in a hundred years or so. Importantly, it may only be becoming possible in what appears to outsiders to be a subgenre within the larger musical landscape.
(If you’d like a possibly slightly better laid-out version of my thesis about music in the age of mass media, please check out a tweetstorm of mine on the same subject.)