The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America by Michaelangelo Matos – review

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Three decades after its inception in preponderantly black and gay club scenes, dance music has finally seized commercial hegemony over the white, middle-American audiences that had previously ignored it. In the process, however, the nomenclature has been disfigured. I can’t think of any three-letter abbreviation that discomfits me as viscerally as EDM (electronic dance music), nor one that forces me into such stark confrontation with the depths of my own elitism.

In the introduction to The Underground Is Massive, the music journalist Michaelangelo Matos’s chronicle of the genre’s strange journey from chthonian reverie to ubiquitous clamour, the dread letters are unfurled in their redundant ungainliness. Like three shuffling dads shanghaied into a four-legged race at a school sports day, EDM as a term is desperately behind the curve and painfully parochial. Thinking of those for whom house, techno and their evolutionary offshoots have long been the only game in town, I’m reminded of a brilliant scene in Girls, where Jemima Kirke’s Jessa hurls a bottle at two “crusty sacks of shit”, one of whom responds: “You’re going to reduce us to a subculture and then not accurately name the subculture? Nice.”

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