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.”
To carp on like this is to risk coming across as the sort of irredeemable character who recurs in James Murphy’s lyrical vignettes (“But have you seen my records? This Heat, Pere Ubu, Outsiders, Nation of Ulysses ...”). Matos notes that “One defining dichotomy of dance music is that it is, by definition, populist – and that many of its most ardent fans are anything but.” He negotiates such dichotomies decisively, and he succeeds in crafting a pop-phenomenology of dance music not by attempting to force equipoise upon its asymmetries but by unequivocally picking sides. Defending the rationale behind his focus on what one DJ referred to as “the obvious shit” at the expense of “the hidden gems”, he unashamedly aims his book not at the dogmatic initiate but at the open-minded novitiate. He reasons that “the obvious shit” to him “is almost completely unknown to nearly everybody else in the country”.
An occupational hazard of writing about music for a living is the inevitability of someone quoting you the exhausted banality that your work is equivalent to dancing about architecture. In The Underground Is Massive, however, Matos proves himself capable of deftly evoking the music he’s discussing – sample his early description of “Acid Tracks” by Phuture as “pure machine music with an obviously human touch, constantly warping ... Twelve minutes of a machine eating its own wires, the 303 gibbering away over drum machine, hand claps, and referee’s whistle”.
The meat of his thesis is that the medium is the message. As he puts it: “The rise of the US rave scene and the rise of the internet, besides being concurrent, mirrored one another in many ways. Both mixed rhetorical utopianism with insider snobbery ... As a style whose digital nature was encoded into its very name, techno is the music of early adopters.”
The organising principles of The Underground Is Massive are also shaped by new technology. My rough count of the songs and tracks mentioned comes to roughly 300. Matos could scarcely be expected to precis them all, but I was able to track down nearly every item and compile them in a YouTube playlist. The book has been written for a readership acclimatised to instantaneous access to whatever music they want to listen to at any given moment. The Orphic journey through these subterranean soundscapes no longer requires that anyone step outside their own home, much less into a club or record store.
So just how massive is this underground? Ideally, like any utopian vision, it’s larger than any single individual. Matos’s narrative texture instantiates this principle, albeit perhaps unwittingly. What’s exciting about the early chapters in particular is how no one – not Frankie Knuckles, nor Juan Atkins or Derrick May – is afforded a salient presence; the revolution was an ensemble drama with the music front and centre. This effect is partially achieved, however, by deluging the reader in names. With the recurrence of passages (which scarcely gain anything from being read in context) such as “The loft scene was Derrick Carter, Lego, Spencer Kincy, Diz, all those cats. Then there was the rave scene, which was Hyperactive, James Johnson, Miles Maeda, Josh Werner”, Matos may be outsourcing slightly too much of the traditional burden of reportage to Google.
Still, one learns not to get too hung up. The narrative is happiest when it is set on the fringes of society. Whether it’s Chicago and Detroit in the 1980s, or Los Angeles and San Francisco in the early 90s, when Matos is writing about a scene there’s a buccaneer swagger to his story-telling. The jerry-rigged, pre-internet ethos of house and techno’s formative years is evoked: a time of mixtapes handed out to drivers during the rush hour gridlock and three-man record labels started by childhood friends (the one who owned a car would receive a jacket labelled “Distribution”). Once the focus, of necessity, shifts toward individuals, the prose is becalmed by the stale air of duty. Hell is other people, and utopia curdles into its opposite when overshadowed by those who come, colossus-like, to bestride it (Moby, for example, claims an ambivalent prominence in the middle chapters, as often for rock star petulance as for the music). That’s also the point where “the obvious shit” ceases to be merely a descriptive term and also becomes evaluative.
If the book’s pace suddenly surges in its final chapters, it’s because Matos gives every impression of a man gritting his teeth and wanting to be home before the rush. Aside from a conspicuously caustic sideswipe at the Swedish producer Avicii (“undifferentiated slop; any pretence of building an arc is nonexistent”), he bites his tongue regarding the current generation of superstar DJs. Still, we can infer his opinion on the Cro-Magnon man-smash-bone-headed din of Skrillex or the philistine posturing of Deadmau5 from the terseness of his treatment. He is an underground sentimentalist, and the amount of Grammys an artist receives is taken to be inversely proportional to the merit of their music. Matos’s achievement, which I hold to be considerable, lies in his commitment to his arc, no matter how tasteless he finds the destination. As for those hidden gems, they’re still out there; and those who read this book will emerge from the experience equipped to find them.
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