You don't need me to tell you that "EDM" is a huge deal, that it's becoming increasingly embraced by late teens and early 20-somethings, and that there's no doubting its relavancy as a permanent "cultural phenomenon." But as the genre proliferates more and more into the mainstream, it has--likely unintentionally--picked up some habits championed by its ever-growing audience.    

Buildup → Drop Disconnect

I’ve always thought that Electronic Dance Music and grimy college/postgraduate dancefloors have long been a perfect match. This is because:

• Both have a remarkable ability to create massive expectations that inevitably result in giant letdowns
• For maximum enjoyment, both require your mind to be addled by choice substances
• Both are irrationally enjoyed by people who go to Indiana University

And on a more existential “dude, this shit is my life” sort of level, we, as millennials, have this remarkable ability to think that we’re going to effortly fuse our passions with monetary success, all in the pursuit of making a good living for simply being ourselves. Most of us are still at the build-up here, so it’s all good. But the drop might not be.

Checklist Experiences

I went to Sensation White in Copenhagen back in 2010. Granted, this was just when this sort of thing was getting cool, and DJs were slowly becoming dorm-room names. But even then, the whole thing was just an excuse to drink a buch of absinthe, be amazed at 40,000 universally wasted/drugged out people dressed in white, and, by far most importantly, tell other people that I went to Sensation White.

Before it was cool, before it came to the states. A card that I shamelessly play today at pretty much every turn. Because nowadays, there’s nothing cooler than going to a dope event than telling everyone you know you went to that dope event.

Hipster Tastemaking

Anything considered “artistic” or “creative” will inevitably be rooted in the countercultural early adopter hipster credo--liking things before they’re adopted by society at large, because that’s when they’re actually “saying something.” Massification viewed as a terrible thing,  a process that saps the music, clothing, or style of it’s original “meaning” as it becomes diluted to fit the sensibilites of the general populace.

EDM Bros may never admit it, but the one’s who enjoy using the words “underground,” “scene,” and “sell out” in casual conversation are among the biggest proponents of this hipster philosophy. Ultimately, this isn’t exactly a bad thing--a genre without its original base is like a television show that morphs from an island survivor story, to one about a weird hatch, to one about time travel (!), but it's certainly easy to make fun of.

Noise for the Sake of Making Noise

When the lights went out during the Super Bowl, all of us were thrust into an alternate reality in which the only purpose of human existence was to out-joke our friends, and out-observe every single person on social media. If you listened closely, you may have realized that the whole thing was just bunch of competing, cacophonous sounds that were more annoying than anything else, and for some reason caused inexplicable discomfort.

Take that last sentence out of context, and you’ve got yourself some dubstep.