Rave On: International Adventures in Digital Dance Music

Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect. Cultural liberation and musical innovation. Pyrotechnics, bottle service, bass drops, and molly.

Digital dance music has been an important pressure for greater than three many years now, and has undergone transformation upon transformation because it has taken over the world. On this looking out, lyrical account of dance music tradition worldwide, Matthew Collin takes inventory of its highest highs and lowest lows throughout its international trajectory. By means of firsthand reportage and interviews with clubbers and DJs, Collin paperwork the itinerant musical kind from its underground beginnings in New York, Chicago, and Detroit within the Nineteen Eighties, to its explosions in Ibiza and Berlin, to right now’s mainstream music scenes in new frontiers like Las Vegas, Shanghai, and Dubai. Collin reveals how its dizzying array of genres—from home, techno, and storage to drum and bass, dubstep, and psytrance—have given voice to domestically particular struggles. For thus many individuals in so many alternative locations, digital dance music has been caught up within the seek for free cultural house: forming the soundtrack to liberation for South African youth after Apartheid; inspiring a psychedelic get together tradition in Israel; providing fleeting escape from—and at occasions into—corporatization in China; and even undergirding a veritable “unbiased republic” in a politically contested slice of the previous Soviet Union.

Stuffed with admiration for the probabilities the music has opened up all around the world, Collin additionally unflinchingly probes the place this utopianism has fallen brief, whether or not the tradition maintains its liberating potentialities right now, and the place it would go sooner or later.