I Predict a Riot: the EDM Crackdown?

Derrick May said it: “EDM is ‘Disco Sucks’ waiting to happen”

…none of which is likely to make very much sense if you are under 40 – but in 1979, in a typically cavernous American enormodrome, many thousands of disco records were ritually torched as part of the “Disco Sucks” movement. Ostensibly America woke up to the fact that disco wasn’t just very very gay indeed, it had been doing a very gay dance right in their faces and they were too dense or aroused to notice. This isn’t a joke: they really did not know that The Village People were gay. They really, truly didn’t. Many actually thought they were a bunch of like-minded tradesmen and municipal workers who’d formed a cross-disciplinary choir.

In shock – and possible closet-based guilt at actually enjoying it all – Middle America launched into an all-out assault on the fact that disco had dry-entered the mainstream. In the ritual burning the pitch was so damaged the game was actually called off. There is a deep irony there, of course, though it didn’t harm the push to kill disco one bit. In fact it was their brightest, hottest and most insane hour. A shitty lighthouse winking hate on a cliff-top of dull-witted intolerance.

That general intolerance was, of course, an even bigger factor than any musical considerations. This was simple everyday bigotry. Disco was not just gay, but black and Latino to boot, and even worse than that, it got people of different races and sexualities mingling. In a standard racist tactic, ancient boiling hate was dressed up merely as a matter of taste. In the racists’ rhetoric, disco was simply bad music and had to be stopped for everyone’s own good. The fact that destroying cultural things for the greater good is textbook Fascism also seemed to be lost on them. The fact that the last time public burnings had happened at this level was at Nazi rallies seemed equally ignored.

“All hate needs is a plausible hook to hang its hat on and it can justify anything”

The angry mob’s desire to stem an imaginary tide of degeneracy was compounded by disco’s total dominance. By 1978

very
mainstream
names were ‘going disco’ and to all intents and purposes it was everywhere. All hate needs is a plausible hook to hang its hat on and it can justify anything – up to and including 50,000 people rioting at a stadium over something as innocuous as oom-tish-oom-tish. You don’t have to be a genius to see that you don’t get that degree of hysteria simply over a matter of taste. If they did there would be a burning Bieber-man festival every week by now. On that day in 1979, in that very stadium, if they could have got away with ritually burning something else black, shiny and sexy instead of just vinyl they would have leapt at it. Repeatedly. Until it was dead.

Disc jockey Steve Dahl in 1979. (PRNewsFoto)

And it absolutely and efficiently worked. Once the word had got out, disco became a dirty word. Under the guise of “taste,” everyone from the platinum selling producer to the kid on the street put disco at arms length. Some because they do whatever they are told by fads and fashions, many because they just always properly hated Black people, gay men and Latinos. Europe continued to love and nurture disco and don’t worry! it only sounds like I’m saying Europe is better than America because I am in this instance. In the intervening time Europe built dance music into a towering global empire and sold it right back to the United States in massive spadefuls.

“America continued to outright refuse any proper acknowledgement of the pioneers of house in it’s own back yard”

Which brings us to today. In true commercial American style the US has tardily taken it all on board and completely removed any and all of the redeeming features from the dance culture it helped to found. Then it totally ignored 30 years of European dance music and claimed complete authorship of the parody that is left over. We know this re-branding as ‘EDM’. During this process America continued to outright refuse any proper acknowledgement of the pioneers of house in it’s own back yard, replacing them with manufactured pretty-boy stadium versions.

Maybe because despite waiting patiently for 30 years for them to change, those heroes resolutely continued to be Black, gay and Latino. Some of our biggest legends are all three of those unholy things, but the mainstream is not acknowledging that. This EDM johnny-come-lately attitude of shock at anything untoward behind the glitz is writ none-more large than the hysterical way they trumpet a photo of Daft Punk without their helmets. Previous magazine covers with their exposed faces on the front and a 20-year open and transparent career in Europe may as well have never happened. If America doesn’t know about it then it simply does not exist. God knows what will happen when it’s ‘revealed’ that Daft Punk are in fact French. It was enough of a blow to many Americans that they weren’t actual robots.

My sincere hope is that in-bred bigots and murderous armed lunatics don’t use EDM as a cypher for their insanities and project onto it. America always had a vibrant and globally competitive dance scene. At it’s best it can’t be beaten. It was always very much for the minority however. You had to find it, it didn’t find you. Disco was the same. It was not for everyone… until suddenly one day it was. Now EDM is treading the same path, dancing the same steps across a very dangerous dance floor. And there is love at the centre of all this. The best parts of disco and EDM are about unity, tolerance and happiness. Which lets be frank annoys the tits right off some people who can’t ever stop being furious at everything.

Middle America, with its almost medieval religious drives, has neither diminished nor mellowed. It’s a sleeping dragon of biblical proportions, pun intended. There is a very real possibility of a repeat of Disco Sucks. Derrick May said all this far more neatly than me in that one killer sentence. There could all too feasibly be a clash between Middle America’s self-appointed moral guardians and their own children (literally their own children). The trick here is to learn from recent history and prevent this from ever happening again. EDM is everything disco was. It too started out Black, Latino and gay and now it’s as white and straight as an accountant’s hard-on. It’s large, brash and it came from a drug and sex-crazed cultural ghetto and is currently literally everywhere. Crucially, just like disco, at its most ubiquitous and commercial it is truly terrible music, and thus very easy to attack. This is the dangerous truth at the heart of it. One we should start admitting.

Just like disco, EDM now informs the sound of many a mainstream hit record. One day that many will reach a tipping point of too many. Just like disco there is a very real danger that when the band wagon rumbles ever-onward the backlash will throw the baby out with the bathwater. Intolerance doesn’t do nuance. When the hate-tsunami hits it will try to take everything down with it. Top to bottom. All it takes is one look at global neo-conservatism and the politics of fear to see how easily the masters of hate can hijack anything and turn it to their own purposes. In America it can be a stadium seat at a ritual burning or the murder by police of one of it’s innocent citizens.

“When a previously marginalised culture goes mainstream, it can wake the dragon”

In the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s the Conservatives used dance music as a smoke-screen to introduce a sweeping set of draconian laws to ban all manner of public gatherings, lawful protests and even socially cleanse the traveller subculture almost out of existence. The threat is not just very real, it’s happened in our lifetime already. The grime scene was almost throttled at birth by explicitly racially biased regulations on venues. Is there a connection between increased police brutality and youth sub-cultures? I am putting it to you that sometimes there is, and we need to be extremely mindful of it.

America doesn’t care so much when everyone is in their place racially and sexually. When it crosses over and a previously marginalised culture goes mainstream and “infects” their precious white youth it can wake the dragon and the effects can be widespread and sometimes horrific. At times of economic hardship and political conservatism scapegoats are needed. Lets not be one. Not again. If these questions are about what we can do to prevent a repeat of some truly awful mistakes then surely music is the answer, and as ever, love is the message. We need to make sure we are all working to get that most important of messages across and make that music work for us, rather than against.

I predict a riot, but wish upon a star. Just because something is waiting to happen doesn’t mean it has to happen.

The post I Predict a Riot: the EDM Crackdown? appeared first on BOILER ROOM.

  • Love
  • Save
    Add a blog to Bloglovin’
    Enter the full blog address (e.g. https://www.fashionsquad.com)
    We're working on your request. This will take just a minute...