Photo by Alejandro Ulloa/FUSA Director of Photography
Techno-laden beats pulsate through the absurdly thin walls of both the Townhouses and the apartments. Hypnotic chromatic lights flicker at intermittent beats. Hearts beat in time with a rhythm that you not only hear but also feel in your cells. Uncoordinated bodies surround you, sweat flying in all directions. For those who have ever attended an electronic dance music concert or festival, this might sound like a familiar scene.
Fairfield University Student Association recently hosted the Bingo Players and Bassjackers as its headliner and opener, respectively, for the fall concert. Both groups are categorized as EDM, the same genre that launched the fall concert last year. Diplo continues with his success while people blast Krewella’s “Alive” on the radios and iPods.
Fairfield students have responded well to EDM. FUSA sold approximately 1,700 tickets this year and sold between 1,850 and 1,900 tickets for Diplo and Krewella, and responses were largely appreciative.
But why is electronic dance music so popular?
The answer, it seems, mostly lies in the generation of listeners, Dr. Michael Serazio says. Serazio is a Fairfield professor of communication who specializes in pop culture. He has extensively covered popular music, including EDM, and is a fan of EDM himself.
“There’s an ebullient optimism to EDM – an ethos that I see reflected in millennials as a generation. It feels like something they’d dig,” Serazio says.
Millennials generally refer to people born between 1981 and 2000, according to the Pew Research Center. To call millennials optimistic might seem counterintuitive, given the times that they live in. Job creation is frozen. Unemployment rates constantly fluctuate. TIME magazine recently reported that high levels of student debts will haunt graduates for years: “81% of the most burdened borrowers—those with more than $40,000 of student debt—have private loans with interest rates of 8% or higher.”
But PolicyMic, a news website, muses that the millennials are not unaware of the poor economic opportunities awaiting them. Writer Hannah Kapp-Klote says, “The millennial generation’s optimism … comes from the realization that global economic instability is daunting, but provides an opportunity for change.
“Optimism is nothing without a plan, and millennials seem to realize their lifelong accomplishments might never mirror those of their parents. In a world where there’s so much to fix, maybe that’s where millennial optimism comes from,” she says.
The generation’s fascination with technology can explain EDM’s popularity. “All pop music scenes go in cycles: waves of popularity and waves of diminished interest,” Serazio says. “I think EDM’s resurgence has to be related to the incredible rate of technological change that we’re experiencing as a culture – a cultural shift that digital natives (or college-age millennials) are intimately familiar with.”
In the past, researchers described millennials as the most ethnically diverse and the first generation to “regard behaviors like tweeting and texting, along with websites like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Wikipedia, not as astonishing innovations of the digital era, but as everyday parts of their social lives and their search for understanding.” For millennials, there is nothing wrong with technology being used in music.
EDM has recently reached mainstream, but has been around since the 1970s, according to Serazio, popular in underground clubs and basements. DJs have since emerged as “artists of postmodernity … creating something new out of recycled materials,” Serazio says. The millennial gets exposed to past’s artists through samples and remixes.
Serazio names a few EDM tracks and albums that he considers the “best”: “Discovery” by Daft Punk, “Ghostwriter” by RJD2, “Feed the Animals” by Girl Talk, “Body Talk” by Robyn, “Otto’s Journey” by Mylo, “Keep It Goin Louder” by Major Lazer, “Play” by Moby, “Collapsing at Your Doorstep” by Air France and “Levels” by Avicii.
Calvin Harris tops the list of Forbes’ highest-paid DJs in the world with $46 million earnings in a year. Harris is responsible for the popular “I Need Your Love,” with vocal contributions from Ellie Goulding. If he walked in the streets, wearing his usual t-shirt and blue jeans, no one would probably recognize him. But play the soulful, yearning “Sweet Nothing” or the summer hit “Feel So Close,” and just about everyone can mouth the lyrics, sparse as they are, without hesitation.
Perhaps “Feel So Close” summarizes the nature of EDM and the gravitation of people towards this once-subpar genre. The answer, for Serazio, is simple: They want to feel alive.
“One of the functions of popular music in society is to give voice to hope and channel the energy that comes with the joy of being alive,” he says.
Jon Pareles in his New York Times article examines electronic music after the largest music festival, Electric Zoo, was cut short. He wrote: “Hip-hop, rock, R&B and, of course, the blues are well aware of struggle, sadness, mortality, memory and anticipation, as they tell stories and fill their song forms; electronic dance music takes place in an eternal present.”
Junior Andrea Butler is one of the two concert organizers for the fall concert. Though not a huge fan of electronic dance music, she says she understands the appeal of the bass-laden, futuristic subset.
“I think EDM means so much to so many people because, like all genres of music, it serves as an escape,” Butler says. “Attending raves and music festivals, or even just listening to your favorite artist on the walk to class, is a way to temporarily forget all the bad stuff and just immerse yourself in something that celebrates positivity and freedom.”
Butler says she believes the popularity of EDM is also linked to the mentality of a college campus: students unifying in solidarity, the desire for freedom.
“[EDM] creates a party atmosphere, which, naturally, is something that majority of college students love,” she says. “It embodies the whole ‘have fun and be reckless with your friends’ mentality, which is definitely common among people our age.”
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