Profs and Pints Online presents: “The Social History of EDM,” a charting of electronic dance music’s journey from deviant subculture to culture industry, with Chris Conner, visiting assistant professor of sociology at the University of Missouri and author of the forthcoming book Electric Empires: A Social History of Electronic Dance Music.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

Although electronic dance music is now a billion-dollar industry and firmly part of the mainstream popular culture, its origins were very much on the fringes, as a politically dissident youth subculture linked in sensationalized media reports to all-night drug parties.

Gain a deep understanding of EDM’s sociological origins and rise to mainstream acceptance from Chris Conner, a scholar of subcultures, criminology and deviance, urban sociology, and LGBTQ+ studies. His research focuses on how marginalized groups maintain solidarity in the face of historical forces seeking to co-opt them. He is the editor of The Gayborhood: From Sexual Liberation to Cosmopolitan Spectacle.

We’ll start by looking at the EDM movement’s originators—predominantly Black and Latino gay men living in Chicago and Detroit—and the first gatherings they organized in clandestine venues. In these formative years members of the subculture defined themselves according to values summarized with the acronym PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect). Politically they saw themselves as standing against wealth inequality, the War in Iraq, gender inequality, racism, and discrimination towards LGBTQ+ persons. In many respects, it seemed to echo the 1960s counterculture movement.

The EDM movement came under attack, however, when sensationalized media reports on it put lawmakers under pressure to pass the RAVE (Reducing Americans Vulnerability to Ecstasy) Act of 2002. Drafted by then-Senator Joseph R. Biden, the new federal legislation left EDM promoters facing stiff fines and imprisonment if their events were seen as encouraging illicit drug use.

These legislative efforts and the resulting crackdown on underground dance parties stripped away much of the EDM scene’s politically dissident edges. This development, however, proved a boon for the music industry that had seen those edges as an obstacle to selling the scene’s underlying music. Able to rebrand the music in manner that made it seem unthreatening to mid-American values, they turned EDM into a highly profitable culture industry and, even, an integral part of urban revitalizations strategies.

This talk will look at what has been lost and gained in the course of EDM’s evolution and what the future holds for both the music and those who initially helped give rise to it.

Profs & Pints Online: The Social History of EDM