Electronic Dance Music is dying. You may not have noticed. It may not affect you directly. But it’s a really big thing and, unless your teenage children have already told you, then you heard it here first. In fact, your teenage children are probably still in denial about it, so go and tell them. Get them back for scratching the car or vaping in the kitchen or whatever pitiful infractions pass for rebellion these days. Tell them: sorry, but electronic dance music is dying. Your rave is going to its grave. Ibiza now exerts the same cultural pull as any other barren 220 square-mile island, including the Isle of Man. The DJ has been hung, not by Morrissey as some of us hoped, but by his own corporate greed.
Yes, for music that goes bleep-bleep-bong, 2016 is like 1977 was for disco or 1980 for punk. Only the diehards will stay to fight. I’d like to think that my young children can now grow up in a DJ-less world, but alas this will not happen. For unlike other youth cultures, EDM (as it’s called) is adaptable. It mutates, like flu. It will be back, bigger and more godawful than ever. And so there’ll be new DJs; more DJs. And in case you hadn’t noticed, there is already a plague of DJs. Last year there were festivals featuring 300 DJs, all jumping up and down with one headphone can pressed against an ear and jabbing a finger at the heavens in the belief that they belong up there. No, the EDM collapse and 2016’s Summer of Anything But Love will be a mere hiatus. But it gives us a chance to ask ourselves: why do we tolerate these people?
If you care, the dance-music scene is collapsing because, like an old sun, it got too massive.
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