Post-Industrial Music

I think one can make an argument for EDM as being a post-industrial style of music. If industrial music was a last breath from the "chemical reactions" of society's decaying corpse, EDM is that angst co-opted, absorbed into mainstream society.

Personally, when I listen to EDM, I hear what I've long referred to as "fucking computer noises." And I feel like that's a fair assessment. Where Industrial music had a strong emphasis on the visceral - percussive pieces based on the banging, scratching, rending of metals, live performance of the overtly sexual and/or violent - EDM is deeply internalized within a laptop. Excluding artists such as Pretty Lights or Daft Punk, who sample existing songs, or record their own instrumental samples, EDM is largely the layered oscillators in FruityLoops. Outside of the studio, the performance aspects of EDM are focused on automated lights shows or laser effects, rather than the actual execution of the music being performed (if it is even being performed). Distribution is also mostly ephemeral for EDM, with Nielsen Music reporting that EDM made up 6.8% of total streaming purchases compared to EDM's 3.4% total market share. All of this points to the sociological shift in a society going from an industrial to post-industrial economy. Where our economy is now information-based, it makes sense that our music should be composed in 0s and 1s, and that our primary means of acquiring it should be over the internet. The rebirth of vinyl I think supports this; with our focus on the cloud and data, physical objects now have the fetish value we associate with LPs.

EDM does share some similarities with Industrial music's angst, though interacts with them differently. EDM culture embraces the sex and violence of Industrial through its fashion (have you seen what people wear to these things?) and the raw volume/power/violence of "the drop," and treats these elements as positives, as opposed to boundaries or buttons to push and alienate the audience (or perhaps its more a matter of the sex and violence moving from the stage to the audience). Further, there's an interesting divide between performer and audience that industrial musicians played with that's also present in EDM. As I mentioned before, some of the main performance aspects of a EDM concert are the lights/lasers, members of the audience doing light gloves/hula-hoops/etc., and of course the music being played, but not the performance of that music. A DJ hunched over a laptop or beat pad, stuck behind a table isn't the point of the show. There's no camera shooting down at them so you can see what the performer is doing to create the music. The performer is largely alienated from the audience. Certain performers challenge this such as Daft Punk or deadmau5, with distinctive styles the performers don in live settings, but even in those cases their personas act as more of a master of ceremonies than as live artist.

Essentially, I feel as though EDM is emblematic of the ephemeral post-industrial society. A society built on information, and distributed through the internet, and a culture more focused on itself than what's going on in front of it.