10 Things to Be Grateful for This Thanksgiving
Here’s the deal: I have a million things to be thankful for. I’m healthy; I’m happy; I go to music festivals for a living. Life is good. And while we surely all face our own particular sets of challenges on the daily, in the grand scheme, the world of electronic music has a lot to toast to this Thanksgiving.
To get your thanks ball rolling, here are 10 musically minded things to be particularly grateful for on this holiday of appreciation and pie.
Diversity of All Kinds
Indeed, there is a lot of discussion about genres, and a lot of discussion about how we should stop discussing genres. It’s true that the words we use to qualify the music we listen to have gotten more obscure (terrorcore, anybody?). Maybe we do all just need to shut up about genre taxonomy and where artists fall within it—the argument by many artists being that such tags are limiting.
But the fact remains that electronic music is one of the most diverse genres in the entire musical solar system. We’ve got hard sounds! We’ve got soft sounds! We’ve got trance! We’ve got psy trance! Sure, not every genre is for everybody, and there can definitely be contention between factions, but as the festival petri dish keeps proving, you can get fans of many flags together in a field, or a forest, or a parking lot, or a racetrack, and everyone can get along like BFFs.
What’s more, according to a Nielson study released earlier this year, electronic music fans are the most ethnically diverse of any musical genre. Black, white, brown, kandi-colored, whatever, we are the colors of the same motherfucking musical rainbow. Props.
Deep House
To be fair, I love bass music, trap and dubstep with the force of a thousand wobbles, and I can even fist-pump behind some big-room, but I’m hella thankful that in 2014, mainstream tastes evolved toward house and deep house and put some shine on not only the ultra-talented producers who have long existed in this realm, but also the artists who blew up along with the trend.
Art. So Much Art. All the Art.
We’ve got an ever-evolving mélange of music in what is arguably the most forward-thinking genre, top-notch (and tear-jerking) music videos, visual artistry, whimsical installations, and the opportunity to embrace our own artsy alter egos by being a part of a scene where costumes are encouraged at events year-round. This opportunity to play dress-up not only provides a creative release, but gives people the chance to sport outfits that make them feel more like themselves than they do in their day-to-day. Such opportunities are not just fun, but arguably profound, and thus important and worth giving thanks for.
Burning Man and Its Residual Sonic Output
As one Insomniac employee observed as we cruised the Playa in the Wide Awake art car at the desert art festival this past August, if you really want to understand the creative pool whence EDC springs, you’ve got to go to Burning Man. This year, we did, and the sights, sounds, and experiences of the event were nothing short of transcendent—life changing, even, if you want to be grandiose, which I do. More pragmatically, our entire crew heard some next-level music out there, and we’re still streaming sets by Tycho, Above & Beyond and Marco Bailey that happened on the Playa and then made their way to SoundCloud. There’s really no effective way to sum it up other than to say that if you ever get the chance, GO.
This.
Thank you, internet.
Lorde’s Tweet
Okay, listen. There is a part of me (the part that enjoys good-looking men in suits and music to exercise to) that appreciates Diplo, but there is also a part of me that thinks that his whole asses-over-everything ethos is just kind of gross. And tired. And chauvinistic, actually. Yes, I realize a lot of women are willing participants, and that’s totally cool—you go Glen Coco—but a lot of us ladies are just standing on the side of the club, intermittently rolling our eyes and wondering how much money the dude is making off his never-ending no-twerker-left-behind campaign. And I assure you that there are men who would call us uptight prudes because of that.
So, when pop high priestess Lorde tweeted at Diplo to check his manhood after he Twitter-mocked her pal Taylor Swift for not having a sizeable booty (sacrilege in Diplo’s world, to be sure), I had to applaud. And by applaud, I mean retweet. Women are considerably underrepresented, often objectified, and sometimes just straight-up abused in the electronic genre, and it’s mostly accepted as cheeky and status quo. When Lorde fired back, however, it was headline-making.
After the incident, Lorde told The Fader, “I love Wes [Diplo] and he’s a big brother to me and one of my first friends in the industry, and part of having a friendship with someone like that is not letting them say stupid shit. Taylor’s my friend as well, and I’m a girl, and if I see some weird body-shaming on my feed I’m going to be like, ‘Hey man…’ We do still love each other, hopefully.” Thanks thus to our favorite teenage kiwi songstress for seeing something and saying something.
Giorgio Moroder Has a New Album Coming out in 2015
And it is called 74 Is the New 24.
A Still Neutral Internet
While the verdict is still out on changes to laws regarding net neutrality, a November statement by President Obama has given hope that policymakers are truly intent on keeping internet fast lanes at bay and maintaining egalitarian access to quick speeds. (Although it should be acknowledged that web access in economically depressed communities is often lacking). “We cannot allow Internet service providers to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas,” Obama said, calling the web “one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known.” Thanks, then, that—at least for now—we can all surf, stream, download and cruise for cat GIFs with equality.
“Core”
I mean, how good is this song?
All Y’all
I’ve interviewed a lot of security guards and policemen at a lot of concerts and festivals, and the sentiment I’ve heard over and over again is that the crowds that come to electronic music shows and festivals are the kindest, the most considerate, and the best behaved. Hell, the head of event planning for the Las Vegas Metro Police Department keeps a kandi bracelet on his desk. While each scene surely has its challenges, we arguably exist in one of the world’s nicest musical communities, and with the genre crossing borders at the speed of the internet, the scene truly is a global family.
Katie Bain is supremely grateful for many things including trap music. She’s on Twitter.
