Rises, Redemptions and the Road Ahead: The Past and Future of Dance Music

Looking back on the rocky road dance music followed in 2015, from film flops (We Are Your Friends) and stock drops (SFX), to flash floods (TomorrowWorld) and overzealous cops (HARD), it seems that the glorious ascent of EDM hit some inevitable turbulence last year.

Dance music’s reputation, especially in America, has faced more rises, falls and redemptions that the entire Rocky film franchise. First emerging in the early 1970s (from Philadelphia, no less), our culture has weathered endless waves of fickle public tastes, fierce media witch hunts, and opportunistic political pandering over the past 40 years—plus plenty of self-sabotaging behavior along the way. As we head into uncharted waters in 2016, what can we learn from past problems that have plagued dance music, and how do they compare to the current crop of complications?

DISCO SUCKS AND THE AIDS EPIDEMIC

Disco came into being in the early ‘70s, a time when America was suffering from a deluge of domestic downers. The hippie hangover, defeat in Vietnam, tricky Dick Nixon in the White House, and a long list of social and economic woes created an existential crisis that was felt throughout the nation. Nowhere was this malaise more visible than in New York City, where the once great metropolis was on the verge of bankruptcy, with a skyrocketing crime rate and neighborhoods that looked like war zones.

Among the hardest hit were the city’s gay minorities, blacks and Latinos who faced a double dose of prejudice for the color of their skin and their sexual preference. Often alienated from their families and facing constant threats of violence, they began to form an alternative community in the city’s gay gathering places—public bath houses, private lofts and underground clubs. With this came a celebratory music style that took the underdog stance of dance-ready ‘60s funk and wrapped it in lush orchestrations and lyrics of love, loss and triumph against life’s plethora of challenges.

This inclusive and optimistic sound, soon dubbed “disco,” turned out to be the salve that all of America needed to mend its wounds. Disco spread rapidly across the country, infiltrating every corner of American culture, from the inner city to suburban enclaves. At its peak, the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever brought disco into every household, with its soundtrack that went 15x platinum (15 million copies sold) in America.

Disco’s dominance, however, wouldn’t last. Lingering prejudices, easily found within the homophobia-tinged cry of “Disco Sucks,” quickly overtook the cultural conversation. Most of the public turned off from the disco fad as quickly as they had latched on. What remained was a network of clubs, DJs and record labels that held on to the music’s minority roots. Storied venues like the Warehouse in Chicago and the Paradise Garage in New York thrived during the post-disco fallout. However, a far more dangerous threat was on the horizon.

In the early ‘80s, the AIDS epidemic decimated much of the remaining dance music community. Its most visible landmark, the Paradise Garage, closed in 1987 as its owner, Michael Brody, succumbed to the disease. Its successor, the Saint, filled the gap for a few years before the audience—horrifyingly hit by the sexually-transmitted death sentence—was reduced to the point when the spectacular venue was forced to shut its doors.

Another disco icon, Studio 54 co-owner Steve Rubell, died of AIDS in 1989. The infamous den of celebrity sin had peaked in popularity a decade earlier—a three-year pinnacle from 1978-1981—during which time Rubell and his partner Ian Schrader defined the VIP nightclub experience. It all ended just as quickly, with the pair being convicted of skimming money and sentenced to 13 months in prison, an unprecedented penalty for only one year of tax evasion.

In a 2010 oral history of disco published in Vanity Fair, the still-living Schrader clearly saw government encroachment as continuing to impede nightlife, 30 years after he first heard the feds knocking on his door.

“It wasn’t AIDS that made the nightclub business difficult. Government regulations did it in. Steve and I did our first nightclub [the Enchanted Garden, in Douglaston, Queens] for $27,000 and Studio 54 we did for $400,000. Now, with all the regulations, fire codes, sprinkler requirements, neighborhood issues, community planning boards, before you even put on the first coat of paint, you’re into it for over a million dollars. What it’s done is disenfranchise young people.”

RAVES, ELECTRONICA and the AMBER ALERT BILL

In his coffee table book Dancefloor Thunderstorm, which documents the ‘90s Southern California rave scene, photographer Michael Tullberg includes a section on protest against anti-rave legislation held outside the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles during the early 2000s.

In one photo, a Latino youth, decked out in gigantic phat pants and candy necklaces, steps off the curb onto Wilshire Boulevard, holding aloft a handmade sign that reads “Dance Is Not A Crime.” Another photo depicts a nine-foot-tall raver on stilts photo-bombing an evening news reporter. If the original disco movement was TKO’d by fickle public sentiment and a calamitous public health disaster, the second wave of American dance music squared off against a ferocious combination of media exploitation and government overreach.

Like most events in history, things overlap. While disco in its original form was sputtering out in the mid-’80s, a new style of modern machine music made for dancing was taking its place. Arising from cities like Detroit and Chicago, these new sounds, named “techno” and “house” respectively, failed to quickly capture domestic attention when they first emerged in the Midwest. Instead, these sounds first caught on in the UK, where they caused a major stir in 1988 under the banner of Acid House—an ironic name, given the scene in England was mainly fueled by a newer psychedelic drug, MDMA (ecstasy).

It wasn’t until the mid-‘90s that dance music, having evolved into European rave style, returned to America. Mainly imported by UK expats into a culture still captivated by commercialized alternative rock, rave took off most noticeably in Los Angeles. Early promoters were able to draw tens of thousands of youths—disenfranchised by the mainstream nightlife entertainment options—to alternative venues like warehouses and studio spaces, where they could dance all night to a litany of subgenres like trance, breaks and drum & bass, along with disco’s original progenies, house and techno.

Soon, these illicit events drew the ire of local law enforcement, which began shutting down unlicensed events—not just in Los Angeles, but across America. In his recent book, The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America, author Michaelangelo Matos tells the tale of an underground party in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that was busted by police looking to stop underage drinking. The cops found a few beers and issued fines to all in attendance, but they failed to recognize the baggies of little pills stashed around the venue.

The ignorance to ecstasy would not last. The popularity of electronic music blossomed in the late ‘90s, as rave culture crossed over into the mainstream as “electronica,” a sound that saw groups like the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy combine rave style with rock composition. As the taste for electronic beats grew, ecstasy quickly became front page news.

By 2000, municipalities like Chicago and Toronto were enacting rave bans, citing safety concerns related to drug use, specifically ecstasy. In New York, dance music mecca Twilo was closed by authorities after repeat incidents involving drug-related medical emergencies in the club.

The anti-rave sentiment soon reached a federal level, most famously in the case of James “Disco Donnie” Estopinal Jr., a New Orleans party promoter who was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the DEA under federal “crack house” laws. The government’s singling out of electronic music for persecution became overt in 2002, when congress introduced the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act. The bill failed to pass, but the almost identical Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act was enacted in 2003 as part of the entirely unrelated AMBER Alert bill.

By the time the law was passed, an uncertain legal standing, combined with local combativeness and fatigue from hostile news media, had cooled the dance music scene to a mere murmur of its former self. In New York, a sudden interest in the city’s antique cabaret laws found smaller dance music spots harassed by police in a post-9/11 push for total control of Manhattan. In 2005, at the dawn of YouTube and social media, a two-minute video circulated online of a highly militarized police force shutting down an outdoor rave in Utah. The low-resolution clip of faceless police in helmets, face masks and riot armor, carrying automatic weapons while a helicopter circles overhead, was proof positive that at least some segments of law enforcement, empowered by broader government action, were resolute in their commitment to completely wipe out electronic music culture. And it almost worked…

EDM, FESTIVALS and CORPORATE INVESTMENT

For some of the media, the furor that followed EDC 2010 marked the beginning of the latest crusade to put drugs at the forefront of the discussion about the electronic music experience. For those with a broader perspective, 2010 was undoubtedly the turning point at which dance music morphed again, from rave and club culture to the current EDM and festival industry.

Though it appeared to many at the time to be another devastating blow to dance music, the controversy of 2010 turned out to be only a bump in the road on the way to the overwhelmingly positive and profitable dance music experience for an entire generation. EDM has hit the top of the charts, and festivals have proliferated across the country. Investment by experienced entertainment corporations have assisted longtime independent promoters in delivering large-scale events on par with the biggest concerts and sporting events in the world, with all of the logistics—from safety to spectacle—managed by seasoned experts.

With so much institutional power now backing electronic music activities, one might expect the movement to be immune from the same onslaught of meddling that has crippled it in the past. But as we’ve seen, market strength, however influential, will not ensure long-term stability.

What has always sustained our culture is the commitment by those at its core—the ride-or-die artists, promoters and fans for whom this is not entertainment or business, but a way of life. Looking at 2015 alone, it’s easy to wring our hands and wait for the worst. But in taking the long view, it’s clear to see that no matter what comes the way of dance music, it is stronger than its opponents. The need to dance and celebrate never completely fades.

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