Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect. Cultural liberation and musical innovation. Pyrotechnics, bottle service, bass drops, and molly. Electronic dance music has been a vital force for more than three decades now, and has undergone transformation upon transformation as it has taken over the world. In this searching, lyrical account of dance music culture worldwide, Matthew Collin takes stock of its highest highs and lowest lows across its global trajectory. Through firsthand reportage and interviews with clubbers and DJs, Collin documents the itinerant musical form from its underground beginnings in New York, Chicago, and Detroit in the 1980s, to its explosions in Ibiza and Berlin, to today’s mainstream music scenes in new frontiers like Las Vegas, Shanghai, and Dubai. Collin shows how its dizzying array of genres—from house, techno, and garage to drum and bass, dubstep, and psytrance—have given voice to locally specific struggles. For so many people in so many different places, electronic dance music has been caught up in the search for free cultural space: forming the soundtrack to liberation for South African youth after Apartheid; inspiring a psychedelic party culture in Israel; offering fleeting escape from—and at times into—corporatization in China; and even undergirding a veritable “independent republic” in a politically contested slice of the former Soviet Union. Full of admiration for the possibilities the music has opened up all over the world, Collin also unflinchingly probes where this utopianism has fallen short, whether the culture maintains its liberating possibilities today, and where it might go in the future.
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In this book, I found the answer to the question that I had always have about electronic-techno music: What and why is its relation with politics and the LGBTIQ community? Maybe it is the same relation that pop, rock and even jazz music have with this two worlds. but these are three of my passion's life: techno, politics, and LGBTIQ.
The book order makes that the reader do not get bored just reading facts about how electronic music has growth through its history, but it invites us to take a world tour around the most important cities, where the electronic music took and takes place.
“‘You have to also understand that this music came out of cultures that were oppressed, so it was amazing because it was this space that people could go and be themselves. House is basically the bastard of disco and it was always a black and Latin art form, the music of people of colour, of queer people.'” pg. 352
