EDM: Asian Sensation, Social Cement

In the past 20 years, the EDM scene has grown immensely. Part of its success is an influx of Southeast and East Asian Americans in the electronic music fandom. Massive online Facebook communities have formed to match members with their next “ravebae,” festival Reddit forums are asking what all the “Asian Trains” (a seemingly endless line of Asian people cutting to the front of the crowd) are about, and Asian youth are turning to club drugs in significant numbers. What’s going on here?

Several academic works and online individuals alike have posed answers to why it might be attractive to this demographic. Ultimately, most posit the rave as a “cultural home,” where Asian Americans feel some semblance of unity with each other. In this recreational outlet, we can engage in a prosocial ritual of emotional release among a cosmopolitan crowd. Of course, such collective effervescence is not genre-exclusive — why EDM?

It helps to first understand the EDM rave as a cultural practice. The raver code of conduct is PLUR: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. Strangers trade homemade bracelets, affectionately called kandi, in an endearing, four-part handshake — five-part if you count the hug that so often ensues. Some larger clusters in the congregation are self-described ravefams, stewarded by rave moms or dads who take great responsibility to take care of the first-timers. These form prior to the raves, frequently within college campus social organizations. Some of the ravefams build totems to locate each other in the expansive mob.

All of this signaling of social cohesion happens alongside some consumption of uppers and glowing lasers. In so many ways, it’s a beautifully inclusive scene, promoting undeniably charged, headbang-level energy and a sense of vigilant community care.

There’s also a classic rebellious element here. Especially from an outsider perspective, the rave scene is culturally incongruent with stereotypical Asian Americanness, founded on model minority myth-muted personalities of diligence and acquiescence. As such, some ravers narrativize their own experiences listening to EDM as self-actualization, backdropped by diasporic struggles. The flamboyant costumes, the extroverted camaraderie, the psychoactives, and the music’s relentless demand for movement become implicated in a grand protest against the strict labels stickered to Asian bodies by Western society. EDM has become the background music for liberation, exciting dancers who are self-diagnosed with emotional repression.

But perhaps the growth of EDM and its induced freedom is an indicator of the decline of artful culture. German philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer lamented “true” art when the culture industry established itself in the early 20th century. Adorno deemed much of popular music at the time as merely “social cement,” lacking in its ability to offer genuine, inspired art for its consumers. Popular music, as opposed to “serious” music, is made to appeal to the masses which passively consume it. In his view, listeners of popular music all too easily become rhythmically obedient, participating in merely the illusion of an exodus from the dreary realities of capitalism.

Music’s turn to social cement transpires in tandem with economic alienation. In the process of standardizing music into a cultural commodity, the songs start to blend together. The beats become louder, the melodies get more similar. In parallel, in separating ourselves from the products of our own labor, our social identity — our very human essence — is pulverized. What’s left from the cultural-industrial grinder is just bits of us and a soulless art, comfortably settling together into a cement that at least feels robustly communal, if even for a fleeting moment.

EDM would cause a heart attack for Adorno, either from peaking heart rates (some EDM boasts a standard 170 BPM), or because he was right. It’s the music to which people trance themselves in order to find themselves. The beat drop, the most anticipated seconds in an EDM song, is standard — every producer pushes a predictable release of tension. EDM makes catharsis reliable: song to song, artist to artist. Because of the ease of expectancy within the song, everybody’s uninhibited emotional relief is simultaneous. And in consistently fostering such instances of intensity, EDM makes social synchrony itself a commodity — available with a venue ticket, demanded by a lonely world.

Asian Americans, repeatedly represented as exceptions to America’s racialized meritocracy, are uniquely caught in the contradictions of capitalist entanglement. When you put it all together, it’s no surprise that EDM is a primary arbiter of Asian American counter-culture. It is the epitome of Adornoian “listener regression,” and it’s evidenced by EDM’s overall rise in popularity. Habitually consuming music that booms enough to drown out life’s extrinsic pressures is a tactic to renegotiate identity via escapism.

In regards to EDM and raving becoming cultural markers, I feel hesitant. I myself admit that I am regularly involved in (debatably) absent-minded music listening, that I enjoy raving for all the reasons I have stated and more. Nevertheless, when speakers blared and the lights beamed at my first rave, I had barely listened to EDM; I just had to pretend I belonged. That’s all it takes — and that might be more of a problem than at first glance.

Because when the speakers turn off and the admission has been paid, the cultural home we sought remains firmly stuck in some desert or metropolitan venue. EDM becomes a reminder of the last event, and a lead-up to the next one. A particular archetype of ravers is caricaturized to be trapped in a serotonergic spiral, waiting for the next lineup to drop over the course of the work week. True liberation works past any unique terrain of consumer modernity.

Nonetheless, EDM sets the scene for people to engage in drug use safely around their friends; the scene where relationships spark to form the next ravefam; the scene which outshines all of the stresses of adult life for a weekend. There is no denying that this music is energizing while its associated experiences are vulnerable. However, we ought to question its romantic promise.