While dance music had been popular with the masses in Europe for a long time, and European producers developed the house and techno genres forged in Chicago, Detroit and New York in the late 70s and 80s in the United States during the 2000s, dance music was still a subculture that existed mainly in centers such as New York, Miami and Los Angeles. From Las Vegas to Miami, Los Angeles, Ibiza, Twitter and beyond, Billboard Dance presents here the 100 moments that defined the EDM decade. For many converts to dance music, Keith Flint epitomized the strident and direct spirit of The Prodigy. Indelible in the videos of “Firestarter” and “Breathe”, Flint was also electric on stage with his training partner Maxim.
The singer's death at the age of 49 shocked the music world and prompted the group to support mental health and suicide prevention campaigns. The Prodigy's latest album with Flint, No Tourists, is raw, propelling and brimming with life, a worthy testimony of a singular talent. JACK TREGONING Avicii represented the top of the scene, with his massive hits, his huge payouts, his high-flying lifestyle and his global fan base, which together created the template for EDM stardom. Critics may have called his music corny: “They were the one percent,” said Avicii's former manager, Ash Pournouri.
But the millions of fans who listened to Avicii songs like “Levels” and “Fade Into Darkness” knew that Swedish-born producer Tim Bergling was making the defining anthems of the EDM youth movement. The songs were huge, upbeat, melodic and unabashedly pop oriented, ushering in the EDM era with a wave of glow bars and serotonin peaks. The nightclub era peaked between 78 and 79 years, at which time burgeoning nightclub scenes were common in most major U.S. cities.
UU. New York was perhaps the most notable, as it hosted the famous Paradise Garage, which would later be credited with having a major influence on modern dance clubs. Technically, EDM is its own genre under the broader umbrella of electronic music, rather than being a general term in and of itself. House music continued to gain momentum as its popularity spread across Europe, and the small Balearic island of Ibiza was home to a thriving musical culture in the mid-80s.
While critics had long debated when the EDM bubble would burst, arguably nothing represented the decline of the EDM era more than the death of Bergling. Dance music has always had a strong presence at Coachella since the debut of the Southern California festival 20 years ago, and EDM eventually became synonymous with the event's huge stage in the Sahara. It was at this time that the American music industry and press were promoting the term EDM, trying to change the name of rave culture in the United States. The sixties gave rise to iconic bands such as Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, but it was the Beatles who occupied the musical throne and had a great influence on the way music was produced.
Building on the foundations laid by house and techno innovators such as Frankie Knuckles and The Belleville Three, as well as by superstars such as Paul Oakenfold and Armin van Buuren, who carried the torch at the turn of the millennium, EDM came to describe the most recent era in the history of dance music. In the midst of the rapid rise in popularity of EDM, the legendary French duo Daft Punk resumed the classic influences of electronic music in Random Access Memories. In a reductive way, DJs only push buttons to play other people's music, but in the EDM decade, festivals, Las Vegas nightclubs, liquor brands, and oil oligarchs invested lots and lots of money in these button push buttons. Thanks to the work of these artists and the millions of followers that accumulated around them, the next ten years definitely became the decade of EDM, in which music reached unprecedented levels of popularity, became incredibly lucrative and brought with it many silly, surreal and deeply significant moments for many of us who were there for them.
Seeing the culture of dance music go from being a clandestine phenomenon tailor-made for marginalized communities to becoming a corporate monolith of an industry dominated by white men and millions of suburban children wearing tutus and daywear confused many veterans of the scene, creating a kind of gap between the old guard and the EDM generation. .
