EDM is to Loco Dice/Carl Craig as Matchbox 20 is to "punk" or as The Monkees were to Hippie Counterculture...
But the larger question is whether co-optation and the "uncooling" of cool is a top-down story of Big Commercial Interests Ruing Everyone's Fun - or rathermore whether the EDM we see today wasn't an entirely predictable result and longstanding output of "counterculture",
which has always been an intimate part of consumerism if not one of the most important parts!. Perhaps the term "counterculture" is a misnomer to begin with!
We can think back to the heady "early days" and the ways this scene linked to art/fashion and other statements of taste - the way we obsessed over genres and competed to demonstrate our knowledge of the music by explaining the difference between "house" and "techno". This self-sorting and continuing display of authenticity,
what some call "status seeking", is a basic input to capitalist consumerism - the products we buy (and don't buy), the "lifestyle" we embody, these all become vessels for the expression of our identity
Maybe the real question is whether we should have expected any other result than the rise of EDM - since our scene's inherent competitiveness, links to consumer culture and our own social psycholody were likely to lead us to this outcome.
After shedding the old myth of co-optation and my emotional attachment to noble narratives of the Early Hippie, I became a lot less fussed about the rise of EDM.
Complaints of it seemed like so much fluff afterwards - like more a reflection of OGs in the scene feeling threatened by the dilution of cool. IF anything the explosion of EDM has just surrounded me with more electronic derived music - and maybe led more "normals"/mainstreamers into the underground as they started with Skrillex and moved to more interesting stuff!
