2 Comments on “Episode 180: ESM – Electronic Sad Music”

1. Amanda OTI Staff Oct 19th 2015 6:24 pm #

   Are you guys ever gonna talk about the weird US-specific rebranding of electronic music and rave culture as EDM and EDM festivals? Cause electronic music, raves and clubs have been a huge part of urban and youth culture for decades, especially in places like London, Berlin, São Paulo and Chicago. And yet, mainstream America seems to think EDM is a new phenomenon or something. I guess my question is, why rebrand it? To me it seems like the reasoning behind it was that Americans couldn’t be seen finally getting into something so freaking late in the game, so they took it and changed it just enough (or tried to) that it could be passed off as something new that they had just come up with. Obviously, I may be biased.

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   • Amanda OTI Staff Oct 19th 2015 6:40 pm #

     A little bit of background information: one example of the prevalence of electronic music and club culture in São Paulo (where I grew up) is that there were a few clubs specifically for underage kids. So only people between the ages of 12 and 17 were allowed in. Most kids in there were between 13 and 15 though, cause once you’re in high school, you start going to actual clubs for adults (the drinking age is 18). At least that’s how things worked in the early 2000s. One way to put it is that all the teen drinking going around in Gossip Girl looked pretty realistic to me. (Aside from the fact that they didn’t look like actual teens. I found some pictures of me at a bar at 15, when I remember feeling pretty grown up and thinking I could pass for 18, and remembering all that while looking at my face in the picture felt pretty pathetic. That particular place was German though, and served high schoolers both because that was no big deal in early 2000s Brazil and actually legal in Germany)

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