This chapter investigates the ‘bass music’ genres of dubstep and trap at massive North American festivals in the 2010s, an era in which DJ sets were characterised by a sensationalised moment known as ‘the drop’. It begins by demonstrating that the sense of rupture delivered by the drop is emmeshed with social and musical disputes (especially in online festival groups). The chapter then examines the gendered dimensions of the bass music drop. It ends by considering bass music’s #MeToo moment of reckoning regarding alleged sexual misconduct by the dubstep producer-DJ Datsik. In doing so, the chapter suggests that despite previous and ongoing associations with unity, transcendence, and escapism, EDM is sometimes unable to escape the divisions and ills of the world as it is. Rather than ignoring the dark sides of EDM culture through affirmative scholarship, our field would benefit from a critical turn and methodological innovation.

Industry figures show that whilst most attendees at electronic dance music events are young adults, older people are also participating. The changing demographic destabilises conventional readings of a culture hitherto associated with youth and reveals the shifting priorities and expectations of older people in relation to (sub)cultural participation. This chapter investigates the impact of this emerging trend and examines the role clubbing plays in the lives of older people. Drawing on the perspectives of participants over forty, it highlights the contradictory attitudes that circulate around the topic of club culture and ageing. Whilst the reported benefits of participation are significant, older people’s presence provokes polarised views and notions of belonging in the scene can be undermined by concerns about fitting in, appearance and feeling ‘othered’. The discussion foregrounds these tensions and explore the ways in which older people’s participation in club culture is provoking change.

Based on ethnographic research in Berlin and further research into early rave cultures, this chapter addresses the commercialisation of the techno rave in Berlin as part of wider transformational processes, and as a source for protests movements that promoted alternative visions, economies, and practices of rave such as free parties, teknivals, and parades. That Berlin was ‘poor but sexy’ became the city’s leitmotif from 2003 onwards, when Berlin was still cheap and grimy. Rich with creative potential, it was just starting to attract foreign investors. In the aftermath, Berlin was embedded in a global tourism industry to market its urban identity, also through its electronic dance music cultures. The discussion shows how music and culture are entangled with political-economic processes of neoliberal capitalism and how these are contested through counter cultural practices linked with electronic dance music. Gentrification and commodification of culture continue to be pressing topics in urban Europe at large and reverberate in the musical genres at stake.

Flow is a concept used in studies of electronic dance music to articulate a range of social and bodily experiences on dance floors, centred around the musical performances of DJs. It is also used in other scholarly fields and applied in therapeutic and corporate contexts. The catch-all, plural, and positive quality of the concept makes flow easy to apply to many settings and phenomena. This chapter examines flow experiences on dance floors in conjunction with existing notions that club cultures epitomise neoliberal conceptions of creative labour. Overall, it suggests that capitalist logics of flow configure a social environment on dance floors where people can enjoy themselves with others while looking inward, rather than reaching outward in the pursuit of action and social change.

Offering a brief overview of electronic dance music formations, this chapter not only addresses readers who are new to the subject but also experienced participants and researchers who wish to engage with the topic from a broad perspective. In doing so, we offer a consolidation of issues in the development and definitions of extant genres and subgenres that constitute electronic dance music cultures. Drawing out common threads across these genres, the introduction locates several theoretical themes that can be found woven through electronic dance music research, such as immersion, liveness, musicking, technological affordances and affect, as well as challenges of various research methodologies and discourses in this area. Finally, we conclude with an overview of the volume in terms of dance settings, global and local contexts, genre aesthetics, production practices, embodied subjectivities and identities.

This chapter explores the pivotal role of DJs in shaping electronic dance music through their dual function as curators and innovators in the genre’s evolution. The discussion traces the DJ’s influence from the early days of synthesised music, through the post-disco era, to contemporary digital practices. It emphasises how DJs, through their record collections and live performances, drive genre formation and preservation. Examples include the archival work of Frankie Knuckles and Sven Väth, and the establishment of the Museum of Modern Electronic Music (MOMEM). Fiketscher argues that DJs’ extensive music collections and their role in curating and presenting music are crucial in documenting and defining dance music history. This comprehensive view highlights DJs as both historical archivists and genre-defining artists in electronic dance music.

The appropriation of black creativity has long driven the development of electronic dance music. While the electronic aspect of EDM, its distinctive relation to audio and computer technology, may seem an exception, a coherent discourse based in Afro-futurism sees black appropriation of technologies usually coded ‘white’ as itself creative, a form of bricolage that repurposes obsolete or deprecated technologies through transformative misuse. Tracking the evolution of this ‘secret technology’ requires careful attention to both dance music’s black roots and its silicon-coloured offshoots. Focusing on the technological underpinnings of acid house, UK rave, and breakbeat hardcore, this survey uses historical sources, technical manuals, and first-hand accounts to explore in detail how micro-generations of EDM producers built upon each other’s mistakes, turning the weaknesses of obsolete devices like the Roland TB-303 bassline synth, the Akai S950 digital sampler, and the Commodore Amiga PC into spurs for sonic innovation.

This chapter addresses issues in genre classification of electronic dance music. The discussion is particularly focused on how the genre negotiation of the techno genre is shaped by socio-cultural contexts and processes as it developed from specific localities and spaces to current online community-building and tagging practices. After locating the research context in genre theory, the chapter first evaluates historical narratives of the development of techno and argues that genre histories and categories are forged by the dynamic between genre cultures and the music industry. The engagement with genre definitions in the online world is addressed through a case study of an automatic genre classification and clustering algorithm that predicts stylistic repertoires of techno labels on the music distribution platform Bandcamp. The discussion leads to an understanding of how user-generated folksonomies enable DJs and producers to destabilise industry-prescribed taxonomies while remaining distinct from dominant forms of techno.

This chapter engages with contemporary discourses on interwar dancing in Fascist Italy, and with the ‘continual oscillation between authorisation and prohibition’ that characterised the fascist regime’s policies towards dancing, but it principally focuses its attention on the social practices, lived realities and affective experiences of dancing during this time, asking how, to what, where and with what results did Italians actually dance? As such it both moves beyond the emphasis on establishment ‘moral panic’ which has typified much of the (short) Italian historiography on social dancing to date and connects the history of social dancing to the growing interest in the histories of everyday life and the lived experience of dictatorship. Using a range of contemporary diaries and memoirs, and also ‘reading against the grain’ official sources, such as the records of the administrative police who were responsible for issuing and monitoring dance hall licences, the chapter uncovers a multifaceted and dynamic social world of dancing in interwar Italy, one in which Italian dancers stepped in and out of the state’s gaze in different ways and at different times. Above all, the chapter argues that, despite the fascist dictatorship’s attempts to curb and shape social dancing in archly nationalistic terms, the actual practices, lived and affective realities and experiences of social dancing in fascist Italy operated within markedly transnational frameworks.

Ballroom dancing developed in the USSR in a specific set of conditions typical to many totalitarian regimes. During the period in question, the Soviet party-state aimed for political and ideological control over its citizens. Naturally, this included control over their leisure activities. For the entirety of the Soviet Period, political and public discourse maintained that dance served as one of the most desirable ways for individuals (and especially youth) to spend their free time. It was concluded that dance had a huge influence on Soviet citizens’ political consciousness, physical development, moral character and taste. This explains why state and public institutions, alongside dance and music experts, continuously tried to invent and disseminate new Soviet dances that would serve to educate the so-called ‘New Soviet Man’. Among other things, these ambitious goals often required the prohibition or censorship of modern western dancing styles. The politics of prohibiting and allowing certain types of dances varied depending on the era and was linked to wider political developments. However, attempts by Soviet politicians and some of the most renowned choreographers to regulate and nationalise the dance practice of the population were rendered less effective by the efforts of many dance evening organisers and the practice of amateur dancers to use the state project for their own motives. Social dancing allowed Soviet citizens to learn gender-specific body language and communication, to find friends and even partners for life. Those who engaged in couple dances quickly mastered the language of the official ideology to legitimise their practice to the state when necessary.

Starting from the observation that couple dancing requires the co-ordination of movements, music and mutual expectations, the chapter traces the development of conventions of couple dancing in Germany from the 1920s to the 1930s. It argues that standard steps, danceable music and well-established scripts for how to conduct oneself and what to expect from dance hall encounters were pivotal for men and women to take the risk of seeking love on the dance floor, and it shows that these conventions were established only by the 1930s. The chapter studies musicians, songwriters, dance teachers, venue operators and critics of social dancing to trace the changes of the social world of dancing under the impact of a new mass culture. Focusing on Berlin, it builds on the trade press of these groups of actors as well as on primary evidence from the archives of the city’s ‘theatre police’. The chapter consists of two chronological parts. The first focuses on the 1920s and challenges the familiar perception of dancing in the ‘Roaring Twenties’ as a spontaneous and emancipating outburst by showing that dance floor encounters were in fact fraught with tension. Music and steps were out-of-sync; the reputation of dance was tainted. The second part looks at changes in the technology, economy and regulation that transformed the entertainment business around 1930 and gauges their impact on social dancing. From this moment on, social dancing acquired the function as a primary setting to instigate heterosexual romantic relationships.

The introduction presents the growth of couple dancing in commercial venues around the world as the object of study and formulates questions about the reasons for this trend and its effect on class, gender, race and inter-generational relations, which are the main topics of the book. It positions the volume in the historiography and outlines the sociological concept of ‘social worlds’ as the theoretical move that the volume undertakes in order to tell new stories about social dancing in the era of the two World Wars. The introduction concludes with a summary of key findings from the chapters to address the volume’s two main questions about the ‘social’ and the geographical worlds of modern couple dancing.