One of the best reads from the last month. Its long but worth it!
Article from Hot Water Inc
"There’s been a lot of noise over the past few weeks, from various people and places, about the quality of the current electronic dance music experience.
On June 23 – enjoying the afterburn of a Rolling Stone cover story in which he called out everyone from Skrillex to David Guetta for dialing in their sets – Deadmau5 used a Tumblr post to piss on the importance of technical DJ-ing skills, saying that with the advent of Ableton and its automatic beat-matching capabilities, “we all hit play.” An editorial on super-blog Dancing Astronaut declared that “EDM” had officially “mainstreamed,” and decried the lack of new music in most superstar DJ’s sets: “What worries me is not that DJs are simply ‘pressing play,’ but that they’re pressing play on the same tracks in the same order night after night after night,” said writer Jacob Schulman. Meanwhile, Paris Hilton played her first official DJ gig– and apparently wasn’t even able to press play (a tech came onstage to do it).
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal (of all places!) even chimed in, bemoaning the “dumbing down of electronic music,” and labeling crossover artists like David Guetta and Calvin Harris “cliché-riddled, white-bread house that don’t represent the best of the genre.” Then there’s the much-talked-about feud between veteran DJ Sneak and Swedish House Mafia (sample: “I do not respect DJ actors”); and icons like Mark Farina and Dennis Ferrer being asked to vacate superclub DJ booths for not playing recognizable music.
The bottomline: Artists are getting
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