A few months ago, Sebastian Ingrosso tweeted this;

And it got me thinking; He’s almost entirely correct (despite being such an ironic statement from someone who’s known for his recent affair with hard drops and immensely commercial productions). Why has music these days become so aggressive? Is it due to the increased commercialization of electronic music?

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A lot of the new releases by major artists like Hard Rock Sofa, Dimitry Vegas , Hardwell and the likes, have just lost the basic melody of their tracks. I mean, they are club bangers, no doubt, but they’re only good if you’re listening to them after a session of significant substance abuse or if you’re an andrenaline junkie.

There’s no way they’re good for a listen when you’re relaxing, or just when you want to listen to music for the music. It’s filled with hard repetitive beats, and thumping sub basses. Most of them sound the same with just slight variations in chord progressions.

               

And these are just the relative newbies. What happened to the good old guys like Tiesto and John Dahlbäck? They’ve almost ignored their original styles and have started dishing out run-of-the-mill commercial dancefloor tracks, with the typical “heavy bassline/repetitive synth riff” formula.

Love Comes Again – Tiesto

Pyramid – John Dahlback

Tracks like Tiesto’s “Love Comes Again” and “Tenshi“ co produced with Ferry Corsten, and John dahlback’s “Love Inside“, “Pyramid” and “It Feels So Good“ were what defined house, trance and progressive back then. Wow! Those were such pristine, beautiful compositions. Why is it that more and more artists are just completely abandoning their own genres, and flipping it for this main stream adage? And please, oh please can someone tell me, what the hell is trouse, and when did it come about. Trance and House are 2 completely separate genres with different elements, and just can NOT be mixed up.

This view is also echoed by a lot of bigwigs on the scene. This is what Arnej had to say;

“Why is it that everything today sounds the same? Well, quite simply what happened in the last few years is that trance and house lost their identities. House more specifically than trance, because people started borrowing ideas from trance. House music was never really about a big epic or uplifting hook, it was more so about a funky groove and feeling. We all know what made trance we all like stand out was this big epic melodic journey.
Now what we have is this one big blended genre, but lets not kid ourselves. It sounds more trancy than it does housey. So who copied whom?“

Ok I won’t be completely hypocritical; I do love getting my nasty on to tracks like Wakanda and Atom. But it just pains me that more and more releases are starting to sound the same, more or less. I miss the good ol’ days, when trance DID have that brilliant melody, and house was just about beats and “grab-you” synths.

I do agree that music is supposed to be a vent for emotion. Any emotion. But there are much better, and smarter ways of putting that across. For example, like Basil O’ Glue or Arnej. Basil’s stuff is really dark. You can feel it. But you can also literally hear the genius he’s put into composing it.

Cosmogony – Basil O’ Glue

Electronic music these days is so unassuming.  It’s manufactured for simplified listening to the masses of the pop culture who think they are at a rave; when in reality they are at a pop concert. For example, take David Guetta’s Titanium. It’s a well composed, sing along, karaoke type track.  But can you believe it’s reached 1 million downloads? Thats what BBC’s Newsbeat recently reported. A simple glance at the Beatport top 100, would reflect exactly that. If you notice, it’s the more aggressive tracks that occupy a majority on the charts and are more commercially viable.

Even on popular culture alone, artists like Skrillex and Afrojack have been getting a considerable amount of Grammy nods. Whereas artists like Above and Beyond, Rank 1, Armin Van Buuren etc, failed to get as widespread a recognition as the former few.

To further re-iterate mass opinion,  Let’s take a look at the Forbe’s List of the World’s Highest Paid DJ’s:

Kind of makes you want to go like “Whaaaaaaaa? These Guys? Really?” Of course you’ve got geniuses like Deadmau5 and Tiesto on the list. But the rest of them just goes to show how, like with every genre that goes mainstream,  EDM too has lost its roots. (DJ Pauly D is actually one of the cast members from MTV’s Jersey Shore). Not only that, we’ve got social starlet cum hotel heiress, Paris Hilton, who has now just signed up to release a house music album. (Read more of that here.)

I had recently read an article by John Boggart for The Atlantic, Talking about ‘how EDM could be the next Rock n’ Roll‘. Here’s an exerpt from that article talking about what EDM is today;

“The critic and musician Norman Brannon recently noted that the new EDM populists play short sets of two hours or less, as opposed to traditional electronic DJs, whose sets could stretch to 26 hours or longer in extended cycles of build, peak, release, ebb, and build again. “Could anyone listen to 26 hours of Skrillex? Would that even be mentally possible?”

And another excerpt, talking about EDM’s influence on mainstream POP music.

“Music journalists are only just now beginning to grapple with how EDM seemingly sneaked up on them unawares. The narrative of new music has so often been one of building from a despised underground after years of struggle, rip-off, and hustle to mass popularity. But EDM came in by no back door but right through the front gate, with Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” in late 2008. The sound didn’t take long to spread: the takeover was complete by the time Ke$ha’s unutterably dumb and technologically astute “TiK ToK” began 2010 at the top of the charts. Gaga and Ke$ha, of course, are pop stars, and “TiK ToK” was co-written with Max Martin, who engineered Britney Spears’s career 15 years ago: It applies the sound structural principles of popcraft to the aggressive forward momentum of EDM, and features a pure-pop bridge where Skrillex fans might expect a drop. But only year later, Britney’s “Hold It Against Me” (also with Martin and Dr. Luke) had a gloriously scuzzy drop in place of a bridge, and ever since, the “dubstep bridge” has become practically synonymous with pop radio; if “TiK ToK” was written today, it would almost certainly have one.“

One could say, that this sudden surge of aggressive and commercial music today could be attributed to substance abuse.  Or one could argue it is to cope with constant urge of the youth to ‘rage’ (verb – intransitive: to party extremely hard. Often implies drinking significant amounts of alcohol.). Whatever it is, it does not bode well for the intention of what the primary purpose of music was meant to be, viz., to soothe the soul.

But hey, I’m not here to judge. We’ve all had our experimental phases. And the people can do whatever they want, I mean, we live in a free world. But what’s concerning is how their taste and perception of music is being diluted right before my eyes. And how it’s becoming an extremely commercial genre.

On the other hand, however, one could argue how it’s beneficial for the entire fraternity if a genre gets widespread recognition. It means more and more of the mass population are showing appreciation for the genre.  Now increasingly so, with some of the industry’s biggest names performing at some of the most elite destinations all over the world.

Acts like Above & Beyond, Tiesto, Hardwell, Arty and Gareth Emery have begun signing in for residencies at Uber exclusive Las Vegas Nightclubs and Hotels. After announcing Tiësto, Calvin Harris, deadmau5 and Steve Aoki, Hakkasan, the famous restaurant at the MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas, has revealed the final touches to its impressive residency roster.  Bingo Players, Bob Sinclar, Dada Life, Danny Avila, Hardwell, Laidback Luke, Michael Woods, NERVO, Quintino, R3HAB and Tommy Trash will all have exclusive residencies at both Hakkasan and the iconic WET REPUBLIC pool party. Emotional Trance Experts, Above & Beyond have also not been left behind. They’re currently administering Group Therapy to patrons of The Wynn Resort, again at Las Vegas.

 Beatport, the world’s largest DJ music store, was just snapped up by the billion dollar SFX Entertainment (headed by Live Nation founder Robert Silverman) while video platforms like OneBeat will be exploding onto gaming consoles like Xbox and artists like Avicii are modeling for Ralph Lauren. EDM, it seems, is transitioning from being popular in clubs to mainstream media.

“Almost all music is electronic in one form or another. It’s all evolving in a direction and eventually we’ll just drop the electronic and just call it music,” assured Matthew Adell, CEO for Beatport, who were just acquired by SFX, the worlds largest EDM promotions company for a cool $50 million. “What we call ‘electronic music’ will just be called ‘music’ in a couple of years. You know how in bad science fiction movies they’ll say things like, ‘Hey look, that’s the space toilet,’ but it’s in space? So why don’t they just call it the toilet? They’re already in space.“

Electronic Music today, is definitely not the same as when it started out. Almost every track is over produced, with increasingly heavy drops, and ultra cheesy bridges and riffs.

Nowadays, artists are judged by how good a “trip” one can have to their music; or how hard one can “rage”. And this is mass opinion, worryingly enough. No longer is he/she judged by his/her musical prowess, or his/her command over the mixers, or his/her ingenuity in composition, but by their popularity in mainstream media, which is now more than easily achievable with social networking sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. More often than not, the only aspect of production that affects mass opinion is how “heavy” or “hard” a drop is, or how intense the beats are.

Now you might say, that I’m being too prudish with my musical preferences, or that I need to evolve with the times, and that I should be appreciative of my heroes and idols in the Electronic Music Fraternity. And I’m all for that. But I just want music to be what it’s meant to be.

But as they say, “to each their own”

Let me conclude with what a friend on a popular social networking site shared recently,”…if they (artists) create without love in their hearts, their music will show it. Yes. Music is meant to be a spiritual divine experience.“

And I couldn’t agree more.