Read The Introduction of Modern Rituals Vol. I: The Dance Music Reformation here. Each article is accompanied by original abstract paintings, also by Whitney Wei. All essays are available, read aloud, in audio format.
We’re currently amidst a sectarian conflict in electronic music. But this fracture emerged from converging, conditional pressures, to be explored in the next section of this six-part essay.
A few years ago, the word ‘permacrisis’ was crowned in the public lexicon. Its choice as the Collins Dictionary word of 2022, defined as “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events,” pointed to the prevailing discontent of the times. The psychological and social rupture of the Covid epidemic, the Russo-Ukrainian war, Brexit, inflation—all against the rapidly advancing final horizon of climate change—revealed a world in clear decline, an age of deep existential foreboding.
This may seem unique to us, but history reveals that whenever there are interlocking crises, it usually paves the way towards a new societal reckoning. Take the Late Middle Ages, for instance, which were defined by French poet Eustache Deschamps as an “age of tears, of envy, of torment... age of decline nigh to the end.”
Not unlike the tribulations of 2022, Deschamps lived through the Great Famine years caused by bitter weather conditions that blighted several harvests, the Black Death in its pneumonic strains of plague and 100 per cent lethal infection rate, and the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. The severe demographic collapse resulted in tremendous economic upheaval, destabilising the old feudal system in favour of early capitalism in Europe’s urban centres.
All of these inflection points introduced a new set of values in society. In the Late Middle Ages, growing cities were revolutionised with the invention of the printing press. This enabled greater literacy and the rapid communication of ideas that allowed Martin Luther, arguably the first viral influencer in history, to catalyse the Protestant Reformation. His movement protested corruption in the Catholic Church, ushering in the core tenet of salvation from personal faith alone.
Similarly, post-Covid, there was a massive push into social media, our contemporary version of the printing press, due to pandemic restrictions and the accelerated rise of short-form video content on Instagram and TikTok. This came shortly after several closures in electronic music media like Red Bull Music Academy, Vice’s THUMP, as well as Mixmag ceasing their print edition and Electronic Beats pivoting away from strictly traditional editorial. Stripping away the gatekeepers of culture allowed the individual artist to market themselves directly to the masses.
Once a craft that was highly technical due to the nature of vinyl, DJing evolved over the years into the digital pastime of the everyman. Jane Fitz once said, “You can only be a DJ if you play discs. Everybody else is a USBJ. I’m not saying that one is better than the other, but they are different.” These technological barriers to entry lowered further once Traktor’s DJ software introduced the sync button in 2003 and the Pioneer CDJ2000 Nexus became the new industry standard hardware with a sync button in 2012.
Just like Luther, who advocated for democratising access to the Bible, there were a multitude of online tutorials that democratised DJing to anyone who had the ample time to learn during the Covid years. Some might argue that real DJs need to learn how to properly beat match, but the prevalence of a frictionless digital alternative contradicts this. Ultimately, it is easier to sell more gear if the marketing language declares that anyone, anywhere can be a DJ.
On the audience-side, suddenly there was an influx of DJs peddling their Covid bedroom streams. Post-pandemic, new electronic music converts with a craving for IRL interaction romanticised their nightlife liberation through the lens of content, as a natural extension of where the music had found them. Electronic music’s core, countercultural doctrines had nowhere near the same mimesis as its unmistakable, consumable style. Conveniently, between 2018 and 2020, Instagram had taken a sharp left turn into e-commerce, introducing the “shoppable posts” feature to allow customers to buy items featured in aspirational lifestyle images directly in-app.
This, coupled with the platform’s movement away from chronological content a few years earlier, ushers in “a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, to other events—that all assumptions of coherence have vanished.” This was how media theorist Neil Postman once described television, but it could easily apply to the psychological engineering of social media at large. Such an on-platform aversion to continuity cherrypicks the vague emotional register of “rave,” meanwhile dispensing of its anti-authoritarian ethos.
The assumption here is “that bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism.” By 2023, the “Pinterest Predictions” report traced a surge of interest in dance music aesthetics, particularly in searches as “rave fashion,” “techno style,” and “rave party aesthetic.”
Before, dance music media tightly controlled and curated the cultural legitimacy of artists, who could work for years in the dark without recognition. These intermediaries were often white and male with corresponding taste in select artists of the same ilk. It was a highly exclusionary and—some might even say—corrupt system. The weakening of traditional editorial structures due to social media was a double blow.
First these tech platforms siphoned audience attention, and then eventually most of the advertising money that went with it. It certainly didn’t help either, that trust in these media establishments was eroded by outcries of discrimination and reform during the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. As a form of reparation for past exclusion, there was an uptick in global coverage and BIPOC scenes, but skepticism of its legitimacy persisted. Pair this with the juggernaut influence of TikTok and Instagram Reels and its widening monopoly on attention, as well as the rise of Substack, and we usher in an era of heavily fragmented music discovery, commentary, and circulation.
The power dynamic has now flipped. Music media is clearly beholden to popular artists whose online followings rival or dwarf their own. Independent music journalists can start their own publications at will, and build towards more stable income streams through subscription models. The message to traditional music media is loud and clear—your validation is no longer a must-have, it’s a nice-to-have.
On the surface, this seems like a net positive. But there’s a shadow side to all changes. During the Reformation, the Catholic Church was accused of corruption through hoarding political power, cronyism, and elitism, among other transgressions. The Church also functioned as an intermediary whose exclusive transmission allowed the religion to concentrate its messaging and retain its otherworldly aura. Once Martin Luther incited the people with his 95 Theses and started translating the Bible from Latin into the lingua franca, German, suddenly everyone had access. The word of God became anyone’s construct.
In electronic music terms, democratisation is empowering in theory. There are artists all around the world who are currently able to showcase themselves in unprecedented ways without intermediaries. This fundamentally destabilised the monopoly that music media had on cultural authority. That said, this also invariably means the dilution of previous values. What was once sacred or mysterious because of its opacity—from the technology itself to dance music’s original countercultural intent—was dispelled, replaced by a plurality of interpretation.
Electronic music and dance culture has always had a spiritual significance. It is one of the very last, waning frontiers for freedom. But this space is becoming increasingly indoctrinated by content logic, which is not so much exclusive to on-app behaviour as it is a mode of continual existence. It is its own corrupting mechanism. Ravers seek the dance floor for what sociologist Émile Durkheim termed “collective effervescence,” or the cessation of selfhood into unified ecstatic ritual.
This comes into inevitable tension with the new profit economy of social media, which hones users into a state of perpetual desire and self consciousness under the tyranny of metrics, assigned to all aspects of the lives they choose to broadcast online. Solidarity and status anxiety cannot comfortably coexist. Ego dissolution and ego performance are opposing ontological conditions.
By 2027, the creator economy is projected to reach a valuation of $500 billion, swallowing electronic musicians and industry personnel into its homogenising infrastructure. Throughout time, capitalism’s clear delineation of winners and losers has always ripened social tensions.
During the Reformation, author Carter Lindberg wrote, “This slowly developing individualism stimulated both a heady sense of liberation and a morbid insecurity and terror before the loss of this newly found self in death.” Death, in contemporary terms, being irrelevance. But the fracture runs deeper than economic anxiety or social tension, there’s been a drastic transformation in the cultural consciousness.