I should have had more faith in a musical revolution that was intrinsically linked to change. Of course it would change. That was the beauty of EDM in the first place. It was a change to begin with and it kept on changing... evolving. How could it die?

The music never died. The scene did.

The scene should have died though... and it did. It became commercialised and awash with ne'er-do-wells. People who had an investment in the “scene” that was extraneous to the LOVE of the music. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that's what happened.

The music was taken from the people and given to stakeholders that didn't give a shit about it. The media (radio, TV, print who simply pandered to ad spend), the club owners (money-hungry charlatans), the drug dealers ('nuff said), the protection racket (bouncer mafia) etc. EDM soon lay in shattered ruins.

The music belongs to the people! Peace, Love, Unity and Respect. These noble ideals were a founding war-cry for the EDM scene. That war-cry was the zeitgeist of the EDM fraternity. And fraternity it was. The cohesive aspect of the dance scene should never be under-estimated.

Phoenix rising
Where are we today? After simmering beneath the surface, ignored, undervalued and under-estimated, the dance scene is making a comeback. The vehement genre proselytising of the last ten years has abated. Many people are becoming genre-agnostic (bar one or two genres, this includes myself). There's a wellspring of belief in EDM. Not to mention a groundswell of newcomers.

At first, the “skippies” freaked me out. However, I took it as a sign of my age, and eventually came round. How could I possibly judge youngsters coming into the scene? A scene I professed to support with passion. I was getting old and these are the punters to whom I should be handing the baton. “Fidget” and “skippies” are a pulsating pimple on the face of modern EDM. Perfectly illustrating the new order. Perhaps not as idealistic, but just as hedonistic, as the old guard. EDM is offering them an outlet and a means to embrace that unmitigated euphoria that we have all felt through EDM at some time. And it is not going unnoticed.

The dance scene has been injected with fresh blood. I'll say that word again: Fresh. When Fresh took over the afternoon drive on 5fm, he – being a DJ himself – opened up EDM to the entire country. He has not let us down. This is a massive development in the scene. No longer relegated to late night weekends, EDM is now on the most popular radio station in this country every single day at peak times. Fresh also opens his show to other genres, giving prime airtime to Drum & Bass, Progressive, Electro, Fidget, Minimal and others. We have Erica Elle, Roger and Fresh playing the best EDM South Africa has to offer on 5fm.

We also have groundbreaking producers and hordes of qualified knob-twiddlers. Decks and mixers rival guitars as the musical instrument most requested by teenagers of today. We also boast a totally unexploited opportunity for crossover fusion in South Africa as EDM is possibly the only musical genre without racial segregation (admittedly a moot point). EDM unites though, no doubt about it.

Keep pushin' on
“Keep pushing on; things can only get better. It won't take long; keep on pushing to the top.” I can think of a million house lyrics to capture my sentiments and that's just one of them, but I'll always come back to Eddie Amador's “House Music” - Not everyone understands house music... it's a spiritual thing, a body thing, a soul thing.

Where are we now? We have an aging old guard handing over the reigns to an impassioned new school. Let them “dress funny”, “dance funny”, “act funny”. Let them embrace the scene. Let the pioneers lead us. Let the DJs and producers enchant us. Let our communal love for EDM bind us.

Peace, Love, Unity, Respect and Electronic Dance Music. It's the modern equivalent of “Sex, Drugs and Rock n' Roll”. But it's more of a spiritual thing, a body thing, a soul thing. Rave is dead, long live EDM.

I hope this meandering self-justification has managed to elucidate how I feel about what's happening right now in the EDM scene, but more importantly, I pray that I have succeeded in shepherding our scattered consciousness into a common understanding.

To put it more simply: Fuck the party! We are the party!

I'll see you on the fucking dancefloor!