Michaelangelo Matos, The Underground Is Massive: Book Review

It's right on the damn cover: "EDM," highlighted in the divisive and corporate genre tag's unofficial color, hot pink. Considering the inside pages, the placement of that term on the cover of Michaelangelo Matos' The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America is a plain endcap attention-grabber. Matos is actually writing the history of post-disco dance music, a history he rightfully recognizes as far broader.

His attempted scope is more massive than any festival crowd. The Underground Is Massive opens with Juan Atkins and Derrick May toying with disco and funk in 1983 Chicago and closes 382 brusque pages later with the insanity of Daft Punk's party after sweeping the 2014 Grammys with Random Access Memories.

The territory is covered unevenly: Matos editorializes practically nothing about the early days of dance music—when the author himself was an untested auteur and raver—and then inserts one-liners galore in everything post-dubstep. ("Everyone seems to be trying to outdo everyone else in the 'I don't give a fuck' sweepstakes," he writes of late-model festivals. A certain Swedish House Mafia track "could give Bryan Adams insulin shock.") Still, he progresses first through micro-movements like U.K. garage or the origin of the Furthur festivals and then through time, stitching each scene together as much with section breaks as with an unsteady flow of facts. Matos wears the hats of both rote historian and snarky music critic well, but it's when they're changed that Massive grinds its gears.

That's not to say the book is impractical. The number of interviews Matos conducted, along with zones, Listservs and forums pored over, is stunning. Initially, early Chicago and Detroit dance history gets treated with a hand as light as Matos' would have been in his childhood in the late '80s, though that might be for want of data as much as the author's own light tread.

As the music matures, so do the stories. We have tales of a Midwest party crew requiring a hit of acid to be taken at the door (as the Drop Bass Network did in 1995) or of rookie cops getting hired on off-nights to work security at massive break-in raves (as was standard practice in early '90s Chicago).

Much is left out, and understandably so, but for dance fans it could seem like a slight. Dubstep gets four pages; Trap, grime, glitch-hop and gabber get far less. Equally understandable is his exclusive focus on Europe, the Great Lakes region, New York, L.A. and San Francisco, though omission of Asia entirely is unforgivable. For the curious, Portland appears but once, adjacent on the page to Seattle as "rock towns."

However influential they have been on millennial dance and pop, one group is the subject of a few too many pages of circle-jerking. "What was Daft Punk going to do?" begins the long buildup to Matos' admittedly impressive description of the French duo's first stateside performance. If written in 1990, though, Matos could just as easily be gushing about the canonization of Madonna as dance's mass-market savior.

But there's one big bone to pick with Massive, one the underground movement itself would probably like to stick in Matos' eye. The term "EDM," he claims, "originates in academia: Scholars began using it because it had no connotations to specific styles." He goes on to note that "nearly everybody" is disappointed in the major labels' minted term, but neglects to mention why, or that there are plenty of, say, house producers who don't make EDM.

EDM's lifespan as an all-encompassing, music critic-infuriating term will eventually come to an end, just as those pink letters on the cover may eventually fade. But for all the bluntness of Matos' widescreen tactics, what he's compiled in Massive is a monument to dance music—and to its hapless critics. 

GO: Michaelangelo Matos speaks with Douglas Wolk at Powell's on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 800-878-7323, on Monday, May 4. 7:30 pm. Free.

WWeek 2015

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