Incredibox - Background music for programming.

Because the electronic wave of the 90's/00's was completely missed by most Americans, and it has just taken that long to break into the cultural mainstream here. Radio friendly DJ's who promoted their brands to the masses such as Oakenfold and Tiesto were a big factor, but it is also generational. For instance, my friends and I were pretty into the late 90's electronic scene in the NE US. We loved trance, progressive, house, jungle, dnb, breakbeat, and adored the ambient/experimental stuff as well. At that point though it felt like almost everything great was coming out of Europe and we were regarded as weirdos at school for being into this music.

However, some of us had younger siblings, and cousins. And they grew up looking up to someone they though was cool and loved this music. So they thought it must be cool too, and showed their friends. At the same time, many of the people I grew up with were graduating college and started to work, and putting their favorite electronic music in advertising and websites and music soundtracks etc. Why didn't it catch on earlier, as it had in Europe? I think much of it had to with American attitudes and policy toward drugs and the control of the record companies on music promotion. The only place you might hear electronic back then was late night college radio or MTV late Saturday night. There was a sense that this was very much dirty underground druggy music, and event promotion was still very much by flyers and word of mouth. That kind of thing will never catch on in the US mainstream, where there needs to be a sexy, familiar face on the posters and TV advertisements.

Thanks, this makes sense. 15 years is about a generation in this context.

>However, some of us had younger siblings, and cousins.

This in particular fits. The "cool older brother" thing is a perennial motif in the evolution of dance music.

The race/class/geography aspects of EDM history are fascinating. First you have upper-middle-class often gay black kids in detroit rejecting the polyrhythms and rowdy attitude of the hiphop and funk around them in pursuit of the perceived sophistication of androgynous european synth-pop. Then this gets picked up by white working class british teenagers who add syncopated hip hop drums and dub bass in pursuit of the street legitimacy of US hiphop and jamaican dancehall. This leads eventually to dubstep, which then gets crossed with stadium rock and exported back to america, to the center of the mainstream. When music makes these geographical leaps it is shorn of its sociocultural context and meaning, leading to the sacking of old sacred grounds and the sanctification of new ones. The acceleration of this cycle in the internet age is fascinating. I'm sure many here will see parallels with the spread of hacker/startup culture.

> I think much of it had to with American attitudes and policy toward drugs and the control of the record companies on music promotion ... That kind of thing will never catch on in the US mainstream, where there needs to be a sexy, familiar face on the posters and TV advertisements.

All of that has always been true in the UK as well. When rave music started to penetrate the charts at the start of the 90s, that wasn't via involvement from the music industry. Those hardcore tracks were getting in the top 10 purely from ravers going out and buying 12"s in independent record shops, tracks which were pressed and distributed by companies owned and operated by the artists. The huge, often illegal events where people were going to dance to these records were similarly done with no involvement from the music industry, at least at first.

The major difference, at least where the UK is concerned, is the impact of pirate radio, which until very recently provided a framework to promote the music, the events and the culture entirely unmolested by the establishment. This in turn is enabled by high population density: more people in your signal footprint, and social housing placed in convenient 20-storey towers on which to mount your antenna. The US's low population density, which you would have thought would make massive unregulated parties in remote locations easy to execute, makes pirate radio broadcasting uneconomical and unviable. Again, one could draw interesting comparisons to the communities based around local BBSes and how that changed with the spread of internet access.

This is incredibly cool. Having a blast messing with it.

I love it.

Thanks, that actually makes it reasonable to listen to for extended periods of time.