Outside the gates of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, along the dusty perimeter road, party kids mass in the flat glare of the dusk sun. They're here for the Electric Daisy Carnival, hyped as America's largest rave—though it's unlikely anybody here would describe it that way. "It's not actually a rave," says Peter, a cloud programmer in his late twenties from the Pacific Northwest I'd met in the hour-long cab line back at the Strip. "It's a massive. A rave is at a warehouse, and it's noncommercial. EDC is a hundred thousand people at a racetrack." EDC is such a massive massive that it takes us twenty minutes to rush across the interior staging ground of the Speedway, from

The entrance past the six satellite stages to the main stage, kineticFIELD. Though the biggest DJs aren't on until 1 or 2 A.M., some of Peter's favorite acts are on early, and our special wristbands—his VIP, mine media—hadn't gotten us out of the long line to be frisked.

_ At this rate, they're gonna need more Red Bull. _

That hundreds of thousands of kids would fly and drive across the country to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to spend three days in the desert dancing to the beats of some 150 DJs would have seemed rather unlikely even, say, three years ago. Somehow the thing that everybody had predicted circa 1995—that electronic dance music (hereafter: EDM) would take over pop—had been delayed a mere seventeen years. In 2012, a gentleman named Skrillex, whose music sounds like a computerized raccoon fight, took home three Grammys, sweeping the electronic categories, and was the first EDM act to be nominated for Best New Artist. Deadmau5 appeared on the front page of The New York Times in his signature mouse head. Forbes estimated that Tiësto was averaging $83,000 an hour for his DJ sets. No corner deli went unthrobbed by a Calvin Harris beat. Why was this happening now? Was this really the rave scene's triumphant return, another retro craze for a culture increasingly addicted to accelerated nostalgia, or was this something different? There at the Speedway, the scene had grown so inclusive—Greek-letter tank tops and athletic jerseys—that it was hard to tell if it was a scene at all. I put the question to Peter, who was dressed in a symphony of gray: "When you look out at these people, do you see anything like a coherent style or culture?"

"You can tell sometimes by how people are dressed what genre they're into," he says. He gestures at a little flock of scant-vested people who could be parking attendants at a busy nudist colony. "Like, those kids in the Day-Glo neon, they're probably into house. And the kids who are in black or goth are probably into dubstep, and I guess the people who are into trance, like me, are harder to pick out."