Story continues below

And just because the music bypasses the higher reasoning processes doesn't mean its fans are as stupid as some critics would like to believe. The derision towards the genre is typified for me in one of those screenshots that get passed around on Tumblr: Skrillex had posted a song by legendary British experimentalist Aphex Twin on his Facebook page, and the reactions from his young fans, as recorded in the screenshot, were variants on "cool music... but where's the drop?" Hand-wringing over the ignorance of the youth of America proceeded apace, but several people actually visited the Facebook page in question and noticed that the composer of the "screenshot" had actually edited out all the many enthusiastic fan reactions that didn't conform to the "kids are ignorant" narrative.

You might still be wondering what the fuss is about—hasn't electronic dance music been hugely popular, both commercially and critically, in a wide variety of forms, for almost four decades now? And of course you'd be right. Electronic music has evolved and fragmented since the days of Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and Giorgio Moroder in the 1970s, and has come to encompass everything from disco and synth pop to drum 'n' bass, jungle, and trip-hop. And electronic dance music did flirt with the U.S. mainstream in the unsettled late '90s, when a handful of British artists like Fatboy Slim and the Prodigy rode big, obvious grooves to alt-rock success.

Indeed, Skrillex and his peers freely admit to not having invented the building blocks of EDM's sound. But of course nothing ever was truly new. Syncopation had existed for centuries before jazz, and New Orleans musicians in the late 19th century simply applied the harmonic scale of the blues to the rhythm of ragtime via the medium of the marching band. Rock and roll was merely the lively step of Appalachian country given electric instrumentation and a blues structure. Hip-hop was simply funk built from records instead of live bands, with hype-men talking in rhythm over the beat, a novelty staple from vaudeville and Broadway. What all of these explanations leave out, of course, is the cultural context: the specific milieus that created, disseminated, and popularized each genre.

So it is with the current wave of EDM, which could be thumbnailed, back-of-envelope style, as being to hip-hop generally what rock and roll was to jazz: not a total overthrow of the dominant musical paradigm (though it was often billed as such at the time), but a paring down of ideas that had been present in the music from the beginning. When hip-hop challenged rock's dominance in the U.S. in the late '80s and '90s, it intersected with electronic dance music only tangentially, even though the same production methods and techniques are widely used in both musics, and they share a common source in disco. It wasn't until the turn of the millennium that entirely electronically programmed productions of hip-hop music became seen as the norm; for much of its history, rap's emphasis on streetwise realness and on sampling was paired with beats built from existing live-drumming breaks rather than those that were created electronically. But as the lines between dance-pop, synthesized R&B, and hip-hop blurred in the 2000s, the popularity of electronic dance music that featured the raw aggressiveness of hip-hop, but detached from rapping or break-beat syncopation, increased.