Matos — The Underground Is Massive

Author: Michaelangelo Matos
Title: The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America
Year: 2015
Type: Book (Dey Street Books)

The American half of the rave story got its historian from a witness who missed the parties. Matos went to his first rave in 1993 and came up through the Midwest scene, and the book he built runs as eighteen landmark events told as set pieces, cut down from the twenty-five in his proposal, with an ending he found only after Daft Punk swept the 2014 Grammys.¹ The introduction admits he “attended precisely zero of the events for which the chapters are named.”² The reconstruction ran on the archive: the six rave mailing lists whose archives survive on Hyperreal, resaved as PDFs and word-searched on an iPad until they yielded “probably a couple of thousand pages of stuff,” a library of American rave zines he retyped as he went, and more than three hundred interviews, with Derrick May reportedly the best and wisest of them.³

The arc runs from the Chicago and Detroit beginnings — Frankie Knuckles’ club floors, the Belleville Three’s teen-party circuit — through the nineties archipelago of regional scenes, the Furthur campground festivals among them, past the “electronica” push and into the festival decade, when the industry settled on a three-letter name for what it was selling.⁴ Its central argument is about that name. EDM, Matos argues, is a format: “A radio format is not the same thing as a genre. It’s a formula. It’s 40 percent this, 20 percent that.”⁵ The blend is the one a nineties rave already drew from house, techno, jungle, and trance, with the market now doing the mixing. He had kept his distance from the commercial boom for years; the 2012 IDentity Festival pulled him back in as a reporter, into what the book’s own press was already calling “an estimated $6.2 billion business.”⁶

Reception split along the book’s fault line. VICE’s reviewer called it “a huge, crazy, breathless beast trying to document a huge, crazy, breathless movement” and set it beside Energy Flash and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop; the same review found the breathlessness a cost, a “lack of sober, even-tempered curation,” and faulted the account for telling a conquest with the politics left out.⁷ Willamette Week called the result “a monument to dance music” while flagging what the monument omits — Asia entirely, and any reckoning with why “nearly everybody” winces at the term the majors minted.⁸ The pairing with Simon Reynolds was literal: the two launched the book in conversation at Skylight Books in Los Angeles in May 2015.⁹ The shelf divides the territory the same way: Energy Flash is the UK-centered telling with America as prologue; Matos’s is the America-first history — the country that invented house and techno, the decades it spent ignoring them, and the decade it finally didn’t.

Key contributions

• The America-first history of the rave decades: the Chicago and Detroit origins, the nineties regional scenes, “electronica,” and the 2010s boom in one continuous telling.
• The format argument: “EDM” names the market’s shifting formula, a radio format laid over the genres it draws from.
• The archive method: reconstruction from the Hyperreal mailing-list archives, retyped zines, and three hundred interviews, none of the title events attended.
• The party-per-chapter architecture: landmark events as set pieces, ending at the 2014 Grammys.

See also

• Please Kill Me — the oral history the publisher ranked it beside on arrival
• Last Night a DJ Saved My Life — the DJ’s-eye world history beside this book’s American close-up
• Love Saves the Day — the seventies party lineage this book’s first chapters inherit
• Electronic Dance Music — the umbrella note this book informs, beside Energy Flash

Footnotes

1. The 1993 first rave per the Skylight Books event page; the Midwest years per Huw Oliver’s VICE interview, May 6, 2015; the eighteen set pieces, the twenty-five-part proposal, and the late-arriving Grammys ending per Judy Berman’s Flavorwire interview (all accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

2. Quoted from the book’s introduction in Nick Bazzano’s VICE review, May 7, 2015 (accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

3. The Hyperreal method and the page-count quote per Huw Oliver’s VICE interview, May 6, 2015 — “The main source was the six mailing lists whose archives are available on Hyperreal”; the interview also reports the 300-plus interviews and Derrick May’s standing among them. The retyped zines per the Flavorwire interview — “I ended up retyping a lot of things as I encountered them, which proved useful” (both accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

4. The span per the publisher’s description on Goodreads and Skylight’s event copy, which names Frankie Knuckles and the Belleville Three at one end and the arena acts at the other; the Furthur festivals as a covered micro-movement per Mitch Lillie’s Willamette Week review (all accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

5. The Flavorwire interview, quoted verbatim (accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

6. The IDentity Festival re-entry per the Flavorwire interview; the industry estimate per the Skylight event copy (both accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

7. The VICE review, quoted verbatim — “Matos misses the mark when it comes to representing the politics of said conquest—or critiquing it” (accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

8. The Willamette Week review, quoted verbatim (accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

9. The May 8, 2015 launch event per the Skylight Books event page (accessed August 20, 2026). ↩