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 Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America is a history by the music journalist Michaelangelo Matos, published by Dey Street Books in the spring of 2015. Its publisher describes it as tracing electronic dance music from its roots in American techno and house and the rave culture of the 1990s to the top of the concert business, and as showing the music growing up with the early internet. The book is built around eighteen events, none of which, Matos writes, he attended. Its evidence is more than three hundred interviews, the American rave zines and the archives of six rave mailing lists. Reviews were mixed. Nick Bazzano, in VICE, called it as breathless as the movement it documents and set it beside Energy Flash and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, though he found it weak on the politics of the music’s rise, loose in structure and thin on criticism. Mitch Lillie, in Willamette Week, praised it as a tribute to dance music while faulting it for leaving out Asia.

Matos, a music journalist, published the book with Dey Street Books. Goodreads dates the edition to April 28, 2015, the day Willamette Week reviewed it, while VICE wrote on May 6 that it was out in the United States that week and due in Britain in early June.^{1, 2, 3} Its publisher’s description sets it beside Please Kill Me and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.¹ The description says the book traces electronic dance music from “American techno/house and ’90s rave culture” to “the biggest moneymaker on the concert circuit,” and that it shows how the music grew “in tandem with the nascent Internet,” as the first online forums linked partygoers across the country.¹ In the introduction Matos writes that he “attended precisely zero of the events for which the chapters are named,” and that the plan of the chapters kept shifting while he wrote.⁴ Judy Berman of Flavorwire described the book as turning eighteen events into “set pieces,” and Matos told her that his proposal had twenty-five parts and that the ending came only after the 2014 Grammys, at which Daft Punk won.⁵

Matos told Huw Oliver of VICE in May 2015 that, of his written sources, the most important were the archives of six rave mailing lists kept on the Hyperreal site, which he searched as PDFs and from which he took “probably a couple of thousand pages of stuff.”³ Oliver put the number of interviews at more than three hundred. Matos told Flavorwire that he also gathered the American rave zines, made an index of them and typed out what he needed.^{3, 5}

Matos writes that the term “EDM,” as a shortening of “electronic dance music,” “originates in academia: Scholars began using it because it had no connotations to specific styles (‘house,’ ‘techno’) or sites (‘rave,’ ‘club music’).”⁴

The reviews by Nick Bazzano and Mitch Lillie were both mixed. Bazzano, reviewing the book for VICE in May 2015, called it “a huge, crazy, breathless beast trying to document a huge, crazy, breathless movement” and placed it with Simon Reynolds’s Energy Flash and Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. He found what “feels like a lack of sober, even-tempered curation,” and wrote that Matos “misses the mark when it comes to representing the politics of said conquest.” Despite what it lacks “in overall coherence and critical engagement,” he wrote, it gives an account of the music’s spread that “feels much more immersive, immediate, and affectively charged than other history books in the past.” He ended by advising readers to accept that so vast a story can’t be told without wearing them out, after which, he found, the book becomes a pleasure.⁶ Mitch Lillie, in Willamette Week in April 2015, called it “a monument to dance music,” wrote that its “omission of Asia entirely is unforgivable,” and faulted it for not explaining why “nearly everybody” is disappointed in the term EDM.²

Key contributions

• A history of electronic dance music in America from house and techno through 1990s rave culture to the concert business of the 2010s.
• The music’s growth traced together with the early internet, through zines and mailing-list archives.
• A history told through eighteen events, reconstructed from more than three hundred interviews.

See also

• Last Night a DJ Saved My Life — Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s 1999 history of the DJ
• Love Saves the Day — Tim Lawrence’s 2003 history of American dance culture in the 1970s