The Persistence of the Underground in Dance Music Scenes

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Numerous texts on the emergence of electronic dance music in the late 1980s document its non-commercial origins (Reynolds, 1999; Bainbridge, 2014). Recent books focus on dance music's mainstream popularity and associated economy, especially in the USA where it has been culturally rebranded as EDM (Matos, 2016; Collin, 2018). However, there has been little music scholarship investigating the ongoing prevalence of deliberately marginal 'underground' dance scenes, which would reject association with the initials 'EDM'. Revealingly, despite widespread use of the term 'underground', it is scarcely defined in either popular or academic literature. Furthermore, underground dance music is also not a concept that can be clearly delineated as a distinct musical genre. Both mainstream and underground dance music's compositional processes, improvisational forms, and sonic qualities are remarkably similar (Butler, 2014). However, whilst the same actor roles are at play in both, the usage and expectations of musical experience appear to differ for participants. The proposed research aims to contribute a fresh perspective to the body of knowledge on dance music cultures through a case study of a particular city's underground scene and derive an understanding of what the 'underground' is.