There are some great DJs out there, here in the San Francisco Bay Area we were lucky to have groups like the Wicked crew, particularly DJs like Jeno and Simon, Sunset parties, full moon raves, etc mostly during the 90s. Some of those DJs still have a following today, I think largely based not just on their success back then, but also because you can distinguish their tracks, and you connect those tracks with great parties or events or moments you had back in the day. This is not unlike the music of my youth (which I consider much more impactful long-term and therefore more classic, more timeless than anything that falls under the unfortunate EDM umbrella terminology today) — beach parties listening to English Beat, rockin out to The Police on ski club trips, making love to my first girlfriend in college to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the latter being perhaps an exception to the prior examples of contemporary music having an impact during their time, yet also driving home further the overall point that certain music is just timeless. And simply due to the nature of “EDM” as a format if you will, it’s difficult to say that, other than perhaps one of these cathedral moments such as the picture for this article depicts, I suspect that masses of people won’t ever do something memorable in their lives while listening to any of EDM (especially the stuff that the corporate guys are peddling). But when you can tie pivotal events or moments in your life to a particular song, that song becomes a memory marker of sorts, perhaps even iconic. There’s a great line that Glen Frey of the Eagles said in their bio-documentary — “Somebody once told me ‘people didn’t just listen to the Eagles, people did things to the Eagles’. People broke up with their girlfriends. People quit their lives or changed their jobs. They did things to The Eagles.” I see so many comments on Youtube from Millenials and younger on songs from the 90s, 80, 70s and even 60s, about how great music was back then, and how crappy most of the stuff is that gets corporate airplay today and how they feel ripped off and “grew up during the wrong decade”. So much of today’s music is, in a nutshell, indistinguishable, and therefore unremarkable, and because of that, most if not all of it, will never become a memory marker of sorts to which large groups of people could ever tie pivotal, iconic events to. Then again, maybe that’s not the point of EDM and all its sub-genres, and if so, then it doesn’t really matter. But if it doesn’t really matter, then EMD itself probably doesn’t really matter either. Either that or I’m just turning into an old fart.