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"FacebookPinterest\n\n The growls are indecipherable. I don't know whether to attribute this to the chemicals in this man's system or to the burly forearm around his throat. He alternates between kicking furiously and letting his body go limp in the policeman's chokehold. Eventually, the cop gets him over to a gap in the fence, where I'm assuming he planned to just throw him out and be done with it. The man does something to anger him though, and the cop throws him on the ground. He's beginning to pull the man's arms around his back to cuff him when I turn and see no fewer than six more policemen converging, walkie-talkies still in hand. Various onlookers appear too zoned out to fully process the scene. Next to me, three people continue dancing to the street-side mini-stage, not noticing the commotion. Ahead of me, a shirtless man sways and careens into a fence. This scene is one of my first things I witness at Miami's Ultra Music Festival, the premier destination in the burgeoning electronic dance music (EDM) scene. Welcome to the zeitgeist.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n I originally came to Ultra because I know two young DJs, Ronnie Rose and Jon Janerich of CO/OP, who were on the bill for their first time. Ronnie convinced me to come down for the weekend; they'd get me a production pass and I could see the festival from a rarely glimpsed vantage point. EDM\u2014a sort of catch-all term that encompasses everything from old-school house to dubstep\u2014has, in a few decades, gone from a fringe-y culture of dark, sweaty, drug-filled nightclubs to a mainstream, sweaty, drug-filled festival circuit that can fill locations like Miami's Bayfront Park, in the shadows of cruise ships, yachts, and luxury hotels. This is the biggest thing going right now in youth culture.\n\n It's 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, the second day of the festival, when I arrive at CO/OP's room at the Epic Hotel. I walk out to the balcony, where Ronnie is supporting his lithe frame on the railing. He's shirtless and wearing black skinny jeans. A thin chain necklace dangles from his neck. Both he and his German girlfriend, Julia, are smoking. The view from the balcony is dominated by the sharp contrast between the hyper-cerulean of the hotel's pool and the murky Floridian green of the river lurking between the high rises. The table next to Julia holds an ashtray with half a dozen stubbed out cigarettes, loose remnants of late-night room service, and a pint of Bacardi. Ronnie occasionally turns back to the latter, taking straight shots from the bottle, never chasing. He hasn't eaten today. CO/OP's first set of the festival is in a few hours, and he's trying to calm his nerves.\n\n Jon arrives and tells Ronnie he wants to go over some of the transitions for their set. Transitions are the moments where DJs fade one song out and start bringing in the next, often manipulating effects and EQ levels in the process. They start to tinker with a moment in their set where they arrange Florence the Machine's \"You've Got the Love\" over an electro beat. Ricky, Ronnie's older brother and CO/OP's manager, walks in and jokes, \"What, you guys just learning to DJ right now?\"\n\n They're right to be a little anxious. Ultra has blown up in tandem with EDM's ascension. It has been a Mecca for years, but 2012 is only its second year as an all-encompassing, three-day spree. Almost every notable DJ on the scene is on the bill. If not quite a victory lap, the festival does seem celebratory. Beyond the party atmosphere, there's a certain reveling in the newness of all of this, of the collective fame suddenly draped on the scene.\n\n David Guetta became this generation's first major EDM pop star when he collaborated with the Black Eyed Peas on \"I Gotta Feeling.\" Avicii's \"Levels\" soundtracked a Budweiser commercial that ran during the Super Bowl. Despite losing the \"Best New Artist\" category, Skrillex won three awards at the 2012 Grammys. That night, Deadmau5 performed on the same show as Paul McCartney and Foo Fighters, actually performing with the latter. Around the same time, Skrillex, Diplo, and A-Trak appeared on the cover of Billboard together. Rolling Stone profiles of Diplo and Skrillex followed.\n\n So EDM has arrived, and Miami, long one of its hometowns, goes all out for Ultra. House and electro blast from even the most improbable places near the festival grounds\u2014an upscale steakhouse, poolside at the Epic Hotel, from the facade of a French bistro at 1 a.m. on Saturday. On Friday night, it feels like Skrillex alone has taken over this corner of the city. As I walk to the park, the red and white lights from Skrillex's set light up the sides of buildings hundreds of yards away. The rough rumble and scrape of his music sounds like a war zone from here, distorted by the distance. Earlier in the day, I stood next to Skrillex's DJ booth set when it was still backstage. It looks like a hybrid of a Cylon helmet and a Predator mask.\n\n Skrillex, \"Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites\"\n\n The first set I see is from Tommy Trash mid-afternoon on Friday at the Main Stage. I walk over with the CO/OP crew and we watch from backstage. The DJ booth is set up to accommodate multiple DJs, Ronnie explains, so that the next performer can come onstage and set up and, theoretically, one person's set can flow right into the next one, keeping the party going non-stop. Most DJs use equipment and software similar or compatible with the Pioneer CDJ-2000s that Ultra has on most stages, meaning that nearly all they have to do is show up and plug in a hard drive. Each individual set up consists of four CDJ-2000s, the digital stand-ins for turntables, all hooked up to one mir, often a 900 Nexus. The CDJ-2000s are what the songs are actually played on, and though you can manipulate a track with them, most of that comes in with the mirs, which have the EQ, effects, low, mid, hi, etc.\n\n Most forms of dance music are built on a basic principle: build and release. DJs ratchet up tension until they transition into another song or a \"drop.\" The latter is particularly characteristic of dubstep and electro, the branches of EDM currently dominating the mainstream and most prevalent at Ultra this year (and roughly what Tommy Trash plays). Drops occur when a song builds and builds and then evolves, quickly, into a harder, bass-heavy section. Jon stands beside me saying things like \"Wait 'til this drops hard.\" The common DJ move is a sort of hammer-like mid-air pounding, with DJs bringing their arm down especially hard after the drop. Some then throw both arms out wide in celebration, eliciting cheers. The pre-drop outstretched arm can start to look like a preacher's hand signal. I notice there aren't any female DJs. Like, at all.\n\n During Tommy Trash's set, I meet Arlen, a sound engineer for Skrillex and Bassnectar. Arlen has been a part of this scene for 14 years, promoting shows and working as an engineer for a variety of artists. He's seen it balloon, particularly in the last two years. I ask him about what sort of changes he's seen in the crowd. He says that \"bros\" are a new addition to the scene, and seem to be primarily drawn by the dubstep trend. The fact that EDM has been brought out into the mainstream, out from clubs and into parks, has also made it accessible to a younger crowd. He says some within the scene grumble about the recent crossover, but he doesn't seem to mind: The kids genuinely like the music, and that's cool.\n\n Most importantly, Arlen alludes to the paradox of EDM that drew me here\u2014the tension between the party and the more abstract, spiritual experience inherent to a dance show. As far back as the new psychedelia of the late '80s/early '90s rave scene, there are elements of both: the escapism of MDMA and a beat juxtaposed against the communal, the transcendental possibilities. It's an indistinct line. What parameters are used to judge whether something's escapist or transformative? Who judges?\n\n As I talk to Arlen, two dancers join Trash onstage, standing out in front of the DJ booth and leading the crowd. (The presence of dancers becomes perpetual throughout the weekend and almost always seems superfluous. The crowd never needs help getting riled.) They look like women out of some cyber-punk artifact: miniscule black faux-leather bikinis, gaudy sunglasses, occasional edgy strap accessories, giant fake hair like a plastic blonde ridge. Also, glittery body oil.\n\n After his set, I join Tommy Trash in his trailer and ask him about the moment that converted him from playing in Smashing Pumpkins-inspired rock bands to being an electro artist. His answer is one word: \"Ecstasy.\" The faintest bit of nostalgia colors his smirk.\n\n Later that night, after Ti\u00EBsto's set, I'm trying to find Skrillex backstage amongst the artist trailers. I meet Adam Sellers, a long-time devotee of the EDM scene, PR guy for Above Beyond and Twelfth Planet, and personal friend of Skrillex. I get the sense that Adam has spent many years of his life defending the legitimacy of this scene he loves so much. He calls it the happiest music in the world, stressing the communal quality of it. He feels no animosity toward the new contingent of mainstream fans. He claims the drug use is \"grossly exaggerated,\" and doesn't think EDM is escapist at all. We end our conversation with him telling me about a festival where he saw a man tear off all his clothes and start running around the barricaded walkway in front of a stage. It took the police tasing the man three times to make him finally fall, at which point three cops jumped onto his collapsed, hairy form.\n\n Thanks to my production pass, I'm able to interview Steve Aoki as we drive around the backstage grounds on one of the artist-transport carts. He talks about how the scene's taking off.\n\n \"2012 is a really exciting time in dance music,\" Aoki says. \"We're like a four-year-old child. And everybody's excited to see our cute little faces and fucking play with our hair and shit. In Europe, it's decades of electronic music being popular. You play festivals there and there's fucking moms pushing strollers with their kids.\"\n\n Aoki does seem to harbor some ambivalence about EDM's growth.\n\n \"The dance scene obviously has gained attention because, well, you're here,\" he says. \"We're gaining people's attention. But we're always going to be an underground music media form because we're based on the music rather than the vocals. For radio, for pop music, it's about the voice. We're building ourselves around the music. It's an experiential form of music. You have to experience it to understand it. I saw Daft Punk for the first time and it was fucking life-changing even though I was already a dance guy. I was once again reinvented. It gave me something that nothing else in life could give me and it was all samples and music.\"\n\n There are a few ways you can lose yourself at Ultra. Festivals have that quality\u2014the temporary mid with recurrence. Not one but several massive stages with incredibly expensive and intricate light systems. They're great at creating a world where you forget that outside world exists. Like really forget, like every now and then you need to look up at a building to be reminded \"Oh, yeah, I'm in Miami, bitch.\" (As hundreds of shirts proclaim over the weekend). Then, after it's over, it all starts to feel sort of dream-like, as if three days spent so intensely amongst a few people in such a specialized realm could only have been some collective hallucination.\n\n Of course, the music and the drugs are major escapes, as they have been in other contexts for years. But Ultra and other EDM festivals operate on a different level. For one thing, you can see it in the eyes. It doesn't matter who tells you that tales of drug use are exaggerated. Some people here are flat-out gone.\n\n Then there's the costumes. The rave girl aesthetic is alive and well: nothing but a bikini, sometimes colored hair or accessories like fairy wings, always some sort of knee-high stocking\u2014often furry, usually neon. American Indian headdresses are big. Plastic pacifiers that light up. One guy has a Styrofoam hat made to look like a white alligator head. Another has a strange plastic staff sticking out of his backpack, with a snake's head on top. Beyond entering the festival world removed from the real world, festivalgoers adopt temporary personas to escape.\n\n These are really the bells and whistles, though. The primary difference with the escapist potential of EDM music vs. your typical festival has to do with the basic structures of EDM music. By its very nature\u2014the fact that it's designed to dance to rather than to be performed, per se\u2014EDM is repetitive. It builds, releases, but that release doesn't necessarily signify alteration or progression. More often than not, the same four-on-the-floor pulse throbs underneath everything. Even sober, it draws you in and before you know it, 30 minutes have passed.\n\n It's music to lose yourself in. But I'm not sure what you're left with when it's over. There hasn't been a message, a cathartic release over the course of an hour-long set. I look around me each night, everyone's wasted, or rolling, or whatever, and fixated on the stage, fist-pumping steadily. People don't seem to be dancing with each other. There's not exactly a moment that stands out over another. People cheer on cue, whenever that drop hits. You're just lost.\n\n It's a bizarre tension between community and isolation, escaping yourself and escaping into yourself. On the first night, Ti\u00EBsto's graphics tell the story. Surrounded by hundreds of square feet of LED screens hung around the stage, Ti\u00EBsto is a tiny man spot-lit on a massive stage. The screens turned into massive, green, ghostly crowd shots. They are misty, spectral, and here is Ti\u00EBsto, the individual surrounded by the blurry exterior of that indistinct community around him.\n\n Moments like these push me into the camp that sees the scene as, well, hedonistic. Nobody I talk to this weekend outright says that, necessarily. People allude to the general increase in the prominence of a party atmosphere. With the frat crowd comes more people who want to get out of their minds. People care less about the music than they used to, and the popular strands of EDM trade on a structure that indulges that desire. Nobody asks why. Nobody wonders what particular cultural or societal condition could be behind the wildfire popularity of a music scene that can so easily be construed escapist and not much else. And why would they? This is the party.\n\n I have a theory, one that subliminally informs basically every conversation I've had with a DJ or fan at Ultra. EDM getting so big with Millennials says something about the conditions of the generation. There's a perverse pressure on them. On one hand, we've been raised with the notion that we are the generation that can change things. We're progressive, modern. We've grown up in tandem with the digital revolution and will make great strides with the technology at our fingertips.\n\n And yet, with all this, we have a set of problems to inherit that seem to be ever growing and ever more severe. Political gridlock and inefficacy. Precarious economy. Lack of jobs as the cost of education reaches ludicrous levels. Climate change. Global political fallout from decades of decolonization and, on our part, bullying. Nobody I know who grew up in the '90s was raised to expect any of that.\n\n Few are conscious of this, but it's there, it's embedded. There's a sensation of paralysis, of great unease about the future in most people I know my age. So the sudden rise of a scene where you can chase oblivion makes sense. The moment where our collective inertia may have elevated a form of music not for its merits (which exist), but for the fact that it can represent what we really want: an exit door with strobe borders, a rabbit hole lined in lasers. I'm talking about the moment where the attraction of EDM becomes precisely those three days where you can so fully enmesh yourself in the music that you go beyond the point of thinking or caring about what you might be escaping from. Not catharsis. Erasure.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n It's Saturday, day two. I interview Lorin Ashton, who performs as Bassnectar. Lorin is perhaps the most unlikely of the DJs I talk to at Ultra. After growing up in a hippie commune, he got into death metal, punk, and grunge (and still looks it, with metal-god hair down to his lower back). He never got too into drugs and assumed he'd wind up a guidance counselor or teacher. MMA fighters intrigue him because of \"how their minds work philosophically.\" He's exceedingly friendly and open, eager to share thoughts on the scene; he actually gives me his personal e-mail address for follow-up questions when we run out of time.\n\n For Lorin, the EDM scene is all about the communal possibilities. He's interested in the \"anthropological study of community\" and underground music events. \"The rave was the first social experience of my life where I didn't feel any type of physical danger,\" he says.\n\n To him, the explosion of EDM is a positive motion, a catharsis in and of itself. Via email, he writes that he views it as a movement in which youth culture is rejecting \"the paradigm it's been offered and [is] claim[ing] something new and raw and unique as their own...There has been an almost unanimous acceptance that while we still want our music 'live' and 'loud' we want it as big, thick, heavy, extreme, and rich as possible.\"\n\n Given the aggressive nature of both his old band From First to Last and Skrillex, I expected Sonny Moore aka Skrillex to be, well, edgier. Truth is, he's one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. He's diminutive, probably no more than 5'6, with a slight build. During his shows, a giant virtual avatar, a robot figure, on the screen behind him mimics his moves.\n\n Moore seems more gracious than you might expect of a 24-year-old overnight sensation. In a few years, he's gone from crashing on friends' couches to one of EDM's crossover stars. Meteoric rise or not, Moore has put in his time as the starving artist. I ask him if he feels any pressure as a representative of the scene to the rest of the world because of the Grammys, the Billboard cover, the Rolling Stone profile, etc.\n\n \"I don't think about the mainstream,\" he says. \"Actually, I feel less pressure now. Now I have a lot of freedom.\"\n\n What does he attributes the scene's growth to?\n\n \"I really have no idea, man,\" he says, casually. \"And I don't think anyone should really be trying to figure it out.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Predictably, Madonna's guest appearance at the beginning of Avicii's set causes a lot of trouble backstage. Suddenly, random passages are forbidden, and there's no access allowed to the stage. One manager tells me that an entire patch behind one corner of the main stage, populated by port-a-johns and construction machinery, was set aside so Madonna could practice singing. (None of us believe she actually did any singing onstage.) After being routed around and refused entry at several points on the festival grounds\u2014despite being armed with both production passes and VIP badges\u2014the boys from CO/OP and I find ourselves on the VIP decks overlooking the crowd and Main Stage.\n\n Avicii, \"Levels\"\n\n The Heineken VIP deck is under a giant white tent and populated with white vinyl couches. There are tall tables dotting the deck, and each couch is accompanied by a coffee table. They're all metal with plastic insets that glow green from within. The bar, situated in the center of the deck, is constructed in the same way. Someone keeps blowing a whistle for no apparent reason, woefully out of time with the music. The floor is slick with spilled alcohol. As Avicii's set nears conclusion\u2014climaxing and ending with his infectious \"Levels\"\u2014I spy two members of the cleaning crew fixing themselves whiskey and cokes at the bar. This is how the second day ends. All of us are too worn out from the pre-set madness of Madonna's impending arrival to care much about Avicii's set.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Ashley is a 20-year-old photographer just as native to EDM as she is to Miami. She's been coming to Ultra since her mid-teens, and consequently tempers her affection with a sober and realistic view of the festival and its attendees. Also, she's gorgeous. It's an easy decision to follow her around for half the festival.\n\n I first meet her backstage at M83's truncated Saturday set. She's here working for Ultra in some capacity, but also for the University of Miami's primarily EDM station, WVUM. The next day, I decide to take in some random daytime shows. I'm on the scaffolding overlooking the Main Stage when Ashley shows up. Those dancers are out again. The crowd still doesn't need any encouragement, and those dancers still have that weird fake hair on.\n\n Over the course of the day, I walk around with Ashley on and off. Based on what she hears while working at WVUM, she thinks the disco-house of Duck Sauce is indicative of what might be next for the scene. She too has noticed the lack of female DJs, but doesn't seem bothered. According to her, the drug use was more extreme when she first started going to Ultra. She saw crack and heroin. But she says the partying is more widespread now, a more ingrained and prevalent characteristic of the scene. She attributes this to the younger contingent, the high school and college kids who just want to get wasted. I never ask her about her own experience, or lack thereof, with drugs.\n\n Ashley and I go to see Flying Lotus at the amphitheater stage, which is unusual at Ultra for the fact that it's at the base of a moderately sized seating area. Lorin (of Bassnectar) is backstage for Fly Lo's set and confesses he's worried about playing there later that night. \"We've destroyed places with seats before...\" he trails off.\n\n The counter-argument to this hedonistic weekend, and the scene in general, is Flying Lotus. A self-admitted outsider, Steven Ellison takes the \"album as an album\" experience more seriously than most. His set draws on hip-hop, free jazz, tribal rhythms, and a variety of EDM approaches, with surprises like Portishead's \"Machine Gun\" and Radiohead's \"Idioteque.\" His shows are closer to concerts than dances, light-years away from the sets by DJs like Ti\u00EBsto or Guetta.\n\n If the unrelenting throb of electro somehow reflects and provides escape from the paralysis, Ellison's music does the opposite. Skittering, off-kilter rhythmic shifts, bleeps and bloops that have more in common with a frenetic sax solo, strings, albums that are classical in their song cycle format. This is the small pocket of EDM, the fringe where it becomes spiritual. Ellison's music utilizes the push and pull of strange rhythms and sounds to build towards catharses and unforeseen resolutions. This is EDM that can take you on a journey.\n\n Flying Lotus, \"Galaxy in Janaki\"\n\n Ellison is not aloof or strange. He seems humble. After his set, Ashley and I follow him and his entourage into his trailer to talk. He's casual; he asks me if I'm doing this story \"in a Hunter S. Thompson way.\" He cracks up when he finds out I'm from Scranton, Pennsylvania. His friend jokes about someone telling them how in Miami \"We smoke weed out of receipts!\" Ellison dreams of what he could do with his live show if he was big enough to tour stadiums, the sort of light show he could put to his music. He talks about how free jazz and improvisation have always been in his life.\n\n \"Especially with [his 2010 album] Cosmogramma, man, I was really moved by my aunt's [Alice Coltrane] work then, when my mom passed away. I was really, like, taking in the family music a lot,\" he says. \"I heard the Lord of Lords album she did and I was like 'I want my shit to be like that.'\"\n\n Ellison, citing metaphysics, dreams, and lucidity as inspiration, hopes to continue pursuing that same goal with his forthcoming album, Until the Quiet Comes.\n\n \"I wanted my shit to be forever. Not just a trend, a sound.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Sunday draws to a close with a series of heavy-hitters on the Main Stage, with Guetta and Armin Van Buuren bringing the whole thing down. Tonight's more unhinged than the first night with Ti\u00EBsto, certainly more than the security-stifled night when Madonna joined Avicii for all of five minutes. Fans are jumping the wall and dancing in the walkway. There are tons of Ultra staff members, but they're far more preoccupied handing out glow sticks and big glow tubes to audience members. They walk up and down with giant cardboard bos, tossing them into cresting waves of hands. Ricky and I run up and down the walkway, ducking under what feels like a firefight as fans throw the incandescent tubes back and forth across the center aisle. Up here, the bass is unbelievably powerful. It feels like it takes over your entire body, becomes one with your head and gut, restructures you molecularly. Something's different tonight.\n\n During Guetta's set, there's a woman sitting on the wall separating the crowd from the center walkway. She asks me what short people are supposed to do at concerts and who I write for. I tell her, and she looks back towards the stage with a smile that's hard to read. She starts telling me how she's spent the last several years in South America, and finds the EDM scene here in America uncomfortable ever since moving back late last year.\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n \"Because nobody cares about the music! It's all about the drugs.\"\n\n In the background, Guetta proclaims \"This is the biggest party in the world!\"\n\n \"And it wasn't like that in South America?\"\n\n She purses her lips, looks at me like I've suddenly shape-shifted into Deadmau5 before her, and shakes her head near-comically.\n\n \"No, no. There are like, no drugs there. Here, though. It's just about getting fucked up now.\"\n\n As if on cue, her male friend lurches back and starts trying to talk to her half upside-down, half over his shoulder. He looks like the bro contingent that's relatively new to the scene. His eyes are looking out to something past us and he repeatedly asks for water. He keeps smiling, though. She gives me a \"See what I told you?\" meets \"Well, what can you do\" sort of look and follows her friends to get some refreshments in the downtime between sets.\n\n Something's different tonight. When you're actually out in it, under the array of lights, feeling the pyrotechnics shoot up from the top of the stage a hundred yards away, surrounded on both sides by a parted sea of thousands of people losing their shit\u2014this is where, for a moment, I'm unable to keep thinking about this as escapist. What's happening here? Nothing's changed ostensibly; everyone still has that wasted fixation on the stage, everyone's still diving deeper into that oblivion.\n\n I came to Ultra with prejudices, judgments. But I want to think the explosion of EDM is representative of something positive. I want to think that the mass enthusiasm is one of catharsis, not escapism. I want to think that people are seeking release and transformation, not oblivion. But the line between escape-as-therapy and escape-as-oblivion is tricky. I still have my doubts, but I want to think that the EDM scene isn't just a symptom of a generational malaise or paralysis, that it could actually be transformative. I want to think that it isn't just another rabbit hole to lose ourselves in."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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