2013: The Year We Gave Up All Hope

Brandon Soderberg reflects on the state of dance music in 2013.

Take a listen through the dance charts this year and you'll walk away with a sense that 2013 was defined by a palpable sense of hopelessness. Consider "Clarity" by Zedd, a suicide note of a torch song that's pretty much about losing your mind, and not in the "go fawkin' nuts bruh" way, but in the, like, "your brain isn't working right and you might need to be committed" way. Then, there's the nihilistic throbbing of Martin Garrix's "Animals," a track that bounces between Giorgio Moroder riffage and Zombie Nation stomp, cut with hellish vocals and screams, and ultimately lacking the kind of cathartic drop that could ease the paranoid tension.

Garrix's smash single, which recently surpassed a hundred million view on Youtube, shares its name with Pink Floyd's deeply cynical "fuck our fans" anthem from 1977, and seems telling of how the larger EDM-industrial-complex views its ardent festival-goers—they're animals. In a year that marked the largest monetization of dance music in history—by way of massive outdoor concerts that at times resemble sporting events, and a nation-wide media circus around bad drugs—it's no surprise that even populist Billboard-topping dance got dark.

You heard this in the way that dance music embraced hip hop's blend of aggression and pessimism, birthing "trap" music in the process. The divisive little genre SEO-bombed its way into the mainstream by way of Baauer and Mad Decent and Google's "Harlem Shake," and was explored by edgier producers like RL Grime and UZ. Jacking a style of rap and removing the rapping element altogether is hardly ideal fusion, but trap was still important given the larger whitewashing of pop: Rihanna was the only black artist with a single in Billboard's Top 20 year-end chart. Meanwhile, EDM treated rap verses and R&B-style hooks like acessories to its domineering maximalism.

Chicago, a city often perceived as synonymous with hopelessness, thrived this year. Eerie, dance-friendly albums from Kanye West (Yeezus) and Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails' Hesitation Marks) looked back to dusty, Chicago house grooves from the past to make "we're all screwed" statements about the present. The windy city's nascent drill scene (Chief Keef, Katie Got Bandz, and Lil Durk) and contorted footwork sound (DJ Rashad, RP Boo, Traxman) were aural mean-mugs whose insularity resisted trap-style co-opting, allowing the artists to experiment even as their profiles raised.

Yes, dance music had its cheerier moments in 2013: Daft Punk's late-70s soft-rock explorations on Random Access Memories, Arcade Fire's nervy disco with James Murphy on Reflektor, and Disclosure's critically-acclaimed debut album, Settle, with its ingestion of Chicago and Jersey house tempered by hip-hop and garage (and let us not forget Avicii's True). But those are big deal exceptions to 2013's soundtrack-to-everything-falling-apart rule. Plus, that fact that 2013's only optimistic moments are picked from another, simpler time, is its own kind of nightmare scenario.

The majority of pop seemed rather dire, anyway. Along with Zedd and Martin Garrix, there's Krewella's "Alive," a song that talks so much about what makes them feel alive that it makes you wonder how often they do, in fact, feel alive. The trio's 2013 EP is titled Get Wet—almost eponymous with Andrew WK's I Get Wet—and it triples down on the "party til you puke" attitude, which is really fun if you don't think about how sad it is.

Then, there's Icona Pop's This Is…, a shit-talking dance record exploding with the pained intensity of hardcore and even cribbing a few moves from punk's shouting, crew vocals-style. In Harmony Korine's trap song-in-movie-form flick Spring Breakers, the "I crashed my car into a bridge, I watched, I let it burn" of "I Love It," was visualized when the movie's dubsteppin', hard partyin' girls swiped a professor's El Camino and used it to rob a chicken joint to go to Spring Break (or rather, Spranggg Breakkkk), burned that car in a field, and hopped on a bus to Fort Lauderdale to full-stop embrace EDM party culture. Typically, Skrillex, who fashions himself some sort of millennial Aphex Twin, though he's more like a Fatboy Slim who wishes he were Moby (not that there's anything wrong with that, Moby's soulful Innocents from this year was quite good), was upset at how his music was used in the movie, suddenly confronted with close-ups of his audience instead of his typical legs wide at a laptop stance a few hundred feet away from everybody on a stage.

Look at it this way: That Lana Del Rey's longing-filled dirge "Summertime Sadness" was fit to receive a propulsive remix by Cedric Gervais, speaks to dance's desire to find music about collapsing to the ground and sobbing. None of these emotions are new in dance music mind you, which has always been about the catharsis that occurs when beats take over your body and everybody else you're hanging out with, and you can shake your dread out, but there seemed to be a special desperation to it this year. And what was hiding just below the surface of the mainstream if, you were listening closely, was unearthed and proudly displayed by the underground.

Although Kelela's high-profile mixtape Cut 4 Me imagined Taylor Swift-style confessional platitudes—if Tay-Tay's training was less country and more Mid-Atlantic party music—Fade To Mind releases like Kingdom's Vertical XL, and Nguzunguzu's Skycell were future-goth sounds to blast across the uncanny valley. When these tracks weren't outwardly horrifying like Nguzunguzu's "Mecha," they were eerily anti-septic. The shiny sound of artificiality perfected—not that far off from Oneohtrix Point Never's R Plus Seven.

Gesaffelstein (who had production credits on Yeezus' "Black Skinhead" and "Send It Up," which featured Chicago's King L) transposed leathery industrial beats into hard techno on Aleph, puckishly topping the steroidal rage of aggro-EDM. Meanwhile, Drive soundtrack hero Kavinsky's OutRun shoved Daft Punk's disco nostalgia down a flight of stairs, replacing it with the spazzing sounds of a mid-80s cocaine overdose. And don't forget Prurient's 10-minute plus techno investigations on Through The Window, which really don't sound all that different from Garrix's "Animals," if you're honest with yourself.

Which brings us to the year's most pervasive and frustrating trend: snobbery. Despite key crossover points between the underground and the pop charts—Beyoncé's @LILINTERNET-directed video, the Yeezus production credits for Arca and Hudson Mohawke—the amount of vitriol between the cool kids and the rest of us was palpable. This year, EDM crystallized into a keyword that connotes not just music, but an aesthetic, a mythology, a politics, and an expectation in terms of the experience of what EDM culture demands. The newly risen American festival scene, with its high density of preteens and its semi-fascist collective arm thrusting, has started to feel a little bit like our generation's hair metal—so the snobs have gone further underground to avoid it all.

Still, adjustments to mainstream dance's off-putting macho qualities found on M.I.A.'s Matangi (especially bro-call out "Boom Skit") and clips of trans* filmmaker Lana Wachowski at the end of Burial's "Come Down To Us" off Rival Dealer were vital. Nevertheless, all of us consuming dance—listening to it, moving to it, downloading it, molly-ing their brains away to it—aren't all that different. Whether we're at Electric Daisy Carnival or an RSVP-only Fade To Mind warehouse party whose specific location would be revealed day of the show, we're all in this together, dancing our pain away.