View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Occidental College Scholar Occidental College OxyScholar American Studies Student Scholarship American Studies 2015 “Music in Our Hearts, Not Music in the Charts”: An Analysis of the Contemporary Electronic Dance Music Scene Kathryn Arnett Occidental College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.oxy.edu/american_studies_student Recommended Citation Arnett, Kathryn, "“Music in Our Hearts, Not Music in the Charts”: An Analysis of the Contemporary Electronic Dance Music Scene" (2015). American Studies Student Scholarship. http://scholar.oxy.edu/american_studies_student/1 This Thesis/Dissertation is brought to you by the American Studies department at Occidental College via OxyScholar, an open access publishing platform and institutional repository. All student work published in OxyScholar has been approved by the student's faculty advisor. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 1 Kathryn Arnett Honors Senior Comps American Studies April 15, 2015 “Music in Our Hearts, Not Music in the Charts”: An Analysis of the Contemporary Electronic Dance Music Scene A room drips with sweat as hundreds of young people in bright colors dance sporadically to blaringly loud electronic music. Most are on MDMA, the amphetamine drug that produces feelings of empathy and increases tactile and auditory sensation. The disc jockey spins house music at 128 beats per minute, and as the bass pulsates through the room, the normal boundaries between self, other, music, and space dissolve into a euphoric oneness. This scene could accurately describe a rave during the scene’s fruition in the United States in the early 1990s, or it could describe an electronic dance music event held today, in 2015.