Michaelangelo Matos is remembering a particularly farcical moment from his days raving in the Midwest: "This woman was just making an ass of herself on the microphone. She was clearly fucked up on something. I remember being in the crowd watching her, standing next to these two girls. And I was like 'Who the hell is that making an idiot of herself on stage like that?' The girl didn't look at me, and she goes, 'that's my mom.'"
It's funny, and we can all imagine the girl's mortification, but then the story of rave in America is not one of grace, restraint, and really sound decisions. It's the story Matos tackles in his new book The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America. The book begins in a familiar place, tracing the origins of house and techno in Chicago and Detroit, but ends in one far more alien to fans and scholars of underground music: at Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas and then finally Daft Punk's Grammy ascendancy in 2014.
The Underground Is Massive carefully separates the formation and persistence of rave as a culture—what it meant to dance and dress and trip in America—from genre and artist taxonomies. The book is the first of its kind, focusing exclusively on U.S., making connections between the celebrated underground scenes and the big-tent events they birthed.
It's the rare book on musical history from which you will not walk away with a laundry list of music to explore. "The book is not about recordings," Matos notes. "It took a long time to figure out the structure because it is a minefield." The structure he settled on tells the story of rave through, well, raves, with each chapter using a historically significant party as its organizing principle. The end result is something like an Our Band Could Be Your Life for parties, and anyone old enough to have attended these events in the 90s will likely walk away with a fair dose of regret.
The book isn't about records, but it's also not about artists. Though Moby emerges as somewhat of a central figure—he alternates moments of extreme kindness and humility with rare pomposity, and he does so continually over the course of two decades—the story is better told through concert promoters like New Orlean's Disco Donnie and Los Angeles' Pasquale Rotella, who was organizing underground events for decades before striking gold with Electric Daisy Carnival. Tommy Sunshine, another of the book's principals, perhaps best exemplifies the way rave culture ensnared its fans, as Sunshine went from a drugged out teenager road-tripping across the midwest to running a record store in Atlanta, to, finally, an artist and a DJ who helped popularize the electroclash scene in New York. "Following the timeline of people like Tommy and people like Pasquale and Richie Hawtin you know a lot of the people who really thread the whole narrative," said Matos.
Indeed, the book exposes a long list of characters—Moby, Rotella, Bad Boy Bill, Steve Aoki—who, despite being ignored or ridiculed by underground music fans, have deep, earned roots in American dance culture. "Steve Aoki was shocking to me. Occasionally people are like what’s the most surprising thing you found out about? And it’s that Steve Aoki was actually important and meaningful," Matos says of Aoki, who cut his teeth in LA's mid-2000s scene but is often regarded as a crass opportunist. "He’s a really smart person and a really good business-man and a really savvy guy. He’s clearly trying to make himself into the sort of P. Diddy of dance music. Throwing cake at people? That’s great theater."
Still, Matos bristles when I suggest that dance music, and its behind-the-scenes promoters and organizers, is bad at mythologizing itself. "Dance music is superb at mythologizing itself," he corrects. "What they’re bad at is giving a shit whether anybody outside of dance music knows it or not."
The Underground Is Massive goes to some lengths to correct that, though it was originally supposed to end with 2003's RAVE Act, the congressional bill that effectively shuttered rave culture as it had existed in the 90s. "I didn’t think at first I was going to try to connect what happened at [formative Chicago house venue] the Warehouse with Frankie Knuckles to the modern day EDM," Matos said.
The book is never a personal history of Matos' time as a raver, but its final chapters on EDM pushed him into new areas. "You go in and there’s culture existing in front of you," Matos says of a pilgrimage to Electric Daisy Carnival. "I certainly recognize what I was seeing because it was a metastasized version of what I had been doing in the 90s. The makeup of it was very different. When I was going to raves, the kids who went to raves were the kids who didn’t want or fit into other subcultures or in some cases they were part of other subcultures but then they drifted into this one. What I was seeing wasn’t subcultural at all. EDM is not outsider music. It’s tucked right into the mainstream. That’s what threw me when I went to that first event: These kids are not here to express their difference."
Still, Matos recognizes the populist appeal. "I was having a conversation with a colleague and we were just both like, 'Bassnectar, who the hell cares about Bassnectar?' Well, tons of people care about Bassnectar. More people care about Bassnectar than care about all the labels I liked combined," he said. "This is a big mainstream culture now and to expect it to be oppositional is silly. It’s like people damning Green Day in 1994 or Nirvana in 1991, original punks damning them for being popular."
When I press him on whether the culture has lost something in the transition, Matos is typically realistic: "I do miss the oppositional aspect of it. Of course I’m going to mourn my youth. That’s my job as an old man right?" he chuckles. "It’s not anybody else’s job. Fifteen-year-olds who are discovering the joys of dancing to music...I sure as hell hope they’re not weeping for me because I don’t want them to. I want them to have a good time."