Dance music’s cognoscenti (ie—those who pay work in that neck of the music business) are stoked at the announcement that EDM will get it’s share of the spotlight at this year’s Grammy Awards. Nominee Deadmau5 will perform live with The Foo Fighters, while dance-pop crossover sensation David Guetta will raise his hands behind the decks along with Chris Brown and Lil Wayne.
This has already been a red-letter year for dance music makes and fans as far as the traditionally conservative Grammys are concerned. Dubstep sensation Skrillex leads the nominee pack with five to his name, including Best New Artists (the first EDM performer to be nominated.) Deadmau5, Guetta, Swedish House Mafia and Duck Sauce also racked up nods in 2012. But even though Dance Music has had its own categories since 2003, the award show has struggled to find a place onstage for performances by acts whose stage activity involves little more than pushing buttons.
The solution in 2012 is to take the acts off the stage and put them in a 1000 person tent outside of the Staples Center, where the two combined acts will perform for a standing (and hopefully dancing) crowd. This is a novel idea by the typically unimaginative Grammys—although success is certainly not ensured. Anyone remember when MTV decided to have acts perform in hotel rooms at one of their VMA? No? Well, it sucked.
The nature of dance music is almost always in the context of the party (or home headphone listening). The current swell of popularity for dance music has as much to do with the eye-melting visual displays most artist tour with than it does the music itself. And almost all tracks, even the ones with rock/pop/hip-hop elements, work best when played as part of a larger musical set, with peaks and valleys. Not the “three, two , one, go!” format of TV performances. And the fact that this whole production still requires rappers, singers and long-haired guys with guitars onstage shows that acceptance is only half-way there, at least as far as the 40+ crowd who produces (and we suspect watches) the Grammys are concerned.
Best case scenario, this exercise in trying to fit a square peg into a round hole will be respectable, though ultimately forgettable. Worst case, it will mark the point where dance music’s current flash of popularity will begin to rescind as new devotees start to feel co-opted and potential fans begin to wonder what the fuss is about.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the Grammys will pull off a coup similar to when they ask Christian Aguilera (dressed in all white with bleach blonde hair) to pay tribute to the departed James Brown. It was a decision that took some serious gonads and ended up being the most inspired performance of 2007. But more likely it’ll end up like the last time EDM grabbed the mainstream spotlight, when The Prodigy performed their hit “Breathe” on MTVs Fashionably Loud special, with cringe-worthy results.
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