When I first came to UC Berkeley as a freshman, I had three or maybe four playlists on my Spotify account. A typical 15+ hour-long playlist I would listen to on the daily, constrained to no specific genre or sentiment, ranged from the slower, somber music I would listen to if I was feeling mellow or slow to classic rock hits from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. While I have always been a die-hard music appreciator, my taste pre-university was not very diverse. Boy, oh boy, was I in for an awakening.
And awakened I was. In the fall semester of my freshman year, I was introduced to the world of electronic music. Disclaimer No. 1: Of course, I had heard EDM before college, but I did not learn to appreciate it until then. Disclaimer No. 2: No, I did not discover my love for EDM from hearing “Take It Off” by FISHER at a frat on a Thursday night.
In retrospect, I think my actual EDM enlightenment was the song “TRNDSTTR (Lucian Remix)” by Black Coast when it was topping trend charts on the app Musical.ly back in the 2015-2016 era. And if you’ve read my blog “I miss the old TikTok,” you’ll know that I was an avid Musical.ly user. But at 13 years old, I didn’t really know what to do with my periodic obsession with that song, so my EDM love lay dormant for many years. Fast forward to my freshman year fall, when my newfound college friends took aux during our daily dorm hangouts, my eyes, or rather my ears, were opened to the realm of house music.
House music started to become my default genre for working out because the steady consistent beat was easy to run to and the buildups motivated me to lift. Soon enough, I started listening to house music beyond the gym and expanded my EDM taste to other subgenres as well. I found myself in restaurant bathrooms Shazam-ing the bass house music they would play and then adding songs to one of my three distinct Spotify EDM playlists (what an evolution from before, huh?). I even became my friend group’s coined “house head,” serving as a vessel for EDM recommendations.
However, everything changed when I went to see an EDM artist perform live. In my sophomore year spring, I saw NURKO perform live in San Francisco. That was the first “rave” that I had ever been to, and let me just say, it left a very lasting impression. Soon, my appreciation developed into a passion. I wanted to go beyond simply listening to the music; I wanted to actively envelop myself in my own EDM curations.
That’s when my daydreams started to entail visions of myself atop a stage behind a stretching deck of dials and wires, wearing headphones under flashing strobe lights. A unique alias name for my DJ persona would shine above my bobbing head as I performed a set, administering rushes of adrenaline and dopamine to each individual in the crowd before me, just as I had felt when I saw an EDM set live. Realistically, I am aware that the chances of me living this reverie are extremely slim, but it fuels my motivation to learn how to DJ.
When my birthday rolled around, one of my closest friends, who shares the same treasurement for EDM as I do, gifted me a small DJ deck. Instantly, I started downloading my favorite EDM songs as MP3s to upload onto a DJ software on my computer, which connected with my physical deck for mixing. I’ve probably spent a cumulative five-plus hours watching YouTube tutorials, and thanks to my previous musical experience, learning how to beat sync and align tracks correctly was not a difficult task to learn. I would practice mixing in front of my friends, always searching for critical feedback that I could apply to strengthen my abilities.
As EDM has gained exponential traction within our generation, I have realized that my experience is not unique. Some of my friends have told me that I have caught ADS, or “Amateur DJ Syndrome,” for many other people within the 18-25-year-old range have started to pursue the same hobby with a similar vision of headlining at a major music festival. However, I am not bitter about it. If anything, it makes me genuinely happy to see this riveting EDM culture become widely recognized, attracting more creative ability to the EDM scene.
Although my future will most likely look more corporate than creative, I still plan to develop my DJ skills and hopefully get to the point where I can book small gigs. Even being able to mix for a couple of friends brings me joy. Now, as a house head, let me give you some recommendations. For a more deep house beat, listen to “Tunnel” by Polo & Pan; for a hard, more intense track, listen to “Black Out Days – Subtronics remix” by Phantogram and Subtronics and for just a great head bop, listen to“If You Need” by Taim and ALYSS. If you don’t listen to EDM, hopefully just with these tracks, you’ll understand the hype.
