I was researching underground vs mainstream art, music, and other different elements and came across China’s Electronic Dance Music history. All of us know this as the term EDM which is extremely popular in the USA and has raised in popularity across the globe in recent years. Along with EDM music, many rave parties also known as dance parties emerged in china during the 90s but all of these remained mostly underground. China’s biggest rave party happened in the 1990s, these parties were labeled illegal at the time. It was extremely hard in Communist China to make these forms of music popular with all the censorship and arrests that took place. During that time many nightclubs started to emerge with music and dance. Ben Huang was one of the most famous DJs who also started his career at the time and many other artists started to emerge after that focusing on this form of music. Even though so much was happening and the music was getting popular,, Chinese dance music still remind underground and many of the audience in China were not exposed to it and didn’t understand it properly. A lot of money-grabbing clubs started to emerge and real music fans were thinking it was not getting enough attention. However in 2016 first ever variety show featured electronic dance music to mainstream audiences but it was mixed with Chinese traditional influences, two years after that the show Rave Now further promoted the popularity of EDM. In 2021 the movie, Upcoming Summer further popularized EDM music by pushing it into China’s mainstream pop cultures. The EDM industries now are still growing by altering some of the original underground elements from the music to fit the mainstream taste. I don’t really have any interest in this trend or in EDM music but it was kinda fun to know about the history of this music in China and how it developed over time.
To read more about this please check out the link below:
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/mainstream-underground-and-online-electronic-dance-music-in-china/
Hi, Sandman.
You shared great information regarding Electronic Dance Music; I’m not familiar with it since I’m not a fan of American music. I was fascinated to learn about Electronic Dance Music in China. This thread contained some interesting details that you shared.
Because dance halls are always been placed a tag as “places that good young people should not go to” in traditional-minded China, so the creation of EDM is always underground and online.