The good folks over at ThisSongSlaps hipped us to the New York Daily News' breakdown of "the best music festivals," which mentioned both the EDC New York and Electric Zoo, yet if you read the descriptions, it's hard to understand why they even included two of the biggest festivals on the list:
Electric Daisy
When: May 17-18
Where: Citi Field
What you get: A host of top EDM stars (that’s electronic dance music, for the uninitiated) including Afrojack, Calvin Harris, Dirty South, Zeds Dead, plus zillions of lesser spinners.
How much? $215 for a two-day pass. $119 for one day. But you also have to factor in the price of the drugs you’ll need in order to endure music this repetitive and often lyric-free.
Worth it? If your idea of fun is to flail around in the blinding daylight while unphotogenic DJs hover over turntables playing music meant only for the darkest clubs, the answer would be yes. Even so, you will need the aforementioned drugs.
Electric Zoo
When: Aug. 30-Sept. 1
Where: Randalls Island
What you get: Electro stars like Avicii, Tiesto, Bassnectar and A-Trak.
How much? $359 for all three days. Single days: To be announced.
Worth it? See Electric Daisy. But even more expensive to enter and even more drugs required to stay.
What was the point of that? First off, the obvious assumption to those outside of the EDM demographic is one of the biggest misconceptions about EDM, one that's shared worldwide: You can't be sober and enjoy dance music. There are a lot of fans of the music of all ages; if you think that each and every person in that crowd feels the need to be on "molly" (or any other combination of drugs), you're kidding yourself. When you do that, and carry a name like the Daily News, you end up looking like someone who has done zero research, a reporter who's just grasping at straws.
The flipside of that argument is even more interesting: Since you purposefully indicated that you'd need massive amounts of drugs to even enjoy either of these EDM events, is the assumption then that you don't/won't find people using/abusing drugs at Bonnaroo, America's Most Wanted, Governor's Ball, or any of the other festivals mentioned? Cut the bullshit, please. Anyone knows that drugs aren't based on tempo or genre of music; you actually have more rap songs/rappers talking about molly than ANY EDM producers or DJs. Not that'd you'd care, NY Daily News, as you're not really doing any fact-checking anyways.
We also noticed that the EDM blurbs were pretty short compared to the other bills. Almost like you could tell where the writer's tastes leaned (read: rock). ThisSongSlaps thinks that "these main stream news outlets need to study up." I'd rather that not be the case. By all means, if you are at a mainstream news outlet and want to cover EDM, go ahead and shed some light on it. But do it properly; if you're going for the obvious jokes about one genre, do the same for the others. Realize that you're not playing EDM fans one bit: you're playing yourself. We're not the ones looking like idiots; we've taken the time to understand the music and the way it's being portrayed, both on our end and in the mainstream. You're the ones stereotyping a particular festival that you're being paid to write about because "drugs."
Don't study up, grow up. Or don't even bother mentioning EDM. You're doing no favors to the EDC or Electric Zoo, but you are making sure that DAD (and many other publications) see you as the ridiculous, old hat organizations that you portray yourselves to be.
