Even Deadmau5, a prominent Canadian d.j., admitted to Rolling Stone that most of his peers are just “button-pushers” onstage, setting off a miniature maelstrom in the d.j. It’s also an easy target for those who decry the decline of musical virtuosity, especially in the live arena. (“E.D.M.” is a maddeningly broad term, but it’s a helpful way to describe the crudest of dance music: songs that rely almost exclusively on carefully deployed crescendo to achieve maximum impact.) For anyone prone to cynicism about the future of culture, the rise of this kind of music implies that audiences can be controlled by nothing more than hair-trigger sensitivities to shifting bass and volume levels. The result has been a profitable union of youth, d.j.s, night clubs, and festivals, along with a type of music that feels less like a genre than like a phenomenon.
The past decade has seen various strains of dance music-dubstep and Eurodance, in particular-migrate from Europe and get boiled down to their most elemental forms. The skit is a delightfully brutal encapsulation of the widespread amusement and fear that have greeted bass-heavy electronic music in the United States. He stands behind the decks, as an ominous beat percolates in the background, and proceeds to fry an egg, build a Jenga tower, play computer games, and collect bags of money from men in suits-all in anticipation of the moment when he’ll hit a large red button labelled “ BASS.” When he finally pushes the button-or drops the bass, in the parlance of the genre-the audience members are so excited that their heads literally explode, gore and mayhem spewing across the dance floor. named Davvincii, who has the ability to whip a crowd into a frenzy by doing virtually anything except play music. The bit features Andy Samberg as a preening d.j. Last year, “Saturday Night Live” ran a video online poking fun at the culture of electronic dance music.