Bart Black argues the EDM underground splits into three groups: profit-seekers, attention-chasers, and revolutionaries pursuing spiritual awakening. He frames the scene as a way to escape mainstream control and expand consciousness through music and altered states, asking listeners whether they chase escapist highs or deeper transformation.
Chapters
You know, there's a lot of times I wonder if people really know what it is that we're doing with the electronic dance music scene movement, the underground, whatever you want to call it. And it has a lot of names because it is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And what's interesting is it can be different things to different people even at the same event, even going to all the same events. There are people that do this to make money, and you can pick them out pretty easily. I mean, everybody wants to make some money doing this, of course, but, you know, there's the commercial people. They're the people that without the money they wouldn't be interested in doing this at all. Then there are the people that do it for the attention, and there's no— there's, you know, I'm saying this is is predominant because it overlaps everything. I mean, of course, you know, everybody does it for money. Everybody does it because they like to throw a good party, and DJs like to have attention, and they're attention whores, and the promoters like to have attention, and they're attention whores in their own way. So you have the people that do it predominantly for money, you have people that do it predominantly for attention, you have people that do it for money and attention, but then you have a third group that are the revolutionaries. These are the people that believe and do this because they believe in the counterculture. They understand that this scene and this music is one of the many avenues for people to snap themselves out of the matrix, to be sovereigns over their own minds, the experiences they have with their minds, which truly, if we are not masters of what we think, if we are not free to do with our own minds then what are we actually free to do at all? So the question that I'm trying to pose here is, do you bring— what do you bring to the scene in that regard? Do you understand that this is a counterculture movement? And does that even matter to you? Because to some people it doesn't even matter. Some people, that's not it at all. To some people, they completely enjoy the Matrix reality. And they enjoy just taking drugs to forget that they're in the Matrix reality, and that's their escape. But there are other people that having these experiences where they look past themselves or they look past the world that was shown to them, they understand that there are larger worlds outside of themselves, and there are larger worlds beyond their perceptions, right outside the veil of their perceptions. That they might pierce for a moment while on that high listening to that specific track. And everybody has that experience, but some believe it to be a purely entertainment-oriented experience, whereas others understand it's a profound spiritual event. So I just wonder how many of you understand what it is we're really doing out here. And I wonder how which side you fall on. Are you just chasing the next high? Are you just chasing the next, you know, little bit of escape from a world that you don't understand and is hurtful? Or are you truly trying to seek out something larger than yourself and utilize the music and the art and the experience that we manifest at these type of events to step beyond and look into that other world that's also inside of you. Because that's what I'm committed to. I see that more clearly now than ever. I like, you know, getting paid to do this. I like the attention of playing in front of a crowd and watching the crowd go off. These are all fun and novel things, but at the end of the day, if my life will stand for anything, if my life will mean anything, it will be that I I gave people the opportunity through the music, through the altered states of consciousness, through the environments that we create to step beyond this world and the lie and the matrix that's used to control people. That's where I'm taking this and that's where I want to go with it and that's where I will go with it.
