The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America

Joining the ranks of Please Kill Me and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop—“a clear-eyed, authoritative account” of EDM’s rise in America (Rolling Stone).

“The Underground Is Massive is a book about the rise of electronic music . . . anyone who cares even a little about music will love this book. Dance music’s growth took place largely away from the spotlight, in cross-pollinating scenes around the globe; Michaelangelo Matos tells these hidden histories with the love, care, and joy of a seasoned mage passing down spells to a trusted novice. Every detail, every page, every where-things-changed anecdote hums with life. This book is a genuine service to history, and I am profoundly grateful for it.” —John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van

The Underground Is Massive is the first-ever big-picture history of the American electronic dance music underground, viewed through the lens of nineteen parties over thirty years—from the black, gay underground clubs of Chicago and Detroit’s elite teen-party scene through nineties “electronica” to today’s EDM-festival juggernaut. In telling EDM’s story, Michaelangelo Matos takes in the rise of the Internet and Burning Man, 9/11, and the collapse of the record business, spotlights its legendary artists—including Frankie Knuckles, Moby, Diplo, Skrillex, Deadmau5, David Guetta, Tiësto, and Daft Punk—and vividly charts why and how it took nearly three decades after electronic dance music became a global youth soundtrack for it to hit big in the land that birthed it.

“A staggering work of research, organization, and synthesis, yet Michaelangelo Matos never loses his wit or his deft way with a sentence. He is the Barbara Tuchman of EDM!”—Luc Sante, author of Low Life and The Other Paris

“As much detailed ethnography as musical history, Matos builds the first widescreen perspective on one of the United States’ most obscured cultural legacies.” —Flavorwire

© 2023 Dey Street Books (Ebook): 9780062271808

Release date

Ebook: November 21, 2023