A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
This past weekend, 400,000 people packed the Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the annual Electric Daisy Carnival.
It's one of the world’s biggest electronic dance music festivals and, despite record heat, it was the first Carnival without any attendee fatalities since 2013. Sadly, EDM festivals have become negatively associated with drug-related deaths in the past few years, but there’s far more to these festivals than drugs and sound systems .
These days, the stars of electronic dance music are behind a lot of pop’s best-selling hits. But in the early '90s, that wasn’t the case. Steve Lieberman remembers that time. He's been designing nightclubs, creating stages and running the light shows at some of the world’s biggest EDM festivals for 25 years.
When he first started attending EDM shows, the scene was small and grimy, and it didn’t have the money it has now. But there was something about that first rave in the summer of 1990 that stuck with Lieberman — and it changed his life.
I was fascinated when I walked into that warehouse in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and said, "Oh my god, this is insane. I need to participate a little bit more." It was just something that I felt the energy of it, and it just grabbed me right away.
So walking in and having that experience, that communal experience, being part of something bigger than just going to a nightclub, and that whole camaraderie, with different people from different walks of life dancing ... but the first experience, and I think even now, was really just based on an energy, and a vibe of the community, and how everybody understood and participated at the event.
Lieberman had planned to attend law school, but his love of the nightlife won out. After a few years of working in New York’s burgeoning underground scene, he moved to Arizona in 1998, where he produced two to three raves, every week, for four years. And during that time, things were changing for everyone in EDM — Daft Punk even appeared in a commercial for Gap.
And over the past six years, EDM has grown exponentially. 185,000 people attended Electric Daisy Carnival in 2010. That figure more than doubled this year.
So why has EDM become so massively popular? Lieberman has a few ideas.
The music has a hook, and it's communal. These aren't events where you buy a ticket and you sit down in a seat. These are events where you're an active participant; people walk around and move around.
For the majority of those 100,000+ people coming to that event, they're buying a general admission ticket and it's the time of their life because they're part of something bigger. I think once you get a taste of that and you get into that...there's a vibe that, unless you're there, it's hard to explain.
It might be hard to explain, but it’s Lieberman’s job to help create that vibe. His festival stages are huge. While a stage at a rock 'n' roll show might have a couple hundred moving lights, Lieberman’s stage at Electric Daisy this year had 5,000. And he’s controlling them, almost playing them, in sync with the music.
No matter how old I am, and no matter how long I've been doing this, there's nothing that can replace standing at that console and having control of those lights.
And, of course, there’s "the drop" — when all the elements of a song build toward that one single moment where the beat kicks back in and everyone goes crazy. It’s EDM’s bread-and-butter, and even if you’ve never been to a rave, you can probably imagine the sensory overload that lighting designers can create for "drops." Fireworks and huge pillars of flame are just some of the tools of the trade.
For those who are listening and haven't been to an electronic show, just think of a regular concert, where there's that big moment where the band plays and the whole place lights up, and you can almost feel the heat coming off the lamp. Well, somebody's got their hand on the handle.
I'm that somebody, and when you push that handle up and you feel the heat come off the lamps and the crowd puts their hands in the air and they scream? It's not just the artist who's getting that energy. You're getting it too, because you're participating in the entire environment and you have the ability to make the show great or to really screw it all up.
And that thrill, that immediate gut reaction that Lieberman had when he walked into his first rave back in 1990? Now he gets to pass that feeling on to hundreds of thousands of people the world over.
I want people to feel chills, I want the hair on the back of your neck to stand up. When the last song plays, I want you to say, One more, please. I need more. I want you to leave there energized. That's what I want — I want people to leave feeling exhilarated.