Although it might be pretty obvious to say at this point, EDM (Electronic Dance Music) has infiltrated into and taken a commanding place in the pop culture landscape. And how could it not? What with its bouncy beats and larger-than-life theatricality of its live music experience, wrapped up in YOLO-minded philosophy, the music scene has become the place to reach the masses of the young (or the young at heart). And nowhere is that experience more perfectly captured than in the music scene’s most celebrated music festival, Electronic Daisy Carnival, or EDC for short. The festival, now held in Las Vegas, stands as the largest musical festival in the world with 345,000 people making the yearly pilgrimage to their music’s mecca. In a movie that attempts to substantiate the festival’s most positive of emotional experiences chronicling life, love, and community, we get the sometimes-in-3-D documentary, from Focus Features, Under the Electric Sky.
Under the Electric Sky is a construction of all of the positives about rave culture, largely, of how it appeals to and invites all peoples: the social outcasts, rejects, and weirdos, and allows them a place to “be themselves” (all decked out in and sharing beaded bracelets and necklaces referred to as “candy”). With these sentiments, this movie functions as half music-concert, half human interest piece, revealing the somewhat normal types of people who attend the festival.
Electric Sky follows five stories of fans, each attending the festival to fulfill their own personal wishes. Sadie, a small-town Texas student who suffers from bullying and chronic anxiety (who also brings her Grandfather’s ashes to scatter during a song of one of her favorite DJ’s), a frat-pack of Massachusetts guy friends who RV in memory of their fallen friend, long distance lovers and young professionals who’s six month separation will be broken at the festival, six friends in an open relationship (rave family), a pair of veteran ravers who fell in love at EDC 15 years ago, and a wheelchair-bound youth who feels free when hearing the unbound energetic music, are our movie’s central focus, and are see celebrating as one, under the same “electric” sky.
If you don’t have a political problem with realizing that at the end of the day you’re just watching our entire consumer culture sweating it out to bass blaring pop music in the desert, and in fact, if you find the subject curious, or just want to see what exactly the music and festival means to these people, then this movie will provide you with that experience.
Our movie’s subjects certainly provide an eclectic mix of people for us to watch and to understand what the experience means to them. The fascinating thing about all subjects’ motivations are that they believe, in their heart of hearts, that the scene allows for true freedom, the kind that breaks free from typical society convention. What we then get are a mixture of all types of people- the socially awkward types, along with the MD’s in training. EDM provides the truest and most cathartic release for these people to leave not only the bureaucratic “real world,” but the physical limitation of their mind’s perceiving reality. If you don’t have a political problem with realizing that at the end of the day you’re just watching our entire consumer culture sweating it out to bass blaring pop music in the desert, and in fact, if you find the subject curious, or just want to see what exactly the music and festival means to these people, then this movie will provide you with that experience.
And it’s not hard to see the appeal of it all- EDC, the brainchild and creation of Insomniac’s Pasquale Rotella, is seen as a modern day P.T. Barnum, directing performance artists, massive art installations, epic firework displays, and a reverberating sound system, across the sprawling festival grounds in the final days before the weekend fest. This wonderland is captured in stunning and incredible measure, with cameras capturing the most unbelievable of sights from the grounds level, as well as in somewhat impressive 3-D when craning and sweeping over the massive crowds during the movie’s standalone live musical numbers (credit to filmmakers Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz (Katy Perry: Part of Me). These musical moments, as well as the montage-heavy sequences, feel quite cinematic, yet balanced with the human interest stories, the whole thing feels a little too undefined an experience. The film splits very neatly down the middle, alternating between following and cutting between these people’s trips and focusing on the live music as well, featuring the fest’s biggest names, including Armin Van Buuren, Tiesto, and Above & Beyond.
And in what might be the film’s most limiting factor, or most carefully side-stepped aside, it takes thirty minutes to finally touch on the scene’s most popular fixture- the drugs. We quickly side bar into seeing some behind the scenes footage of medical assistants patrolling the grounds as well as aiding ailing festival-goers, showing their “no-tolerance” allowance for ingested substances such as the crowd favorites, ecstasy and “Molly.” The film, and its spokespeople, very emphatically stress how they oppose the drug-taking that occurs here, and how the drugs are not responsible for people feeling “overwhelming love,” towards each other. And with only a PG-13 rating and the fact that this isn’t a news journalistically-exposing documentary, audiences will be deprived of the more graphic moments that actually are witnessed at EDC.
Under the Electric Sky ultimately proves to accomplish what it sets out to. Even if it acts as more of a PR piece that inflates the emotional reasons for attending the communal event rather than showing its much darker underbelly, electronic music and the spectacle that is EDC, are still this culture’s most widely celebrated music and past-time. This dual experience, of celebrating the pure, artistic and creative expression of this new music, alongside its destructively superficial, money-capitalizing and destructive qualities, makes the music scene a divided one at best. Yet for EDM’s truest and most devout disciples, this movie should validate their vices. For the rest of us, however, the film might not have as deep or heartfelt a connection as its high-on-life, or just plain high, festival-goers.
