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The drug and the music evolved together over years, making EDM a radically different culture today than it was when it started.

We dont know much about Meredith Hunter other than that he killed the American Hippie. We know that his friends called him Murdock, and that he was 18, and that there were three weeks until the last day of the 1960s. 300,000 people had gathered at the Altamont Raceway Park near San Francisco for Woodstocks Pacific reincarnation, but of the increasingly violent masses, he was the only one who stormed the stage with a gun, and the only one who was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel.

Today, we know Hunter mostly in the context of his death, but even there hes just a metaphor. In the rise-and-fall narrative of hippie culture, he is simply the Altamont tragedy, and Altamont is known as the day the music died.

In his reflections on the recent anniversary of the September 11th attacks, John Cassidy discusses the human saliency biasour habit of forming memories around jarring events rather than, say, a series of minor incidents whose impact nets about equal. This mechanism explains how and why history can link a generations implosion to one day at the end of the decade. For both sides of the culture, the tragedys gruesome rawness gave legitimacy to the concern that peace and love were quite literally killing the country.

Consider Olivia Rotondo, whose by-all-accounts-normal life suggests that her death could have happened to anyone. Four hours after tweeting her excitement about the Electric Zoo Festival on New York Citys Randalls Island, she collapsed in front of a paramedic, saying the seven words that in the weeks since have become a macabre Exhibit A in the campaign against the drug that is said to have killed her.

I just took six hits of Molly.

She died that night. Jeffrey Russ, a 23-year old also believed to have taken MDMA (the drugs proper name) had passed away 18 hours earlier. The following daywhat would have been the grand finale to the three-day gyration of 100,000 neon-clad raversRandalls Island was deserted and silent.

Since it first plugged in its equipment five summers ago, Electric Zoo has marked the end of the annual electronic festival season in the United States, the centerpiece each year of one of the countrys most mainstream and lucrative new artistic industries. In 2012, electronic dance music (EDM) spawned eleven platinum hits and increased the population of Miami by one quarter for one of the biggest American musical events since Woodstock. It has repackaged and commoditized the two-decade-old EDM mantra of Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect (usually abbreviated to PLUR) that apparently captures what this whole vision, with its bass drops and Day-Glo campiness, and a certain synthetic chemical stimulant, has always been about.

Its too soon to tell how the Electric Zoo tragedies will influence the cachet of either the music or MDMA use in America, though many believe they go hand-in-hand, to such an extent that its hard to determine exactly which came first.

If you look at electronic dance music culture, it seems to be more diverse, more accepting of the 'other',more welcoming of gay peoplea counter-ethos of were in it together, Dr. Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), told me. Theres a spiritual aspect to it. For many, the drug serves that function. Theres something fundamentally wholesome about these communal dance parties.

Read the original here:
Electronic Dance Music’s Love Affair With Ecstasy: A History