The Best Electronic Music Writing of 2016

THUMP asked me to come up with 20 pieces of notable electronic dance writing from 2016. Instead, I stopped at 30, for a few reasons. For starters, whatever the mainstream music media thinks, electronic music is pop music now. Almost no side of modern pop is untouched by it, or avoids its methodology, from Drake to Rihanna to Flume. If you're going to eulogize Prince or write about Radiohead, you have to acknowledge the fact that both can comfortably be dubbed electronic musicians, however much their guitars may shred. (In Radiohead's case, it's almost a joke: People still insist on considering them a rock band even though they haven't made a "rock" album in 20 years.)

The other reason is that writers write. They have to, and no one's going to stop them—including Donald Trump. Dance culture experienced a lot of obstacles and triumphs in 2016, and a heightened sense of urgency marks many of these pieces—whether their authors were bearing down on recordings, digging into the archives, getting key figures on the record, looking at dancing in itself (particularly in hip-hop), or mourning the horrifying tragedies of Orlando and Oakland. The 30 selections below are listed in chronological order. They speak for themselves via excerpts, but of course, you'll want to read them in full.

The meeting of these approaches – unashamed, celebratory club music and rock star fandom – is what gives Screamadelica its particular mood, half strutting with confidence, half yearning for transcendence. One result is that the record is often better when Bobby Gillespie is a presiding spirit rather than an actual singer. Compare album centrepiece "Come Together" with its single version, where Gillespie enacts a loved-up Ecstasy high in winsome style. The LP drops his vocals, reshapes the track around the gospel backing singers, and it becomes something titanic. It's a full-length manifesto not just for the brotherhood of clubbing but for the syncretic approach to rock Primal Scream were exploring. "All those are just labels," thunders a sampled Reverend Jesse Jackson, "We know that music is music." If you want to know how joyful – and how corny – pop's discovery of rave could feel in 1991, this is where to start.

After eating our ice cream, we parted ways. Leaning against the subway gates as strangers swarmed around us, I asked if he'd encountered any backlash for his plans to re-enter the nightlife game, or if he would reconsider that decision if he knew it would upset Melendez's family. Alig said he hadn't spoken to Melendez's relatives because of the plea deal, but if he knew they were upset by the fact that he was doing events, "it would impact my decisions."

Still, he wasn't sure what else he should be doing with his life. "I can't stop making art or thinking of these crazy projects," he explained.

"Everybody in this country can do whatever they want to do," Alig said with a determined jut of his chin. "I found this out because I had to, moving to New York and not knowing anyone—I had to make things work. It's the same for this show. I have this tenacious part of me that keeps doing it until it clicks." He gave me a raw look stripped of all flamboyant posturing, then disappeared into the subway. It was nearly midnight, and I realized he still hadn't called his parole officer.

Davido released his first singles in 2011, while he was still in school. In the previous years, artists like D'banj, Wande Coal, and P-Square had developed a new sound for Nigerian pop, by pulling elements from R&B, hip-hop, and house, and blending them with Nigerian rhythms and melodies. The wave's primary currency was its cool, led by singers who wore designer clothes and engineered songs for the clubs. Their music was more concerned with letting loose than standing against the country's corrupt, oppressive government. "Before, the most popular Nigerian music was a way to give expression to the people. You could still dance to it, but it was a way to challenge politics," Michael Ugwu, general manager of Sony West Africa, tells me later. "But these new guys, all they wanted was to have fun. It was a new image for Africa."

Whatever his career has been, it has left Andrew Weatherall quite the raconteur. He has a way with words – he describes a DJ set by Scottish duo Slam as "absolutely full-knacker proper panel-beaters-from-Prague-'ere-we-go techno" – an endless store of anecdotes, and an intriguing set of cultural reference points: "I'm an autodidact, because I got chucked out of school." Over the course of an hour and a half we go from Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent to the 'magnificence' of Wizzard's 1974 album Introducing Eddy and the Falcons, via Francis Bacon and William Burroughs' line about how if you're in a hurry to show somebody your art, you should throw it in the trash because it's bound to be rubbish. "Be patient. Very pertinent to today," he says. "Digital culture sells you this theory that if you don't get involved immediately, you're going to be left behind. When you see an advert for broadband, it's always got a caveman in it, because if you haven't got the latest broadband, you're a caveman. But if you're making music or any art, just wait, wait six months, see if you still like it. If you release something immediately, you're not going to be happy with it and it's just going to be part of the digital noise." He chuckles. "Here we are at the apex of the punk-rock dream, the democratisation of art, anyone can do it, and what a double-edged sword that's turned out to be, has it not?"

With parties as wild as they were musically credible, Honey Soundsystem was proof you could put on a queer event with ambition and an edge. It became one of San Francisco's most notable parties regardless of your sexuality, though it was still rooted in and supported by its core gay crowd. Honey brought relevant musical guests from all over the world, bringing a sense of curation, and a sense of vitality, to the gay scene. It was just the kick in the ass SF's nightlife needed.

Northwest of Georgia, in Memphis, 22-year-old entertainer Richard "ILoveMemphis" Colbert decided in 2014 to try and capitalize on the social media–driven teen dance trend. His early songs, like "Google Me" and "#ChopItUp," were naked attempts to follow the success of the Nae Nae and all that came in its wake. None of these songs broke out on a national stage, but they got him some local buzz and established him on Instagram and YouTube. Colbert found a crucial moment of inspiration after seeing people doing the Quan – a dance originating in a YouTube clip that shows Rich Homie Quan executing a loose sashay across a Tampa, Florida, stage last January. The Quan is easy and fun to imitate, and an insightful friend suggested that Colbert write a song to go with it. Thus was born his Top 40 single "Hit the Quan," the spiritual sequel to "Watch Me."

Avalon Emerson: Internet rule number one: don't read the comments. I have a question: over the past five years or so, have you seen a change in the PR process?

Melissa Taylor: Well, five years ago, if you sent a report to distribution and was full of online stuff, you'd probably get fired. The main distributors had absolutely no respect for online at all. Blogs were completely immaterial. It was difficult for us to get them to do good press online because it was badly viewed and everything was still geared toward print. When everything started going tits-up for print, obviously it changed. It's actually nice because it can make things more immediate.

AE: The decline in the importance of print has put pressure on retweets and stuff, which is kind of a kneejerk reaction, as if it's a direct measure of your return on your investment. 'This got 42 retweets; that's twice as good as something that got 21.' It's really easy to flatten everything into that one dimension of shares, pageviews, clicks—whatever—but without contextual weight, it's not an accurate measure of success.

To many queer kids who had hitherto only known of voguing through its few mainstream representations – Madonna's 1990 hit "Vogue," for example, and Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's classic documentary of the same year – discovering that it was alive and well was a revelation. Manchester ballroom guru Cvnt Traxxx went had a personal revelation following a 2009 drag ball in Glasgow and soon discovered the work of DJs such as New Yorker MikeQ, who plays every week at Vogue Nights and is part of the Qween Beat squad, and Houston producer B. Ames. "It was so exciting to find that this culture isn't dead or just a historical artefact," he says. He also explains that, for him, the scene is a revitalisation of moribund house music. "In the last decade, I'd felt house was very much removed from its original context - dance music primarily made for queer people, people of colour, marginalised people. I wanted to make music for dancers, not a room of middle class white people nodding their heads. Ballroom is the essence of what house is: it's very inspiring for me as a producer knowing there are specific sounds that trigger specific moves." Its wider appeal, he says, is also an ideological one. "The reality is that society isn't going to give you your dreams if you're a queer POC," he explains. "Voguing is all about aspirations and dreams, especially ones that people in the culture know are denied to them on a daily basis. You enter the world of ballroom and it's this dreamspace where you can live out your secret desires and make them come true."

His sister offered to help him find a psychologist, but he declined. Instead, he focused on coming out to his mom and his brother. In truth, he had sort of already told them. At the age of 16, in a fit of self-assertion, he had admitted to both of them that he was bisexual, but had quickly retreated and never spoke about it again. "It was too many emotions at the same time," Louis-Philippe remembers. "I was like, 'Oh that's good,' and at the same time, I was like, 'Oh what does mom think?' We're Haitians, and Haitians don't appreciate gay people at all. I thought maybe it was a phase." And on the outside it may have looked like one: not long after, Kay ended up involved in a long-term relationship with a woman that ended only last year. Finally, in early winter, he told his brother and mother definitively that he was gay. Though his mother, a Catholic, did bring up Bible verses that condemn homosexuality, Kay says both were supportive and told him that they'd always love him no matter what. "I feel better than I ever have, you know?" he says. "I've been sad my whole life, but fuck that. I know I have good things ahead. I don't know honestly if I'm fully, 100 percent happy, but I'm starting to get there."

June 2012: Swedish House Mafia announce their imminent breakup and farewell tour, just 23 months after releasing the debut single from their collaborative alias. The "farewell" phase of the trio's career will last nine months.

FREDRO STARR: New York in '88, '89 had the Jungle Brothers come out with "I'll House You," and the shift in hip hop changed – hip hop became hip house, that's what the fuck they was calling it! [Onyx] was into the deep house like Larry Levan, we was up in Mars club, but we was always the hip hop kids in those clubs. That's where it was poppin' at. The first time I went to the Tunnel it was crazy, 'cause it wasn't a hip hop club when we went there – it was house music. This kid named Jamal, who worked in this barbershop in Brooklyn, was into the house scene and was showing us the city. This was how we got hip to New York City. Coming from Queens, nobody went out from Queens, [but] Jamal would put us in Manhattan in '89 and it was house music. We enjoyed it – there was a lot of drugs in those nights.

Like "ex-gay" zealots who warn against the evils of homosexuality from the dark side of their own mental closets, Gibbons didn't dial down his intensity: He simply switched his act from pleasure-seeker to self-appointed preacher. Music that had filled him with unconditional joy now required re-evaluation. This process was painful for friends to witness. Here was the guy with whom they'd spent years searching for the latest and boldest music suddenly making snap decisions to forgo floor-filling platters he'd previously adored. Out went C.J. & Co.'s "Devil's Gun." Out went Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes' 'Bad Luck.' It didn't matter that both records were steeped in the spirit and harmonies of gospel. Both had to go simply because their titles didn't strike this new Walter as godly. And it wasn't enough for just him to give those records up – he wanted Smith and others to do the same.

"I remember once, a bunch of guests were coming into my house holding whisky bottles. The patrol on the street got them, and they actually rang my door and said, 'We want to talk to the owner.' I went there, and the police guy was like 'What the fuck?! You guys are stupid! You couldn't be more obvious than this!' We were in deep shit. So we were like, 'You know what dude, what are we gonna do? Tell me. What's the deal?' He's like, 'You know, give me some money and the bottle." So we gave him the whisky, some money, and we had a party."

By 1956, a scientist in Poughkeepsie named Arthur Samuel had taught an IBM 701, a behemoth nicknamed the "Defense Calculator," how to play checkers. IBM trumpeted the innovation, which put a friendly face on a sinister-looking machine designed for the military-industrial complex, and put Samuel and his checkers on national television. In 1957, while scientists at MIT frantically used an IBM 704 to calculate the position of Sputnik – launched into orbit that year by the Russians, to the great dismay of President Eisenhower – Mathews used the same computer to compose melodies. After many months of late-night experimentation, Mathews successfully coaxed the IBM 704 into generating 17 seconds of sound, laying the groundwork for the field of computer music.

Alan Green: I've never really separated out the spiritual and the secular. I grew up in the church, with traditional hymns, but at the same time I was beginning to listen to pop music, the mid-60s, The Beatles, which had just as much influence on me as those hymns did. Then the hippy stuff like Pink Floyd started to raise questions about how I lived my life and the world in which I lived.

There was a connection between music and radicalism for you?

AG: As a teenager I was very clear that I wasn't in the church just to toe the line, but I saw there was a capacity within Christianity and the bible not to fall into line but to question the status quo, that's what kept me in the church. I was listening to the sort of music that did that questioning.

Robert, was that the same for you with the radicalism of Underground Resistance, were you questioning some of the orthodoxies of the Christian faith?

RH: Absolutely. I found myself addressing what I felt was the hypocrisy of the church, the spirit of condemnation that I felt coming from the church, and self-righteous attitudes that I saw from some of the church elders and how they viewed secular music, and the way we dressed, and what they thought of the typical musician such as myself in this new genre called techno music. I found myself wondering if this Christian culture is for me, but then I heard songs like Heaven 17s "We're Going To Live For A Very Long Time" and Marvin Gaye's "[Wholly] Holy," and I became to relate to songs and messages like that and thinking these are just people like me. Christianity and the Holy Spirit is not just for a special group of people, it's for all of us. That's when I really began to seek God and his will for my life.

Have you got a secret smooth album in you?

Sean Booth: In Rob there is. He's more of a soul man than me.

Rob Brown: I think Sean's maturing nicely though.

Sean Booth: I like it more than I did, I listen to a lot of '80s soul now.

Rob Brown: When we were kids it was quite a polarising thing. I've always been quite malleable, so I'll allow people to have opposing views to me without challenging them too much.

Sean Booth: I'll tell you what though, when I first heard that James Blake remix of Untold, "Stop What You're Doing," I was blown away. I was like, 'How is he managing this level of intensity with soul chords like that?' Nobody would do that! That'd be the thing for me, it'd have to be new to that extent. I really love that track, and it'd have to be as good as that, it wouldn't sound like that obviously, but it'd have to be at least as impactive as that for me to be worth doing.

To discuss Latin American culture without mentioning the role of dancing would be myopic; to discuss gay culture without mentioning the role of dancing is to ignore an essential component of self-definition. With more than a hundred dead or wounded at Pulse in Orlando, it's worth noting that it was the gay club's Latin night that drew the formidable crowd. That the massacre took place as Pride events unfold in glitter and sweat from coast to coast, in a city with one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in the country, adds more poignancy than the heart can stand.

While gay bars have never really been places of safety, they have been spaces of bravery, activism, and resilience. Let's remember that Latin night exists because many gay clubs have a history of racial profiling, excluding not just Latin rhythms and beats, but the black and brown bodies that carry them.

Everyday undocumented queer Latinxs live in fear that any Latinx gathering, queer or otherwise, becomes another opportunity for an ICE raid. When a drag performer sings Celia Cruz's indomitable cover of "Yo Viviré," "I Will Survive," she is also calling forth the memory of the many transgender women of color who have been murdered by hatred and injustice.

"Blog house was what happened when people who ought to have been in bands spent more time in nightclubs than in venues," says Jas Shaw, half of one of the era's taste-making DJ duos Simian Mobile Disco. "These same people spent as much time online as in 'proper' record shops. Blogs were essentially just digital fanzines but they could reach further, and rather than just enthuse about a record they had just found, they could post it – you could grab it and hear it, or play it in your own town that night. It was the beginning of what we take for granted now."

But at long last, Peruvian electronic music is having its global moment. "For many, what's happening in Lima is esoteric and I don't blame them," Alvarado says. "There's not many places to find out about this or much to read, but that's changing. There are more government policies that support [our work], and travel funds." Major players in the current scene—like Quechuaboi, Chakruna and Elegante & La Imperial—are finding fans through appearances on compilations from specialized record labels like Tigers Milk in the UK, Switzerland's Hawaii Bonsai and Lima's own Surrender. And for his new album Mirrors, the UK dubstep producer Mala traveled to Peru to work with some of the country's musical leading lights, both past and present. "It's interesting to see how many years later you have this digital cumbia sound that's coming out of parts of Peru," he told Andrew Jervis in an interview for Bandcamp Weekly. "They're sampling older cambia records and mixing it with modern day production techniques."

Inspired by frequent trips to innovative night clubs in New York City and revolutionary DJs like Stretch Armstrong who were skillfully executing musically diverse sets, Scottie B and Caesar knew they could bring that kind of style to Baltimore.

"[Armstrong] was playing old records and new records and we were like, 'Yo, if we could play like that, it would work,'" Scottie B says with Caesar by his side in the DTLR headquarters, where Unruly Records now partners with the street wear distributor and management company.

"One night at Club Fantasy, we had a bet," Scottie recalls, looking back to a night in the late '80s. "Shawn was playing house already [because] the program to his night was house. I said, 'Play it now! You can get away with it—I'm tellin' you!' So he started playing hip-hop and the crowd went crazy."

There is visible urgency in Brazil's desire to develop an authentic identity within the ballroom community. "My house vogues to funk carioca," says Diego Cazul, who is based in Rio de Janeiro. "It has a very unique beat, and I love dancing to Valesca Popozuda, Inês Brasil, MC Delano, Tati Zaqui, and many others." Dudx Babaloo, however, believes different motivation is at play. "We use vogue as a form of cultural colonization. Brazilians are not taught to like what is created here, only what is imported. We have dances like candomblé and umbanda that were demonized by the Catholic church, and bumba-meu-boi and boi-bumba, which were left aside because they were considered tacky. This is a historical issue, a rescue that Brazil needs to learn. Brazilian folklore has been removed from the educational grid and this is just one example of many."

The song's protagonists are a guy and gal four years out from a short-lived romance, now re-encountering each other in a hotel bar. (Better that than a hotel lobby, which as we all know leads to moral turpitude.) This is a hit song in 2016, so of course the pair are eager for a sweaty hookup—each sings, "I can't stop/ No, I can't stop," and by the chorus they're in the "backseat of your Rover … Bit[ing] that tattoo on your shoulder." But it's the song's asides that color in the sincere melancholy of the romance: 'I know you can't afford' the aforementioned Range Rover, the singer notes, adding that they should take their coupling to "the mattress that you stole/ From your roommate back in Boulder." With these details the vocalist manages to both dress down the paramour and warmly recall their earlier, ramen-for-dinner–era romance. The chorus finally builds to a piercing, desperate mantra: "We ain't never getting older/ No, we ain't never getting older." In essence, this cannily timed song—dropped in late July and topping the charts in late August, in time for back to school and the moment when America's Danny Zukos recall their Sandy Olssons—is Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer" for the age of Snapchat.

Angie, a blonde, bespectacled 38-year-old from Detroit dressed in all black, works in finance and "puts on a pantsuit everyday, but leads a secret double life away from my co-workers," she said. (Everyone interviewed at Even Further declined to give last names. They're respectable adults at this point, and didn't want their consumption chronicled.) She was there with her husband ("who I met at a party"—"party" being a euphemism for dance music all-nighters) and her close friends. Her adult raving motto, she said, was "hardcore for the headstrong—but not too strong, we have shit to do tomorrow."

Meanwhile, the scandal has sharply divided the hip-hop underground. Rap pioneer KRS-One, a longtime friend and ally of Bambaataa, has been excoriated on social media and in hip-hop forums for publicly supporting Bambaataa, including by Savage, who, in an interview with Allhiphop.com, called the iconic MC "worse than any Catholic priest" and pushed for a boycott of his music. KRS-One, much like some members of the Zulu Nation, has blasted the accusers for trying to tear down Bambaataa and tarnish his legacy. KRS-One has gone so far as to say, in an appearance in Birmingham, England, that "anyone who has a problem with Afrika Bambaataa should quit hip-hop." DJ Kool Herc, another lifelong associate of Bambaataa, also would not criticize him, telling me: "I'm very much aware of the matter. I'm not fair-weather, though. He's a friend of mine. His organization has an internal dispute. That's it."

Other rappers have weighed in against Bambaataa. Lord Jamar, an activist, actor, and rapper—he is a member of the politically and socially conscious hip-hop group Brand Nubian—criticized Bambaataa in an interview with Vlad TV for lying about knowing Savage and said that rumors about Bambaataa being gay have persisted for 20 years. Rapper and activist Talib Kweli, a member of the hip-hop duo Black Star, tweeted that he was "disappointed" in the Zulu Nation's handling of the scandal. Arthur Baker, an electro and hip-hop pioneer who helped produce "Planet Rock," knew little of the scandal, but said "obviously it damages [Bambaataa's] legacy."

Similarly to hip-hop, black and Latino people created house and techno as a spiritual response to real social problems like homophobia, racism and governmental neglect. So when a white artist uses the words "ghetto" and "hood," co-opts the iconography of social housing, suggests that all struggles are equal, or makes up a tragic backstory, I would argue that he or she effectively erodes that music's function as a source of spiritual power and resistance for the specific communities from which it emerged. It's one thing to make work inspired by a specific musical style—it's another to co-opt the struggles that gave rise to it in order to package and promote your own work.

Viral dances are nothing new, and are notoriously fleeting—remember the Harlem Shake? But challenges, and the songs that score them, add a connective, traceable nervous system to the writhing mass of grainy video loops. Though these songs are stripped of their initial contexts, they share origins as outliers in their time and genres that briefly shifted the shape of the mainstream sound. Simply put, these were already challenging songs, and it's no coincidence that audiences found more energy to wring out from each of them. Their revivals underscore the appeal of a good challenge, artistic or otherwise: discomfort, growth, and a meaningful connection. If there's anything Americans seemed to have agreed on this year, it's that a good dare is worth its terms, and that the best songs are always fair game.

David's commitment to fundamental principles rewarded him with a room packed full of an ecstatic dancers by the time of his anniversary party the following February; that night I began to grasp what The Loft must have been like during peak years in the 1970s and early 1980s. But a short while later David was forced to start all over again when the friend from whom he was subletting the space defaulted on the rent. This marked the moment when David was forced to vacate the last home that was spacious enough for him to throw a party, which in turn suggested that The Loft had come to an anticlimactic end. David seemed to go downhill during this period, and there were times when he became harder to reach. It seemed incredible that the person who was beginning to seem as though he might turn out to have been the most influential figure in the history of dance culture had reached the point of losing everything.

I feel strange typing these words, because I no longer live in communal artist spaces like this. But they stay with you. They shape us, make us more fearless, give us confidence, validate our dreams. We never forget what those spaces gave us, especially those of us who turned those dreams into a life, and re-fit ourselves back into a once ill-fitting world.

The people lost to the Oakland fire will never get that chance.

Talking about all that was comforting, and knowing that people in nightlife venues throughout the Bay Area were talking about it was, too. (Almost all of the parties I knew of on Saturday night were dedicated to paying tribute to the missing or raising money for their families.) And when some of the Bay Area's biggest jocks, the Oakland A's and Raiders, and San Francisco's most avant-garde electronic music performance venue, Gray Area, are both hosting huge fundraisers for the same cause, a real feeling of unity emerges. Please donate.

The days ahead are going to be very, very hard, as the hole torn through the Bay Area nightlife community will become more painful and obvious. On top of all that, the bullies and idiots of the world are attacking us, too. And some very tricky issues and serious questions about the venue will arise: Already some in power are trying to use this tragedy to further marginalize artists and performers. If the licensed venues and living spaces are too costly and the unlicensed ones are shut down or evicted, what will artists do?