Dashiki Chic: Color-blind Racial Ideology in EDM Festivalgoers’ “Dress Talk”

ABSTRACT

This article examines how electronic-dance-music (EDM) festival participants construct narratives about dress (clothing, accessories, and other body modifications) to reinforce EDM as a demographically and ideologically white terrain. Through individual and focus-group interviews conducted over the course of 12 festival events, I explore how popular campout EDM festivals in the Midwestern United States use conversations about dress to discuss and defend practices of cultural appropriation, often by drawing from interpretive frames of “color-blind” racial ideology. By doing so, these interviewees distance themselves from race and racism, frequently by claiming a “white innocence” that obscures the ways that larger racial inequalities infiltrate and replicate within the EDM scenes many participants insist are unwaveringly egalitarian.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Electronic-dance-music (EDM) has experienced many waves of commercialization. This work focuses on a recent form of EDM characterized by large-scale corporate sponsorship/ownership and the promotion of multiday campout events to mainstream audiences.

2. The works of Eshun and Ferrara are excellent resources which explore the complicated racial histories of EDM and the implications of digitally mediated music for communities of color.

3. See Feinstein and Ramsay’s “The Rise of EDM.”

4. St John vividly describes rave-festival costuming in “Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival” (47).

5. I draw this term and other cognate terms (Others, Othered, Othering, and Otherness) from Said‘s conceptualization of “the Other,” featured in Orientalism.

6. The analyzed interviews derive from EDM-featuring campout festivals held from 2014 to 2016. The names of these events have not been included here, per confidentiality restrictions approved by the University of Kentucky’s Office of Research Integrity. These events varied in attendance, ranging from 150 to more than 90,000 participants. Although each festival was unique, all events were unified through their similarities of music acts, production elements, administrative and auxiliary staffs, corporate sponsors, and participants. Out of the 95 total participants, 44 participants identified their gender as male/men and 41 identified themselves as female/women. Nine participants did not disclose their gender identification; one participant identified their gender as nonbinary. When asked for their racial identification, 68 participants identified themselves as white; four identified as Latinx; and three identified as Asian-American. Two participants racially identified themselves as black, two participants identified as “mixed,” and 16 interviewees did not self-designate any racial identification. Participant ages ranged from 18 to 61; however, most interviewed festivalgoers reported being in their early twenties (21-23). Using tenets of modified grounded theory prescribed by Charmaz, I iteratively combined inductive and deductive approaches to create and refine coding themes within interview data and to categorize data within existing conceptual frameworks – here, the frames of color-blind racist ideology. Additional information regarding interviewee demographics, the nature of events studied here, and data collection and analysis methods may be requested by contacting the author.

7. Barbalato references a 2015 Forbes report that identified the highest-paid EDM artists. Of the twelve DJs listed, ten were white. All twelve artists were men.

8. The cited works of Bradby; and Brunsma, Chapman, and Lellock expound upon how popular representations of people of color in EDM performance are highly gendered and sexualized.

9. Due to the sample size and interview-sampling procedures, these statements are not generalizable to a wider festival going population. This analysis, however, reflects the implications of the statements included within this data sample.

10. Despite their differences in terminology, Crenshaw; Jackson; and Mueller, Dirks, and Picca all deepen discussions regarding “frames of talk”–particularly as they relate to issues of race.

11. For those interested in the dimensions of white privilege, pursue the works of Feagin; Frankenburg; hooks; and Moon.

12. Though some aspects of participant demographics, festival purpose, and event production that St John describes in “Going Feral” differ from those of the EDM campout festivals studied here, these events and scenes share several beliefs, values, behavioral and attitudinal norms, symbols, and material goods with each other.

13. Music scenes that are predominantly centered in communities of color (e.g. hip-hop) also appropriate items and motifs to articulate group membership or identity. Appropriations made by the predominantly white festival going populace do not similarly deploy these tools as a means of resisting racial oppression; instead, these tools become means to amplify aspects of existing white privileges.

14. Waters; Schwalbe, et al.; and West and Fenstermaker detail the performative, interactional dimensions of race and ethnicity.

15. Turner conceptualizes liminality in “Betwixt and Between.”

16. All italics illustrate the author’s/interviewer’s own emphases.

17. van Wagtendonk spotlights contemporary activism and memberships of indigenous persons in electronic-dance-music culture.

18. Brunsma, Chapman, and Lellock found that electronic-dance-music-culture promotional media are rife with essentialized racial imagery.

19. The cited works of Saldanha more extensively discuss this phenomenon.

20. Again, Saldanha‘s works enrich these inquiries.

21. Chapters 6 and 7 in Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style aptly complement hooks’s thoughts regarding the co-option and commodification of resistance groups, movements, and ideologies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kaitlyne A. Motl

Kaitlyne A. Motl is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Kentucky and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Georgetown College. Her research focuses on inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality within jam band and electronic-dance-music festival scenes.  Her dissertation centers on the intersections of gender and sexuality in these arenas, investigating how women-identifying festivalgoers perceive and manage the physical, psychological, social, and sexual threats that these events and their fellow participants pose.