Once again, music awards events show us how totally out of touch they are with dance music. This week the AMAs took place to recognize the music’s best. Unsurprisingly EDM was not widely represented across the awards. The icing on the cake was the fact that Lady Gaga won best EDM artist. The other nominees were Kygo and Marshmello, who might be very different but are both definitely EDM artists. Lady Gaga? Well she did recruit a number of other un-nominated EDM artists to produce her latest album.
Lady Gaga fans are surely thrilled right now as their idol conquers new horizons, however, this comes at the expense of our scene. The bottom line here is that artists from the specific genre should win those prizes. It would be quite cool for an artist to win every genre but that’s not how it works. Lady Gaga is a Pop artist, and she doesn’t try to be an EDM artist. She just released music produced by actual EDM artists.
We don’t really have expectations concerning EDM at awards shows anymore, but this takes the cake. It’s a shame that our vibrant and diverse music scene is so rarely explored in the pop culture realm. Maybe one day we’ll get the respect we deserve.
