Lister

By Sune Urth  

Mike Skinner on Orange. Packed with people listening to a guy rap talking, while the music behind is predominantly electronic and sampled.  

Fatboy Slim and Basement Jaxx on Orange fill the site Saturday night at a party that never stopped.  

And again yesterday, Trentemøller filled the open space in front of Orange for three hours.  

The 50-year-old music critics are tearing their hair out. Where are the prolonged guitar solos, where are the leather jackets and what is the good of it all?

”It’s just a man flipping records. There is no music in it,” I can hear my mother saying. And though it may be true that a DJ was once more of a medium than a musician, the situation is now changed.  

And there is still some truth to the celebration of electronic music being a celebration of a medium. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is a celebration of a contemporary culture, as DJ-ing today is an art form that relates to its own context to an almost grotesque extent.  

A voice in the dark  

But more than that – much more than that – electronic music is the voice of our generation. It is the one thing that is ours alone. The sound of the dance floor is the sound of the scream in your head when you see suits with dead eyes floating with the tide to slave away another day in order to keep together a society that no one really cares about.  

The sound of the dance floor is the sound of the frustration of powerlessness and pent-up anger and chemicals and new-born babies with cancer.  

The electronic heart that beats in the dark corners of your soul’s Congo is driven forward by love and fear.  

Electro is the voice of the media generation as we carelessly navigate down through the sediment layer of meanings across the media. So naturally, we applaud the media for what it conveys. For the meaning it creates in a world that has stopped making sense.  

Electro is the sound of 40,000 hearts beating as one at 120 bpm for just a second.  

And it is only natural that Roskilde Festival joins in. The festival is made for the people who come here. And when electronic acts can fill Orange Stage three years in a row, there is no mistaking what the audience want – and that with their arms in the air and their eyes closed.