When festivals and clubland went into a sort of forced hiatus last year, a lot of soul searching started to take place. This isn’t something which comes easily to the people who run the scene. They’re so fixated on whatever’s coming up next that the idea of reflection is practically anaethema to them. So when people started to notice that festivals in particular were filled with rich, white men, they promised to change.
The promise to change, of course, meant as much as a promise from a violent husband to his battered wife, worried she’s about to leave him. He has no intention of following through with his empty words – and the festival bosses are exactly the same. As I wrote recently, the rich white men are the ones paying their bills right now – and neither has any intention of moving aside for anyone.
I wrote recently about the Isle of Wight Festival 2022 and pointed out almost no women were on the bill. And now, Annabel Ross – a journalist who helped bring allegations of sexual abuse by Derrick May to a wider audience – has been “crunching the numbers”, as she puts it, over the Electric Daisy Festival, due to take place in Las Vegas later this month. It’s worth reading her four-tweet thread on the subject for context. She doesn’t hold back…
I just crunched the numbers on the Electric Daisy Carnival lineup so that you don't have to. By my count, 285 artists are appearing over the three day event. Of those 285, 23 are women, 9 are Black and 15 are NBPOC (non-Black people of colour). pic.twitter.com/aZYcQWEaCG
— Annabel Ross (@annabel_ross) October 5, 2021
She’s right, though. 285 acts, 23 women and just 24 acts who aren’t white. For a scene which was founded largely by black gay men in the likes of Chicago and Detroit, that is an utterly depressing indictment of where things are today.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that the dance music world has been utterly colonised…
