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Slate: This newfangled 'electronica' just might be the wave of the future

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OK, writer Hua Hsu admits in this Slate article, electronica as a movement was supposed to have vanquished rock around 1997 but didn't. For all its appealing hip futurism and marketability, maybe electronica just didn't connect with the masses on an emotional level; you know, like Creed or the Backstreet Boys did. But Hsu posits that 2007 may be the year that the electronica 'wave,' or whatever you want to call dancey programmed music, really drops like the atom bomb. And that could appear to be a healthy proposition; groups like LCD Soundsystem, Simian Mobile Disco and Justice have released some of the years best albums, and mentioning Daft Punk seems to be about five hundred times cooler than it was in the '90s. A record that Hsu left out worth mentioning is Kanye West's house-tinged Graduation album.
I think there's reason to believe that if electronica artists can successfully borrow "rock's vernacular," as the article puts it, it could possibly become a tenable mainstream style. LCD Soundsystem and Justice have done this especially well, bringing, respectively, human warmth and arena immediacy to electronica. But doesn't the talk of marketability and the crass media coinage of terms like "new rave" make you wonder if this is another loosely assembled "movement" that might last about as long as a pack of glow sticks?
Electronica: The Sequel[Slate]
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Electronic
Justice
LCD Soundsystem

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