Some Thoughts On Deaths At Electric Zoo, Dance Music And Drugs

The deaths of two Electric Zoo attendees and hospitalization of at least four others prompted the cancellation of the third day of the festival on Sunday. As a music journalist who covers dance music for one of the nation's biggest media outlets, it's a story I can't say I'm shocked to hear.

I recently watched "Gimme Shelter," a vintage documentary on the tragic events of Dec. 6, 1969, when a massive, free rock festival headlined by The Rolling Stones turned into a bloody, disorganized mess that left one man killed and scores more injured. Meredith Hunter, who died that day, returned to a fight with a gun and was stabbed. He was reportedly high on methamphetamine to the point of incoherence. With the benefit of some distance, many cultural observers marked the festival as the day the end of the peace-loving, feel-good era that is popularly remembered by events such as Woodstock.

To compare Electric Zoo, a festival whose organizers (Made Event) have spent years developing with careful attention to detail, to the Altamont Free Concert would be reckless. Altamont was tossed together after multiple venues refused to host the proceedings, and the Hell's Angels ended up playing the role of a de facto police force. It was hardly the type of event that Zoo organizers Made Event would ever put on (nor, it's worth noting, could such a major event happen in today's America, much less in New York City).

But just like rock and roll culture cannot be fully considered without taking the events at Altamont into consideration, dance music will also have to come to terms with the fact that the broader society now views it as underscored by drug use and reckless behavior.

There's an understandable resistance to this idea within the dance music community, and it generally rests on the following points: that not all ravers or festival attendees do drugs; that most who use drugs "do so responsibly" and that artists and festival promoters cannot be held responsible for the actions of a few. There's a meta claim too: That it's "unfair" that dance music gets victimized when these incidents occur.

Except for the first, which is almost too obvious to matter, those assertions are at once true and false. Of course "all" dance music fans don't use drugs. It's unclear what percentage of fans do and how that compares to other genres. The second assertion, that "plenty" of EDM fans "do drugs responsibly," is the type of thought that keeps D.A.R.E. counselors and parents up at night. It's impossible to do drugs -- particularly those in powder, rock or pill form, like MDMA and ecstasy -- responsibly. In the absence of on-site pill testing, it's virtually impossible that the vast majority of fans have any reasonable idea what's in their drugs. That's to say nothing of latent health conditions which can cause serious injury and/or fatalities when revealed by drugs that put additional stress on the body. At the very least, an organization such as DanceSafe should play a more prominent role in festivals.