More to the floor: the decade the dancefloor was decolonised

Collectives like NON and Naafi helped to loosen the west’s stranglehold on club culture – and now the most exciting dance music is coming from east Asia, Africa and Latin America

In the first half of the 2010s, the western world dominated the conversation in electronic music. White, male producers and DJs, often based in London, New York or Los Angeles, mostly controlled the barriers to entry, and took music from foreign cultures without consequence. Diplo, cherry-picking from baile funk, dancehall and reggaeton and tailoring each rhythm to suit an English-speaking market, is the most high-profile example of this appropriation, but he is just one of many white producers in the post-internet decade who dabbled in different cultures with boyish insouciance they regarded drop-crotch trousers, curtained hair, or any other passing trend.

In the second half of the decade, however, multilateral club scenes from Latin America, Africa and east Asia have come to define the global underground, each pressing their native sounds towards the razor’s edge with confidence and technical prowess.

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by Whitney Wei via Electronic music | The Guardian