It’s easy to get the impression that enthusiasts of electronic music listen to nothing else. (Not that it isn’t true for some of them, who tend to relegate themselves to smaller subgenres: consult Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music for a map of the sonic territory.) And it’s equally easy to believe that, if you aren’t explicitly into electronic music, then you don’t listen to it. But in fact, its history is one of long-term integration so thorough that many of us frequently listen to electronic music — or at any rate, electronic-adjacent music — without being conscious of that fact.
Watch the video above, a 24-minute journey through the evolution of electronic music from 1929 to 2019, and take note of how many songs you know after hearing them for only a few seconds. Early experiments by the likes of Olivier Messiaen, Halim El-Dabh, and Rune Lindblad may ring no bells (and to the uninitiated, may not sound like music at all). Doctor Who fans will perk up when the timeline reaches 1963, with the appearance of that show’s theme song — a recording by Delia Derbyshire, incidentally, whose pioneering work we’ve often featured here on Open Culture. The first piece of full-fledged pop music is Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn,” from 1969, one of those songs whose melody we all know even if we’d never be able to come up with the title.
In the mid-seventies, the names now widely associated with the development of modern electronic music start to emerge: Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” in 1974, Tangerine Dream’s “Rubycon” in 1975, Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene” in 1976. But more important to the history of popular culture is the song that represents the following year: Donna Summer’s hit “I Feel Love,” which was co-produced by a certain Giorgio Moroder. Perhaps the defining figure of electronic music’s passage through the discos into the mainstream, Moroder made an even bigger impact in 1978 with his own instrumental composition “Chase,” which won him an Academy Award by being included in the film Midnight Express.
The movies did a great deal to sell the world on the fusion of electronic technology and pop music in the eighties. Who in the developed world — or indeed, in most of the developing world — could fail to recognize, for instance, Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F”? (And surely nobody who came of age at the time of A Night at the Roxbury can claim ignorance of Haddaway’s “What Is Love.”) As this video assembles its history, electronic music finds its way back to the dance floor in the nineties, and it more or less stays there through the twenty-tens; perhaps you would’ve had to spend a lot of time in the clubs in that decade to know such seemingly era-defining names as Marshmello, Armin van Buuren, Shapov, Major Lazer, and DJ Snake. But from an electronic-influenced hit like Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” alas, there was no escape.
Related content:
The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)
What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
