2010 Articles

Review of Alejandro L. Madrid. 2008. Nor-tec Rifal: Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Mueller, Gavin

The burgeoning field of electronic dance music (EDM) scholarship has drawn from a number of theoretical and methodological perspectives. In particular, the disciplinary melange that is cultural studies, whose rise in academia coincided with EDM’s rise in popular music during the 1980’s and 90’s, has proven an effective tool for researches seeking to understand the social world and political and economic contexts in which EDM sounds and styles arise. This book’s purported object of analysis- a Tijuana based scene knit together through aesthetic practices rooted in the appropriation of the sounds and images of northern Mexico- is appropriately conceptualized for a cultural studies approach.