Why Is(n’t) Ambient so White?

Abstract

This chapter investigates why white and light-skinned artists have long dominated representations of ambient music, a popular (sub)genre of electronic music and style of EDM, within anglophone EDM scenes and media discourses. It explores how early discourses on ambient implicitly shaped the genre’s aesthetics around idealizations of hip highbrow and high-middlebrow white masculinity. Starting in the 1970s and 80s, these discourses tacitly disregarded the relevance of genres racialized as non-white to ambient’s ideals of aesthetic experimentation, affective detachment, cerebral introspection, and physical ease. EDM-oriented discourses reified the putative whiteness of this formation in the early 1990s by repeatedly attaching the ambient label to the expressions of white men while describing the music, by way of a racialized and gendered mind-body binary, as the “beatless” emanation of disembodied mind(s), rather than of individuals. This history illuminates how popular genres become racialized through feedback loops of musical production and discursive categorization. In the course of tracing this history, the author proposes that a discursive framework of “strategic anti-genre-essentialism,” which positions genres as processes rather than categories, may help to undermine essentialist assumptions about music and race without dismissing them.