Electronic Dance Music is a genre that has a long and sometimes controversial history. It has only become massively popular in the United States over the past decade, enjoying a 10-year reign in Europe before it spread across the pond. I discovered this music during my freshman year of college, and being an avid music lover of all sorts, have never looked back. I remember some time ago my friend jumped on me for being a fan of the genre because the DJ’s swore so much when they performed live. When I think back on that moment, I am surprised by the initial emotion I felt. It was not anger, angst, or rebellion. I was actually mortified by his ignorance and what I felt to be a superficial judgement.

Every third weekend in March is the Ultra Music Festival in Miami, FL. This festival is arguably one of the few meccas for EDM DJ's and EDM goers (maybe only behind Ibiza and Amsterdam). If you play here, you have made it big time. If you rage here, there is probably no experience that can ever compare. Every year since 2013, I stream Ultra Live online via UMF TV on YouTube, a live feed of a vast majority of the DJ’s live performances. One year, I encouraged a friend of mine to check it out and absorb the awesome. I mean, I was sitting in a dimly lit office on a Saturday afternoon and the music and the drops were giving me chills... thousands of miles away! My friend, after watching the stream sparingly for a few hours, made a comment to me, “Dude, why is it that EDM DJ's swear so much!” At first I wanted to respond with anger to his apparent ignorance. Why did he feel the need to brand all EDM DJ's everywhere with this slap of disdain? Plenty of musicians, rockers, and yes, other DJ's swear like sailors. What makes them different from EDM DJ’s? Is it because EDM DJ's play to bigger crowds? Or the sometimes negative reputations huge EDM festivals carry? Who are you to judge? However, my friend made the distinct point that EDM DJ's constantly swear every time they talk during their sets.

Now me personally, I have never really DJ'ed. I have gotten up in front of a crowd and mixed music, but I have never been in front of a massive crowd of thousands and gotten everyone jumping and screaming (although I hope one day I can accomplish this dream). However, I have been in that crazy, sweaty, screaming mass of people jumping and raging to the beat of a particular artist’s vision and I will never forget that experience.

I've always been a music guy. From grade school on, I sang, acted, wrote and performed. I could never get enough of any kind of music. Great music always brought me to a place of immense happiness, but EDM music was different. I had heard many people trash EDM and the people who admired it as sellouts. People who “don't have any musical taste” because EDM, for whatever reason, was not considered “real music” because of its electronic origins. Once I started to heavily listen to it though, I felt this amazing sense of happiness whenever I heard a drop. Many times it brought a smile to my face. It wasn't until I experienced it that I understood why hardcore EDM'ers kept coming back for more again and again.

It was several years ago when I saw Alesso live at Rutgers University with my friends from the school. I had been introduced to EDM as a freshman during my first and only semester at Rutgers. I quickly downloaded as much music of Deadmau5, Avici, Armin Van Burren, and Krewella that I could find. I heard it at every party when I went out and from behind dorm room doors.

After my friends and I did a little pre-gaming, we made our way over to the RAC (Rutgers Athletic Center). Now, this is by no means a huge stadium folks, we are talking 8,000 seats, but if I remember correctly, this show was sold out. We finally made it inside and got to our seats in the upper mezzanine. I did not even care that we were up so high. I was just so anxious to begin this incredible musical journey. After waiting for an hour or so and hearing two opening DJ's, the stadium went dark and 8,000 college kids roared. I was yelling before the first note hit, anxiously awaiting a musical experience I had heard so much about and was about to finally experience for the first time. The lights started flashing, the beat dropped in, and from that moment on it was a blur of flashes, aching calves, sweat and screaming. It was amazing from start to finish, but my moment, my epiphany, came not on the first drop of the set but right around 45 minutes in.

I could just feel it in the air that we were reaching the climax of the set. The stadium was deafening, the bass felt like it was reverberating off my skin, the lights were a brilliant display of colors and patterns more inexplicable than the cosmos themselves. The music started building and the entire stadium was moving like a bull at the rodeo waiting to fly out of its cage and start kicking and jumping in all directions... and then the beat dropped. In the instant that it did, the stage lights flashed bright and for half a second the entire stadium was lit up in front of me – I had my moment, my epiphany. What I saw in that half second or so will remain with me for what I hope to be the remainder of my life. I saw 8,000 people, people from thousands of backgrounds, beliefs, faiths, trends, fashions or hobbies, GPA's, families, socioeconomic classes, sexualities and genders....jumping.

It sounds ridiculous but let me explain. 8,000 people with their hands up, sweating like fiends, screaming with hoarse voices all doing the same thing, sharing and enjoying a moment of indescribable celestial happiness. In that moment, everyone in that stadium, no matter who they were or where they came from, was one and the same. Every single person in that stadium was equally entranced by the emotion of the crowd and the beat of the music. Eight thousand people, all equal in one singular experience. I finally understood what PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect) meant to EDM'ers in that single half second. All those people in that stadium were bound by the same thing, all on the same level, enjoying a high greater than anything I have experienced (natural or artificial). You see, even if I tried, I could not begin to describe the happiness I felt in that moment and the slight reliving of that moment I have every time I hear a beat drop. So imagine, a DJ creating that moment in front of that many people night after night, month after month. To be able to give people that moment of ecclesiastical joy because of something you are playing or something that you created is a feeling I cannot begin to understand. I am positive of one thing though. It must be a greater feeling than the one I had when that beat dropped for me.

Now, imagine instead of 8,000 people it's 165,000! Can you imagine standing in front of 165,000 people all screaming, jumping, raging, crying and dancing to your creation of mixes and tunes? There are no words I can muster to describe what I felt at that moment that rainy March night at Alesso. I cannot imagine how many times that must be multiplied for a DJ. Especially a DJ at an event like Ultra Music Festival!

When I was a little boy, my mother tried explaining why secular music had so many swears compared to the worship music she would play in the car. She told me that people who swore in music had a terrible vocabulary and could not express what they were feeling in normal English. You know what, maybe she was right. Not so much about the terrible vocabulary part but about not being able to express yourself in your own language.

When I am inexplicably mad or frustrated, I start swearing. I mean stringing together lines of cuss words into sentences like in one of my college papers. I swear because I cannot express in words how angry or upset I am. I dare to make the hypothesis that the same goes for people who experience indescribable happiness; they f****** swear.

So I told my buddy, EDM DJ's swear so much because there are no words in any human language to express the feeling of joy they feel when creating this moment of ecstasy for themselves and the thousands of people they play for. The only way to describe it is with the motions and emotions within that moment and doing it again and again to recreate the high over and over again. Who can blame them for cussing like a sailor? There is no experience like it.

Listening to the beat drop makes you feel like the floor beneath your heart just gave out and you are falling into this void of happiness; that for a moment you understand the world with all its problems and everyone in it. Who knows why we feel this way. Someone told me once that our heartbeat mimics the music we listen to. Maybe when a beat drops our heart skips a beat and some chemical release triggers that feeling. I am certainly not qualified to make that statement as fact, however, with my experience, I am qualified to make these two statements:

One, I might finally understand why EDM DJ's swear so much.

Second, there is absolutely no feeling like the feeling of the MOTHERF****** BEAT DROP!