I Was There When Trance Went Bad

a.k.a. The genre went supernova in the late '90s and early 2000s, but how do the defining songs from that era sound now?

For decades now, trance has been one of electronic music’s most reliable punching bags. There are plenty of reasons why. The cheesy builds and even cheesier drops are a good place to start, and the music’s largely funkless nature isn’t helping either. In many ways, trance is almost entirely divorced from dance music’s Black and brown roots in the American Midwest, and the enthusiastic crowds of drug-addled, flamboyantly dressed children—also known as candy kids—the genre reliably seems to attract don’t bolster its case as a serious pursuit. (Neither do the the Jesus poses happening in the DJ booth.) Trance is bombastic. It’s over the top. It’s often pretty ridiculous, and despite its commercial success—the music was filling arenas long before anyone uttered the word “EDM”—it’s long been considered something of an embarrassment, the sort of thing that tastemaker types will sneer at and those with no real knowledge of electronic music will cite to dismiss DJ and club / rave culture altogether.

Reviled. Maligned. Belittled. Criticized. Hated. Words like these frequently pop up in discussions of trance’s reputation, and though the genre has been around in various forms for more than 30 years, “trance has always sucked” still tends to be the most common narrative, especially amongst older dance music heads. Even so, the music has experienced a resurgence of popularity in recent years, to a point where what was initially touted as a “revival” has become seemingly permanent. Since 2017, Mixmag, DJ Mag, Bandcamp, Pitchfork (twice) and even The New York Times have all published lengthy features about trance, either highlighting its enduring appeal or touting its return to relevance, and Arjan Reitfeld’s 2021 book, Hypnotised: A Journey Through Trance Music 1990-2005, went a step further, devoting more than 300 pages to the music’s initial ascent, tracing its evolution from a niche concern to a full-fledged global phenomenon.

These tellings provide a more nuanced perspective, yet even as they refuse to dismiss the genre as a whole, they do tend to lay out a revised narrative in which trance had a “good” period and then went creatively off the rails once it found widespread commercial success. There’s no exact date when that switch was flipped, but it was somewhere around the turn of the millennium, and “1990s good, 2000s bad,” while not 100% accurate, does make the story easier to understand. (It’s not a coincidence that many of the trance revivalists garnering critical praise these days, from Roza Terenzi and Maara to Blue Hour and Young Marco, are usually framed as referencing the ’90s, and those engaging with the more maximalist sounds of the 2000s, such as Evian Christ and Lorenzo Senni, are most often celebrated not for their strict loyalty to that era, but for the ways in which they subvert its norms.)

As it happens, my own introduction to rave culture basically coincided with that dividing line in the trance story. Although I’d first encountered electronic music via the “electronica” boom (i.e. when songs by artists like Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers were suddenly put into heavy rotation at alt-rock radio stations across the US), as soon as I connected enough dots to A) figure out was a rave was and B) find my way into one, trance quickly became a major part of my listening diet. And to be clear, I’m not talking about the dreamy, genre-blurring proto-trance stuff from the early ’90s that Young Marco put on those Planet Love compilations a few years back. Even the proggier sounds of Northern Exposure-era Sasha & Digweed would have been too deep for most of the events I was attending. When I say trance, I mean big, bold trance with a capital T. In the Bay Area rave scene, that was the dominant soundtrack during the late ’90s, with bits of hard NRG, happy hardcore and drum & bass mixed in.

That’s not a cool thing to admit. I wish I could say that I’d instead immediately latched on to Underground Resistance, Basic Channel, Goldie, Aphex Twin and the wider Warp canon. Those things were being championed at the time by in-the-know heads in San Francisco—the city also had its own impressive slate of groundbreaking homegrown artists—but at the (legitimately massive) parties I was going to, those sounds simply weren’t on the menu.

Music discovery back then was a lot more dependent on being introduced to things. This was pre-Napster, pre-iTunes and way before streaming, so finding new music often meant hearing something on the radio or at party, reading about it in a magazine or getting a recommendation from a friend. Aside from being harder, it simply took longer than it does today. Yet what I experienced is also something that I think most young music enthusiasts still go through, in the sense that every listener starts somewhere, and it’s usually at a place that isn’t necessarily great. Recognizing that is something that older heads—myself included—should probably do more often, particularly when the urge arises to criticize whatever seemingly tasteless music the latest generation is excited about. (That being said, even in my most embarrassing moments, I was never excited about shit like Eiffel 65 or the Vengaboys. Some of what zoomers have been pushing the past few years is enough to test the limits of even the most patient scene elders.)

My trance phase didn’t last long—roughly speaking, it ran hottest from 1999 until maybe 2001—and once I got a little older and moved on to “better” electronic music, I was quick to disavow the genre. The music’s increasingly commercial bent certainly helped me to justify that pivot, but even once I got to a point where trance was little more than a speck in my personal rearview, I largely continued to keep my distance. While I never hid that part of my story, it was always told with a baked-in sense of embarrassment and self-flagellation, the underlying message being that trance was some really vapid stuff that I listened to when I was a clueless young raver and didn’t know any better.

Recently though, I’ve found myself occasionally wondering, “Were those records actually that bad?” I know that a lot of the trance from before my time was good, and that a lot what followed was pure garbage, but that in-between period—which, again, just so happens to coincide with not only the years I was most invested in the genre, but also my first real introduction to “underground” dance music culture—was absolutely pivotal to the genre’s trajectory. Aside from producing some of trance’s most enduring tracks, the late ’90s and early 2000s were also when much of the electronic music world, or at least its more discerning members, wrote the genre off for good. Was that time simply a preview of just how bad things would get, or was it wrongly dismissed by snobs and critics?

I decided to revisit some of my old favorites and find out.