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Last week, Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize, showing hip-hop like Lamar's has both commercial and critical appeal.
He can score a US number one, sure, but he can also win accolades for illustrating the complexity of African-American life.
EDM, or dance music, does not generally garner much praise from the mainstream music press. It is seen as too shiny, over-produced, lacking in depth.
Instead, it achieves something just as interesting, and perhaps more real — mass appeal, the kind that comes from being able to bring out the physicality in an audience.
That is where the significance of an artist like Tim Bergling, the Swedish producer and DJ known as Avicii who has died at the age of 28, starts to become clear.
Like his European contemporaries David Guetta, or Americans Diplo and Skrillex, Avicii had the power to move, invigorate and send into a kind primordial trance great swathes of people. (FYI: not everyone who likes dance music takes drugs.)
Why you are seeing so many people expressing grief over the loss of a Swedish DJ has to do with the physical response this kind of music invokes.
Dance music demands movement. It demands endorphins, euphoria, the natural high. And it generally does it at large, whether at huge festivals like Ultra in Miami, or in clubs in cities around the world.
Avicii, who pushed the boundaries of the genre through his collaborations, also had the ability to bring many different kinds of music fans together.
Alongside his fellow EDM stars, he brought dance music to the pop charts at a time when it was only beginning to shake off its reputation as an underground phenomenon closely tied to illicit drug use.
Now you see dance music infiltrating the pop world.
Artists like Rihanna and Coldplay have called on people like Avicii, as well as Calvin Harris and Marshmello, not just to give them crossover potential — of course, money is involved — but to bring their work a little bit of that infectious physicality that sets dance music apart.
Avicii was just a few years ago the most-streamed artist on Spotify, putting him in the company of superstars like Drake and Ed Sheeran. He was the first dance act to headline New York City's Radio City Music Hall.
Forbes reported he pulled in $19 million in 2015, making him one of the highest-paid musicians in the world. In pop and rock, pay cheques like that are reserved for people with household-name status.
Avicii's fame did not extend that far. He preferred the studio, toiling away creating music, and quit playing live a few years ago.
But do not assume, then, that his legacy will not be vast.
It will endure via the music fans around the world who had the opportunity to grab hold of the energy — of the physicality — that coursed through his music.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, dance-music, music, sweden, oman
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