Blackball: Unplugging Electronic Music.

As a cultural phenomenon, electronic music has hit its stride.

In 2015, computer-driven sequences and samples dominate the web, the airwaves, the dance floor and film soundtracks as never before and DJ-Producers are as famous than movie stars.

Yet, behind the hype and glitter is an authentic and protean art form. For every hot DJ, there's an innovator, an iconoclast, a rule-breaker. There are mentors, disciplined practitioners, genre-benders and passionately devoted listeners and fans of every age, everywhere.

When Robert Moog developed the first music synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre, he probably did not envision the stranglehold his invention would take on contemporary music.

An art form practiced by huddled figures in dark nightclubs seems an unlikely agent for social change. To its detractors, EDM isn't much more than that annoying thump from a passing car, or worse: the childlike backbeat for a stream of Hip-Hop profanities, the empty heartbeat of the discotheque—a repetitious soundtrack for hedonism, indulgence and excess.

Blackball was created in the belief that electronic music is a vibrant musical and cultural force with enormous potential for empowering, inspiring and teaching.

In London's grand age of gentlemen's clubs, to be "blackballed" was a one-way ticket to disgrace and obscurity. 

Blackballing electronic music could mean its salvation.

This is a-still evolving, multifaceted art form, with millions or even billions of followers. 

Now is the time for electronic music to be taken back to its birthplace—the classroom.

† http://djzimmie.com/2013/09/05/end-of-djing/