Why Is(n’t) Ambient so White? Page 1 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 September 2021 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Sep 2021 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190093723.013.33 Why Is(n’t) Ambient so White? Victor Szabo Electronic Dance Music Edited by Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta and Robin James Abstract and Keywords This chapter investigates why white and light-skinned artists have long dominated repre sentations 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 ear ly 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 “beat less” emanation of disembodied mind(s), rather than of individuals. This history illumi nates how popular genres become racialized through feedback loops of musical produc tion and discursive categorization. In the course of tracing this history, the author propos es that a discursive framework of “strategic anti-genre-essentialism,” which positions genres as processes rather than categories, may help to undermine essentialist assump tions about music and race without dismissing them. Keywords: ambient, minimalism, whiteness, race, genre “Why is ambient so white?” 1 The question, raised in a Q&A at a February 2018 ambient music conference at the University of Huddersfield, took me aback. Perhaps it should not have—it was a reasonable enough response to the presentation on the Music from the Hearts of Space, a Berkeley-based ambient radio program whose most-played artists in the 1970s and 80s quite literally paled in comparison to rosters formatted by contempora neous US commercial radio. 2 The white man’s question could also have been gleaned from the so-whiteness of the room that day, or for that matter the conference program, which almost exclusively featured presentations on white artists like The Orb, Hildegard Von Bingen, and Brian Eno. Reminiscent of the #OscarsSoWhite social media response to the so-whiteness of the 2015 Academy Award nominees, the question might as well have been informed by media coverage of the ambient genre, which overwhelmingly centers