Electronic Dance Music didn’t grow into a serious industry in America until it was boiled down into those three little letters. Like KFC or MTV, EDM is an acronym that implies a lot about a substance that may or may not be contained in the actual product. But the idea behind an acronym like EDM isn’t about the music itself — it’s about the cold hard cash earned from selling the whole package to legions of people.

In mid-June, Insomniac Events hosted the third-annual EDMBiz conference at Las Vegas’ Cosmopolitan Hotel, in the days leading up to its massive Electric Daisy Carnival, which is loosely known as the world’s biggest rave. As notable as it is for its size, EDC is known just as well for having at least one person die from ecstasy-related trauma annually. Walking through the halls of the Cosmopolitan’s conference halls for EDMBiz, however, the pall of rave-related fatalities was entirely absent. The event convened a group of about 1,000 people who took EDM very seriously as part of their careers, but who’d apparently left their feathers and body paint at home: the most extremely dressed attendees were goth-casual, but everyone else looked like a generic creative executive. Regardless of dress, everyone was munching on sushi and sipping lattes, listening to bass music spun by a duo of statuesque blonde women in slinky leather tank tops and diamond-studded headphones. In the conference’s small expo section, representatives from gear manufacturers like Pioneer and ticketing entities like Flavor.us networked with event promoters and music-reactive LED sunglass vendors. And every so often, I got a glimpse of those at the top of the EDM food chain — the graying (or already gray) white men in expensive jeans, bespoke blazers and, sometimes, tailored button-down shirts.

Ubiquitous West Coast music guy Jason Bentley hosted the two-day EDMBiz affair — he’s the music director at KCRW, and the host of the Santa Monica radio station’s massively popular new music show Morning Becomes Eclectic. The handsome, honey-voiced DJ has always been a confusing character to me, riding the line between hardcore underground music proponent and pure Hollywood douchebag super-efficiently, for a seemingly optimal balance of reverence for good music and good business. He was, in essence, the perfect person to host this particular conference, which was primarily a collection of panels and conversations between people who had been successful at making a more-than-decent career out of concurrent and equally powerful loves of music and money. People who had the love of music, but maybe not quite the level of material success as those on the stage, sat attentively in the audience, taking notes on laptops and smartphones, eager to glean any sliver of an edge over the competition in an increasingly crowded and constantly growing market.

On the first day of the conference, four men spoke on a panel called “The 6.2 Billion Dollar Business,” and offered a vision of the financial and cultural reach of EDM. “Every generation has a style of music that comes with a set of opportunities to reach out to people who are aficionados,” mused Rick Stevens, the CEO of Y Entertainment Group and one of the panelists. “Rock ‘n’ roll, disco, hip hop.” These were all genres that started out conceptually splintered, then rallied under a unified title to become the extremely profitable “sound of a generation.” They were all genres, Stevens said, that were once a lot like EDM.

Earlier in the day, the EDMBiz keynote featured Vegas nightclub kingpin Sean Christie, a man perfectly suited to explain EDM’s rapid mainstream ascent. He runs the Wynn Hotel’s highly successful club properties Surrender and Encore Beach Club, and he looks the part — perfectly executed two-piece suit, slicked-back hair, and an intensity in his delivery that oozes power. When he started booking DJs in Nevada around 2000, the music industry hadn’t come around on DJ culture. Christie experimented, booking events like a spinning debut from Perry Farrell (of Jane’s Addiction) and a set by legendary underground DJ Frankie Bones. Both were complete flops. It wasn’t until Christie orchestrated Paris Hilton’s 21st birthday party at the Bellagio, Christie said, that things began to change — it was the opening salvo in a string of events that catalyzed huge nightclub growth in Sin City. As access to legal gambling expanded around the world, the Vegas gaming industry was losing players — and tourists started to spend more on bottle service at ritzy dance parties.

EDM’s best friend

That shift from casinos to clubs also saw the rise of celebrity DJs. Christie signed Calvin Harris, Kaskade, and Skrillex to their first US residencies in the late 2000s at his Wynn clubs. Soon, bidding wars to book top DJs erupted between clubs, and for the first time ever, DJs could earn six figures in a single night. “That raised the bar financially,” Christie recalled. The idea was, “let’s see what we can afford to pay.” It was around this time that much of electronic music was merged into a mass-market presence under the term EDM — the perfect catchall to sell DJ-producer culture and sound to the masses. While Vegas may have ushered in the era of EDM celebrity, it didn’t take long for the rest of the music industry — and the country — to get on board.

John Boyle, the CFO of Insomniac, described the current financial state of the EDM market during “The 6.2 Billion Dollar Business” panel. “This isn’t disco,” he said. “This is hip hop with a lot more legs.” The prevailing sentiment on the panel was that $6.2 billion is a low estimate, and the global value of EDM is currently closer to $20 billion, with room to grow. “There’s a fundamental difference [between EDM and other music cycles],” Boyle said. “Technology.” After all, EDM fans aren’t merely rabid consumers of drugs, alcohol, and subwoofers. They’re also primarily millennials whose hashtags, likes, and shares create a precisely quantifiable consumer.

If there’s any company that knows how to quantify those consumers, it’s Nielsen. In addition to analyzing radio and TV listenership and album sales, the company also monitors every aspect of how consumers interact with brands online. During a solo presentation called “Engaging the Electronic Music Listener,” Tatiana Simonian, Nielsen’s head of branded music entertainment, described how she measures the data that EDM listeners fork over, either in directed Nielsen surveys or in the form of likes and hashtags, and in chart after painstakingly rendered chart, revealed how EDM has created a new class of highly engaged spenders.

Not surprisingly, people who love electronic music also love electronics. They have “a high propensity to purchase high-tech devices versus other genres, making them ideal for partnerships in the mobile and tech space,” Simonian said. They’re more likely than other music listeners to purchase songs after hearing them in an ad. They’re also 50 percent more likely to buy energy drinks and 18 percent less likely to buy diet soda — presumably because they spend too much time dancing to worry about calories, Simonian joked. They spend more of their music money on live events, and they’re trendsetters — EDM listeners are generally regarded as “key influencers” among their peers. That influence is already attracting major companies eager to throw money at the genre: 7UP, for example, recently debuted its Electric Daisy Carnival-branded can and a companion hashtag, #7x7UP, which the company is using to give away tickets to shows like Tiësto and the HARD Summer music festival.

With album sales on seemingly permanent decline, readily quantifiable EDM consumers offer the industry a raft of ways to make money. Festival culture is chief among them. Modern EDM festivals like Electric Daisy Carnival, HARD Fest, and Skrillex’s Mothership tour are massive productions that dwarf their predecessors: most “laptop” artists and DJs were, until recently, lucky to have shoddy projections on a poorly hung bedsheet as their visual backup. But when Daft Punk brought their massive LED-coated pyramid to Coachella in 2007, things started to change.

Now, Coachella has a series of tents that are covered in acres of LED panels, riddled with high-intensity lasers, and dense with the sticky musk of artificial fog. The festival, which rakes in an astounding half-billion dollars a year, featured an EDM producer (Calvin Harris) as its top-billed headliner for the first time in 2014. Festivals also offer fertile ground for millennials, a generation entirely unfamiliar with the concept of selling out, to engage in “brand immersion.” Swedish House Mafia pioneered the trend when they partnered with Absolut in 2012, releasing a single called “Greyhound” — named after the popular combination of vodka and grapefruit juice — that featured the trio behind a roboticized race dog on its cover. The move successfully cast the cocktail as an EDM staple, and the band incorporated the digital dog into its visuals for an Absolut-sponsored tour. Simonian says Nielsen’s research has revealed that electronic music fans “want brands to sponsor artists.” If this concept sounds like “selling out” to you, your problem might be that you were born before 1990, or that you were raised on some form of punk rock ethos that requires strict division between creativity and capital (I’m guilty of both). Selling out is an alien concept in the EDM market — when Simonian says that fans want brands to sponsor artists, it might just mean that fans are happy to see their favorite producers making a decent wage to create amazing music.

The only way to preserve an unforgettable experience

Some panelists recognized the obvious creative dilemmas facing the current market, namely, that it’s becoming too formulaic for its own good. “EDM has become much more about function than it is about expression,” said Nathan Lim, the manager of the dubstep-metal band Krewella, during the “New Art Of Selling Music” panel. “[It’s about] creating the big festival bangers that are gonna turn the crowd up.” Thump editor-in-chief Zel McCarthy noticed that EDM “seems to be custom-made for the short attention span of millennial society.” But what, in Tiësto’s name, will happen when all these spendy, brand-engaged 20-somethings finally get tired of EDM’s current incarnation? The loose answer amongst the experts seemed to be — as long as the money keeps rolling in — that the industry will figure something out. After all, there are always new subgenres to throw into the EDM marketing machine, and new markets to sell it to. Bangalore’s First-Ever Trap Festival, anyone?

Of all the buzzwords and catchphrases bouncing around the EDMBiz Conference, one popped up more than any other: authenticity. “Even the biggest DJ started off with a love of music,” said Sean Christie, the nightclub magnate. “No one started off thinking, ‘I’m gonna make $20 mil this year.’” And nearly every participant in “Show Me The Money: The Agent’s Panel” said the primary indicator for an artist’s future success is “whether it’s something that feels real.” While, to me, some megahits like DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down For What” resonate as genuine but for every one of those there’s an emotionally flimsy piece of trash like Martin Garrix’s “Animals” that makes me feel empty inside. Still, I should consider myself lucky: if the EDMBiz conference confirmed anything, it’s that the genre is a business first, and an artistic endeavor second — and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Electronic music still remains one of my deepest loves, and the fact that it’s highly commercialized just means I get to hear more of my favorite sounds in more contexts than I ever did when I was an angsty teen downloading 64k Orbital MP3s over a shoddy 28.8k USRobotics modem.

So when I hear Skrillex in a Best Buy commercial, hear Calvin Harris teaming up with Rihanna, or a mediocre deadmau5 rip-off while I’m browsing through the underwear section of Target, I can only smile contentedly: finally, the sound I wanted to hear everywhere when I was growing up is actually everywhere. EDM has become the first “voice of a generation” that openly accepts a partner all other types of music bristled at: unabashed capitalism.

With a range of about 90 miles and an average charge time of 21 hours, the Leaf’s limitations mean most Americans will need to fundamentally change how they think about driving before they bite the electric bullet. But Los Angeles isn’t most of America, and for my LA-based family of three, the transition has been a challenge — but a challenge that feels more like playing Tetris than being on Survivor. Sometimes it feels like the Leaf has more in common with a cellphone than it does with a Camry. The “key” is actually a proximity fob — I almost never take it out of my pocket. You push a button to start the car, and instead of the clunky turning over of a gas engine, you hear one of three user-selected startup sounds — sort of like the soft Apple “dong,” though Nissan’s sound design feels more Pokémon than Brian Eno. Here’s the one I chose:

And then: nothing. The first thing you’ll notice about driving a Leaf is how silently it runs. The dash displays the charge level and computes the number of miles remaining on the charge, which can change depending on how aggressively you drive and how much you use the A / C. Shifting into reverse on the Prius-style knob triggers a friendly warning tone, a sort of consumer version of the annoying beeping you hear when a big commercial vehicle is backing up. Without the purr of a gas engine, it’s often difficult for passersby to hear that an electric vehicle is even on.

The second thing you’ll notice about driving a Leaf is how normal it feels. You turn the steering wheel, you hit the “gas,” you use your turn signals, you hit the brakes. It’s a car. The biggest difference in acceleration: EVs only have one gear, and when you floor it you can hear an electric hum and feel an incredible amount of torque right off the starting line. If you’ve ever chosen the Leaf as your vehicle in Gran Turismo, you’ll know that it can go from 0 to 60 in seven seconds flat. As a result, getting on the 110 freeway gives me the dual pleasures of tree-hugging and getting all Fast And Furious at the same dang time.

But “flooring it” in a Leaf isn’t without its consequences. The in-dash accelerometer is a series of 14 dots — 10 white dots indicate the level of power you’re pulling from the battery, and a heavy foot will light all of them up. When you let up on the gas, the white dots disappear and four green dots blink on, indicating that the centrifugal force of the car is being harnessed to send power back to the battery. It’s an elegant way to monitor the real-time efficiency of your driving behavior — every second behind the wheel turns into a resources-management game. On a recent trip up the mountainous Angeles Crest Highway, I used a ton of white dots to propel the Leaf up a long, steep slope. But on the way down it was all greens, and by the time we were at the base of the mountain the battery had regenerated most of the energy it had used on the ascent. Achievement unlocked, my gamer-brain whispered at the end of the trip. This Leaf Climbed Bear Mountain…and Lived To Tell the Tale.

Plug politics

There are currently three types of chargers available for most EV owners, and understanding them is as important as understanding why you shouldn’t fill your petroleum vehicle up with diesel. Every Leaf comes with a trickle charger. Just like a cellphone adaptor, one end plugs into a grounded three-prong 120v outlet and the other end plugs into a socket on the nose of the car. This is the most widely distributed way to charge, as it essentially turns any electrical outlet into a gas station — but with current technology it takes almost 21 hours for a fill-up.

The next step up is to use a 240-volt supply; if you have an electric clothes dryer you already have one installed. This cuts the charge time down to around six hours, and it’s relatively easy to get a 240v line installed at any residential or commercial property. Many public parking areas offer free 240v charging: the ones in EV-only parking slots at the Whole Foods in Pasadena are covered in sellable ad space, which is a smart way for the high-end grocer to recoup some of the money it loses to increased energy bills. At other high-visibility locations, like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the chargers are visibly sponsored by Nissan. At shopping malls like the Americana in Glendale, a commercial venture called Blink offers charging for a dollar an hour. The semi-wide distribution of EV owners means that there’s usually at least a free space or two available to charge. In order to keep up with rising EV sales, more of these will need to be installed in coming years to avoid long lines at the pump.

But for a peek into the not-so-widely-distributed future of EV charging, you’ll need to find a big, honking 480v power supply. Unlike getting a 120v or 240v line, a 480v installation is an expensive and complicated procedure that requires a big investment of time and money. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power places a premium on high-voltage delivery, and the charging stations themselves are serious machines. The whole package costs around $30,000. In 2013, incentives from the federal government and from Nissan itself brought the cost down to around $10,000, but that money is hard to come by now. Finally, the port itself is about twice as big as the 240v socket — it’s a technical spec called CHAdeMO, an add-on that tacked $1,300 onto the price of our Leaf. While the big chargers are commonplace in Japan, you’ll usually only find them at Nissan dealerships in the USA.

When you do find one — and when it’s not already in use by another Leaf owner — using a CHAdeMO charger is one of those experiences that makes you feel like you’re already living in the future. The big white boxes look like slimmer gas pumps, complete with LCD displays and a bank of four exhaust fans that cool down the high-current circuitry inside, which brings you up to an 80 percent charge in about 20 minutes. The big socket and heavy cord feel a lot like a gas pump, and sitting inside the Leaf as it charges feels kind of like sitting on top of a nuclear power plant. Which feels awesome.

But 99 percent of the time, charging our car is a much less dramatic affair. On a normal day we don’t drive more than 40 miles. The trickle charger is permanently plugged into a socket inside the house. I park the car, pop open the charging port, and snap in the handset. The next morning, I walk to the car, unplug the handset, and replace the cord in its holster. When I turn the car on, the indicator reads 100 percent. The whole process takes about 20 seconds. The result? I never visit the gas station. My house is my gas station. This subtle paradigm shift is probably the most rewarding part of Leaf life. I can safely say that I’ll never buy a gas car again.

Potholes on the green road

Okay, confession time! I still own a gas car — a 2007 Honda Fit — and can’t envision life without it anytime soon, simply because we often take road trips outside of LA County. Although mapping apps like PlugShare can help to find far-flung outlets, there simply aren’t enough charging resources to make long-haul trips practical in the Leaf. The city of LA placed “Electric Vehicle Charging Station” signs on most of the major freeways throughout the city years ago, but when I went to investigate one off Interstate 10 I found that the charger was actually a single 240v plug on the top floor of a parking lot reserved for Paramount employees.

And it’s not like I’m charging my car with green rainbows and California sunshine — like you, my electric power is generated by a nasty cocktail of burnt coal and natural gas, with a dash of solar and hydro mixed in for a hint of renewable flavor. I pay 13.92 cents per kilowatt-hour to the LA Department of Water and Power for that privilege. My bill has doubled since we bought the Leaf, from 165 kWh a month to 330 kWh. But that’s just a $23 difference, which pales in comparison to the hundred or so bucks I used to spend every month on gas. There’s also the added eco-benefit of using the grid’s static distribution structure to power my car, which saves the money and emissions that would be used to transport gas from god-knows-wherever to Southern California.

The LADWP does offer a 2.5-cent-per-kilowatt-hour discount for EV owners, but the process of getting it proved to be a logistical and economic nightmare. In an effort to green my driving, I enlisted the services of Elon Musk’s SolarCity to bring solar power into my energy equation. But getting the panels on my roof proved far too expensive to be practical and I was disqualified from their massively popular zero-down installation. So the entire EV equation isn’t as earth-friendly as I had originally anticipated, but it’s unambiguously a step in the right direction. While Tesla brought the EV future to a privileged few with its $70,000 Model S, Nissan’s democratizing economies of scale have created a new class of people who are dependent on an infrastructure that doesn’t exist across America. But Leaf life seems to be spreading like hay fever, at least out here in what was once Prius country. Since the price drop in 2013, there are Leafs everywhere in Los Angeles. Instead of being eco-pioneers, we’re now part of a larger —and more economically persuasive — group of regular drivers.

As thrilling as may be in 2014, driving electric is getting more banal every day. A subtler and infinitely cooler thrill will arrive in the next few years as electric motors become the silent majority, whirring down highways everywhere in an always diminishing sea of internal combustion engines.

QUIZ: What does this poster say to you? A) Healing B) Pain Relief C) Blazin’ With Mr. Cactus

The 2014 Medical Cannabis Cup at the NOS Event Center in San Bernardino was divided into “non-medicated” and “medicated” areas — the former was equal parts food trucks and activist booths, and the latter required a doctor’s recommendation letter to enter. If you didn’t bring a rec, there was a tent full of “Green Doctors” ready to evaluate and prescribe to new patients on-site. Every time I looked, there were at least 25 sick people in line looking to get well, and fast.

Behind the rec wall was a bona-fide weed wonderland, a sort of cloudy mashup of a Phish show, Oktoberfest, and CES. But where a Phish show is polluted by a network of shady dealers, the Cup was jam-packed with vendors looking to cash in on the steady march of decriminalization sweeping the United States. Hundreds of booths sat on a perpetually hazy blacktop trafficked by thousands of red-eyed attendees. Near the entrance was a lavishly designed GFarmaLabs compound emblazoned with a Breaking Bad-inspired molecule logo and their lofty tagline, “Committed to Medical Cannabis Innovation.”

On display in giant green cylinders were GFarmaLabs’ high-end G Stiks, individually vacuum-sealed pre-rolled blunts with a color-coding system to alert the buyer to the type of blend contained therein. Tangentially medical, GFarmaLabs employed a swarm of booth babes dressed in a powerful combination of underwear and open lab coats wandering around with hospital-grade stainless steel instruments dangling from lanyards.

“Have you tried Liquid Gold yet?” one of them smiled at me, nonchalantly lifting the tube from between her breasts to my lips. And so began my ascent — not by smoking, as I had assumed, but with a highly concentrated cannabis oil in vapor form. Vaping with a pen has a lot of advantages over smoking: it’s almost odorless, it’s easier on the lungs, and it delivers something of a purer high without coughing and the red-eyed cloudiness associated with inhaling burnt plants. And it gets you very super high.

Sufficiently blazed, I said goodbye to my nurse and wandered from the peak of GFarmaLabs’ Apple Store-style installation, descending into the maze of traditional outdoor booths. Attendees generally fell somewhere on the spectrum that lies between neon-spackled Coachella victim and Nike-clad cellphone salesman, between 18 and 25 years old, at least 80 percent male, with a precious few branching out into pseudo-Rastafarianism or traditional California hippie territory.

I turned a corner and ran into a scene ripped right out of Spring Breakers: atop the DabStix booth was a crew of a dozen bros nodding along to the beat of a hokey white MC with ass-length dreads and orange-tinted Locs. His raps were really bad, but they did manage to incorporate a lot of ingeniously stupid rhymes between adjectives like “blazed” and “dazed.” More importantly his cohorts were tossing handfuls of blunts off the stage. At first this struck me as hypocrisy: why was a vape-pen manufacturer chucking out rolled buds? But then the logic of tossing out glass-and-steel tubes into a sea of stoners revealed itself to me. It was the first time I’d ever heard someone say, “It’s raining blunts, yo!” I hope it’s not the last; never before have I seen the American countercultural dream so perfectly encapsulated in a single flick of the wrist.

While American peddlers covered all conceivable iterations of cannabinoid vaporization, the most bizarre invention I saw in San Bernadino was Aktiv8vapor — a commercially packaged e-cig loaded not with tobacco or weed, but with New Zealand Deer Antler Extract.

Mark Jacob, an avid ultra-marathon runner and the founder of the company, says that athletes and hunters have been consuming naturally discarded antlers for thousands of years to increase stamina. “They were nature’s purest statement of regeneration!” Jacob states on the company’s overproduced website. Vaporized deer antler, it turns out, tastes about like you’d expect — mostly mossy, kind of woodsy, and just a little bit gamey, with a mentholated aftertaste at the back of the throat.

“Oh, and you’re not supposed to inhale,” the girl said after I was three puffs in, “just sort of let it sit on your tongue.” Whoops! Maybe I did it wrong, or maybe I was already too high to tell what was happening, but I couldn’t discern any skeletomuscular enhancements after hitting the antler. It did make me feel like I was in the future a little bit, though, but the kind of future that created the wasteoid aliens at the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars. Apparently they sell this shit at GNC for $15 a stick now. LOL @ athletes!

After two hours at the Medical Cannabis Cup I was fed up because I hadn’t actually smoked any weed yet! So I turned my nose to the stinkiest breeze I could smell and ended up at the Exoticgenetix booth. Like most of the best things in life, I had no idea how their booth concept would actually financially sustain itself. Exoticgenetix is a seed distributor and prides itself on developing high-intensity strains with high-intensity names like Exotic Fighter, Black Hawk Down, and After Life OG. A dozen different smoking mechanisms, including a comically huge stem bowl and a three-foot bong, were laid out among just as many jars of fat nugs. The hoodied budtenders were eager to please: “Hello friend. Can I pack you a bowl of Blue Angel?” Yes you can!

My sample size was more than generous, and after I took a preliminary toke I blew the haze in his face and smiled, handing the pipe back. “I mean, you probably wanna finish that to get the full effect.” So I cleared the bowl, getting so bombed in the process that I really didn’t want to try any more. But the Exoticgenetix representative was insistent that I move onto another full bowl of Purple Pig. How on god’s green earth was I supposed to differentiate between strain effects when I was already in a different dimension? The strangest part of the whole ordeal was the fact that Exoticgenetix wasn’t actually selling anything to consumers: they’re a strictly wholesale business. All those free samples were either a serious attempt to generate widespread consumer demand, or a powerfully simple statement of weed-sharing culture.

Moving on, I was heartened to discover that making transcendentally stupid bongs is still a tenable profession. There was live glassblowing throughout the day at the Lurch Glass trailer, complete with a Fred Durst-looking character shaping new creations until the sun went down. There was a glass trombone that looked exactly like a trombone, except you could smoke weed out of it. There was an amazing piece encompassing a diorama of Animal the Muppet sticking his head inside the glass chamber that I’m sure Jim Henson is smoking out of in heaven. And then there was a shifty character walking around surreptitiously with the most complex dragon pipe I’ve ever seen in my entire life — obviously not a licensed vendor, I asked him what it would take for him to part with the emerald obscenity: “I don’t want to seem rude but this is a part of me and it’s not for sale.” He looked at me leadingly. “But…?” I ventured. “Yeah,” he conceded, “Two thousand bucks. I take PayPal too.” I passed.

As the tide of marijuana decriminalization rolls across America, so too does the commercialization of all aspects of its consumption. I first discovered Weedmaps at the HempCon trade show in 2011, where chesty representatives wearing nothing but painted-on cannabis leaves encouraged patrons to download their surprisingly helpful smartphone app, which helps users locate and review nearby dispensaries and delivery services. Since then, Weedmaps has transformed itself into the Amazon of the cannabis world: their new logo even apes the online retailer’s distinctive “smile” logo.

The scene around their compound looked like it had been ripped right out of South By Southwest. Like the Dabstix booth, they also had an MC shouting over blown-out EDM and throwing out handfuls of blunts to adoring fans. There’s been a huge influx of capital investment in Weedmaps. “Lifestyle” brands, as they’re often referred to, spend tons of money at events like this, not because they’re selling anything directly to consumers, but rather to cement their place in the marketplace that’s unmistakably on the upswing.

The other major digital player at the Medical Cannabis Cup was a new venture called Leafly. Like GFarmaLabs, Leafly is appealing on some level to the new medical marijuana patient who’s looking to know exactly what they’re smoking before they smoke it, with data backed by some scientific rationale. Their design language mimics a periodic table, creating what they call “the world’s largest cannabis-strain resource.” Users can search by strain or by purported medical efficacy. If you want to know which strain will put you to sleep, which one will help with back pain, or read a chemical analysis of “celebrity” strains like Blue Dream (it contains high levels of focus-enhancing Alpha Pinene), Leafly wants to be your one and only stop on the quest for enlightenment. The whole thing felt very “Twitter in 2007,” a small player looking to become invaluable to anyone entering this world for the first time. The Leafly representative was also the only dude in the whole place wearing a corporate-branded polo.

As the day wore on and the free samples began to take a cumulative toll on my mind, I decided it was time to enter the world of super-concentrated compounds.

Dabbling in shatter

At the CES convention in Las Vegas, there’s always one product that drives a resilient secondary industry: it’s almost invariably the new iOS device, with hordes of manufacturers clamoring for the residual business of case manufacturing and other consumerist accessorization. At the Medical Cannabis Cup, that product was undoubtedly giant sheets of sticky resin that are broken apart and consumed in small doses. They’re often called “shatter” because of their glass-like appearance and tendency to break off into tiny pieces called dabs. From what I can tell, dabs are the shots of the weed world. Tiny and super-potent, the consumption process reminds me more of smoking crack than smoking weed. Dozens of booths offered $5 dabs to patrons — the attendant, usually a female, super-heats a titanium bowl with a butane torch and place the dab inside, where it’s instantly combusted and inhaled through a bong-like structure.

Although I was originally excited about testing these sticky new waters, a quick conversation with the dabtender convinced me otherwise. “It’s your first time doin’ dabs? Well, what are you doing after this? I’d suggest you have a couch nearby to crash on. And someone to put you on it, because you’re not gonna feel like doing much.” Instead I watched as others partook, inhaling the resin clouds with otherworldly expressions of stonedness and making their way to a nearby chill zone to either nod off or gaze out into space.

That little lounge, with its disheveled pleather couches and tables full of half-eaten munchies, confirmed my suspicions that doing dabs is a very different world than the hippie / Rasta stoner culture that came before it. Dabbers are pure 2000s bros, the very purest form of THC enthusiasts: where most smokers get high to enhance other parts of life, this rare breed seems to get high only to stay high. If the Cannabis Cup was Dante’s Inferno, this was its ninth circle, its inhabitants g8-3sisting in suspended animation as the rest of the universe continues revolving. It made me a little bit sad, but at least they weren’t puking on themselves like a bunch of freshman poisoned by self-inflicted cocktail wounds. After peeking my head into a bit of that dark cloud, I was done for the day.

As I made my way back to the parking lot, I passed by the GFarmaLabs compound once again. By this time, everyone — especially the exhibitors — was a thousand percent messed in the head. One of the labcoat- and thong-wearing associates approached: “Try one?” she deadpanned distractedly, halfheartedly extending a silver tray full of exquisitely-decorated chocolate truffles as she tore at a hole in her fishnets. “What’s in it?” I asked, perhaps a little naively. “I think it’s like…40 milligrams, um….40 percent? 40 thousand something? Maybe cinnamon? I don’t know, they’re fuckin’ bomb. Eat it.”

As my designated driver headed home and the mysterious truffle did its work, I watched the weed festival recede into the sunset. For $28 I had been given a look into the future of drug buffets: although the medical part of the Medical Cannabis Cup seemed to have eluded its attendees, they had all come to San Bernardino to take part in something larger than themselves. Although I was stoneder than I had ever been in my life I was still nowhere near as incapacitated as I could have gotten at any run-of-the-mill open bar. More than anything, the Cannabis Cup represents a possible future for the inevitable intoxication of America: once conservatives discover how much more peaceful — and marketable — of a drug cannabis is than alcohol, even they will have no choice but to support its continued path towards total legitimacy and — if they’re lucky — total profit.

Reclamation

So on his winter break, Oleksik sat in a room full of tapes at the Dischord house in Arlington, Virginia — the same house where many of the most influential punk bands to come out of the DC area had lived, rehearsed, and recorded since 1981. For the Baltimore native who had grown up seeing Fugazi at Fort Reno Park in the capital, “It was a wild time those first two weeks. It would just be Ian and I in the room.” MacKaye would regularly pop early original demos into an old tape deck as they sifted through material. “Whoa, whoa, you shouldn’t do that!” the soon-to-be-professional archivist would scold, wary of the havoc that even a single pass of a tape head could wreak on old cassettes. Within a few days he had created the basis of what would eventually become the Fugazi Live Series — rehousing and reorganizing the tapes from a jumble of crusty Case Logic boxes into an old but well-kept library card catalog MacKaye had found in the trash.

“I made up a numbering system and organized everything so that we could get it out of Ian’s head and into a database,” Oleksik explains. “From there I prioritized everything in terms of obsolescence — there were a ton of DAT tapes that were really shitty.” Before flash recorders and hard drives were cheap enough to use as audio-storage media, the most convenient way to get a high-quality digital recording was on the notoriously unreliable Digital Audio Tape. When affordable SD cards became the norm, DAT equipment disappeared from the market quickly, leaving the archivist with limited hardware options for pulling the Fugazi material into a more accessible format. The only high-speed DAT reader he could find was Sony’s SDT-9000, an internal drive that offered only a SCSI-50 connection. To accommodate the old standard Oleksik found a vintage turquoise Power Mac G4 tower. “When we went to get it from this Craigslist guy he was just like, please take it!” With school back in session Oleksik headed back to New York, leaving MacKaye with the Frankensteined transfer station and a massive job ahead of him. In a bizarre sort of reverse twist of fate, Sony discontinued the SDT-9000 just two weeks later.

For months, the rock ‘n’ roll icon would pop DATs into the drive, set an egg timer as they transferred, and go downstairs to do other work. Meanwhile, Fugazi’s longtime engineer Joey Picuri set about digitizing the cassettes — but the huge volume of material still had no set final destination. “I hate to do archiving for archiving’s sake,” says Oleksik. “We can preserve stuff but what’s the point if no one’s gonna listen to it?” MacKaye also felt that the tapes had a higher calling than rote preservation: “I’m a Hendrix fan, and I’ve studied many, many live recordings of his … I’m glad someone taped those shows, and I’m glad I was able to get ahold of them. My sense was, well, we have all these tapes, let’s not just take a few of them. Let’s put ‘em all up.”

Nice new outfit

And so the march toward digital distribution began. Sometime-Fugazi member Jerry Busher began post-processing: EQing out excess noise, chopping the sets into individual song MP3s, and labeling everything according to the catalog system that Oleksik had formulated. After guitarist Guy Picciotto gave the files and the metadata a final look, the music was ready for the public. On December 1st, 2011, the Fugazi Live Series debuted on Dischord’s website, with the stated goal of making all the recordings available for $5 apiece — a nod to the band’s preferred ticket price during the 13 years they toured. That’s just a suggested price, though: you can actually pay anywhere from $1 to $100 for any show download, provided you can explain why in at least 40 characters.

Like all of Dischord’s output, the Live Series interface is a no-bullshit affair, packaged efficiently and brimming with all the details MacKaye and his bandmates could scour from meticulous tour logs. Every show — from their first on September 3rd, 1987 to their last on November 4th, 2002 — is assigned an audio quality rating from “poor” to “excellent.” Ticket price, opening bands, source material and engineers, and setlist are present for nearly every show, and most come with live photos and fliers, many of which were submitted by fans. There’s also a forum-like interface on every show page, and it’s not unusual to find scores of people who attended each event trading questions and comments with an air of happy nostalgia tinged with hope that the band will one day return from its 11-year hiatus.

But two years after it launched, MacKaye still seems focused on getting the Fugazi Live Series as complete as it can possible be. The band has solicited and received original source recordings that didn’t wind up in his bedroom — submissions from fans and tape traders have accounted for a 10 percent growth of the archive since it launched, giving the whole thing a community-driven feel. “I cannot figure out how many shows we still have to put up. I’m exhausted by it, I’ve spent thousands of hours on it at this point, but we’re really committed to getting it done… one of the things I have to do today or tomorrow is proof 10 more shows. It’s not that I’m sick of it, but if you’ve been on a long journey, the last few days it’s just sorta like, ‘Let’s get the fuck home.’”

Do you like me

There is a lot to be excited about in the ways we produce and consume music in 2014, but it’s often difficult to decipher where the music ends and the contextual media structures around it begin. The best thing about Fugazi, and the live series, is that the music is always the message. There are no Facebook or Twitter logos polluting its pages; no publicist blasting emails about how Dischord is revolutionizing music; no attempt to sell to a nostalgic market. For MacKaye, it remains a matter of completing a simple task demanded by a pile of tapes that captured a small slice of American history.

“I have no idea who’s listening to it. Of course I would like them to think, ‘That was good, we enjoyed listening to that.’ But beyond that there’s no aim. It’s just a document.” But doesn’t the very act of documenting imply that the content itself is important, like those Hendrix bootlegs — didn’t MacKaye have any real feeling of Fugazi’s place in history? “I’m not a nostalgic dude and I just don’t think about stuff like that. It’s just the work.” No matter how hard I pressed him for some shred of pride, I couldn’t feel it over the phone. “Some of the songs, you put a guitar in my hand and I would have no idea how to play them. With that kind of removal I can listen to the songs and think, ‘That’s a good song.’ It’s not me playing it, it’s just the guy in the recording.” It turns out Fugazi’s greatest legacy might be something that everyone involved in creating media could use a lot more of in 2014 — humility.

Photo credit: ECM