Rock ’n’ roll rose to popularity in the 1950s by giving young people something that felt distinctly theirs. In the years after World War II, American teenagers had more leisure time and disposable income than previous generations, granting them enough independence to emerge as a consumer market of their own. They gravitated toward rock ’n’ roll, a new sound shaped heavily by Black rhythm & blues as well as country & western music. In place of much of the mainstream’s restraint, it offered what the Library of Congress calls a "new irreverence or directness".
Notably, adults did not welcome rock ’n’ roll or the scene forming around it. The music was criticized as crude, overly sexual, and potentially corrupting, with authorities sometimes attempting (and sometimes succeeding) to ban it outright. But that backlash is part of what made rock ’n’ roll signify more than a genre or sound. The more certain music, behaviors, and desires were marked as dangerous, the more they were latched onto as symbols of youth, rebellion, and freedom.
Seventy years later, impropriety still has its pull. Anyone who lived through Brat Summer knows this to be true. Charli XCX’s 2024 dance-pop album Brat became a cultural phenomenon, wrapped in imagery of messiness, promiscuity, and self-destructive partying.
Unlike plenty of internet-born aesthetics, though, Brat had a natural habitat beyond the screen: the club. Charli kicked off her album rollout with a Boiler Room set, part of a global live music series that has become a fixture for niche electronic artists with devoted followings. At the time, that was Charli. Then, the Boiler Room set made her cult following visible to everyone else — and, crucially, made it look incredibly fun to be part of. These people were loud, sweaty, excited, and, most importantly, out of the house together. They had somewhere to be. They had a community.
Part of Boiler Room’s appeal is that artists are not limited to performing their own catalog. They can play remixes, unreleased material, and whatever else they want the room to hear, becoming curators as much as performers. And people really want to be in that room. Charli XCX’s 2024 set in Brooklyn drew more than 25,000 RSVPs for a venue that only held around 400 people. Boiler Room’s recent youth culture report helps explain its extreme allure, emphasizing a focus on human creators, live creation, and physical space — particularly at a time when so much music discovery happens through personalized streaming feeds. "The more the algorithm knows us, the more we crave the unknown," the report argues.
Personalization is extremely convenient, but that convenience can remove much of discovery’s uncertainty and, with it, some of discovery’s pleasure. Boiler Room describes the antidote to hyper-personalization in three words: "risk, scarcity, and surprise."
That’s exactly what a rave offers. You enter a room where another human being decides what everybody hears. You can’t skip. You don’t necessarily know the next track. You’re surrounded by people you didn’t choose. The experience isn’t optimized specifically for you. It happens once. It may suck! That’s risk, scarcity, and surprise.
In that sense, the source of influence has changed far more than the desire to get outside it. Rock ’n’ roll offered the thrill of discovering something your parents would never have chosen for you; a rave offers the thrill of finding something rather than having it delivered to you (that, and your parents probably wouldn’t choose this either).
The appetite for friction extends into the music itself. Many dance artists treat conventions of "proper" musicianship as something to push against. Of her songwriting on Brat, Charli told The Guardian, "It’s really just about capturing a feeling of chaos and saying the most blunt thing that is at the top of my brain." That tracks. Many of the lyrics do not rhyme, much of the album sits closer to talking than singing, and the writing gets painfully specific about everything from jealousy toward other women in the industry to what exactly she gets up to at a party. There’s still a deeply entrenched idea that a guitar, a live drum kit, and an untreated voice are more authentic than a laptop, synthesizer, or auto-tune. Brat gleefully rejects that hierarchy; yes, this sounds synthetic, yes, the voice has sometimes been mangled beyond recognition... this can still be brutally honest.
Of course, not everyone found the party charming. In 2025, the Journal of General Internal Medicine published an article titled "Brat Culture: The Public Health Implications of the Glamorization of Hedonism", warning that the movement’s association of smoking, drinking, and drug use with self-expression could normalize risky behavior among young people. But that kind of anxiety has followed dance music for decades. Britney Spears spent much of the 2000s facing similar concern over what her lyrics, clothes (scandalously, this often meant a crop-top), performances, and behavior might encourage young people to do. As her girl-next-door image eroded and her music grew increasingly electronic and club-oriented, she became an easy target for the same old fear: that young people were excited by precisely what authority figures considered improper.
And the lineage continues past Brat. Frost Children, a sibling duo whose music moves across electronic genres, have similarly embraced live formats like Boiler Room not only to promote their music but to build a culture around the same promise rock ’n’ roll once made: that what looks like excess from the outside can feel like belonging from within. Fittingly, the duo perform like rock stars — crowd-surfing, screaming into the mic, dancing with abandon, and ricocheting between DJ decks, electric guitars, and drum kits. Their fans match that energy, dressing loudly, dancing just as frantically, and treating the show less like a performance to watch than a night to participate in. Their individuality becomes the very thing that binds them to the artist — and to one another.
Frost Children are hardly alone in bringing rock-star theatrics to dance music. 2hollis plays electropop to mosh pits full of fans who show up in his signature black eye makeup. Snow Strippers inspire crowds that Paper Magazine has described as "half rave, half punk show." The Dare performs synth-heavy club music as an old-fashioned frontman spectacle. Slayyyter headbangs and growls through electroclash club-pop with a live band while audiences scream back at her from below. The sound may vary across the dance scene, but the expectation is consistent: the audience is there to join in, not stand back and watch.
From the outside, perhaps that reads as chaos for chaos’s sake. Frost Children themselves, however, distinguish between the scene’s outward wildness and what actually happens inside it. Asked by Paper Magazine about EDM’s association with dangerous party behavior, they described something much simpler: "People are just really happy to be there and ready to exist and be in that moment with a bunch of people." Their shows may revel in maximalism, freedom, and letting go for the night, but what lies beneath is a desire for connection, not destruction.
And maybe that is what dance music and rock ’n’ roll ultimately have most in common. Both give people permission to be passionate, loud, strange, messy, emotional... to take up more space than daily life usually allows (even if the mosh pit itself offers very little). If those qualities seem isolating, you’d be wrong. Inside the scene, they become a way of recognizing one another. The transgressive aesthetic attracts people; the community is what keeps them there. That’s the beautiful paradox: refusing to blend in is often exactly how people find each other.
