It was bass and fire in place of birthday cake and ice cream.
Electric Daisy Carnival turned 30 on Friday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, celebrating the only way it knows how: by making your adrenal glands feel like they’ve been hooked up to a car battery.
“This is crazy,” a woman behind us gasped early in the evening as we took a walk down Electric Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in this city of light and sound. “Is that a slide?” she then wondered incredulously.
Yes, it was — a big, bright, glowing pink slide that grown-ups raced down throughout the night like toddlers let loose on a neon playground.
Sure, EDC may be getting up there in years, but here, everything seems to be about aging in reverse — at least for a weekend — as wide-eyed adults dressed as debauched bananas and party-hard superheroes tap back into a childlike sense of wonderment.
Walking into the festival grounds, we saw a dude in a fuzzy rainbow-colored bucket hat with a totem made out of a “Slow down, kids at play” sign.
The sign was accurate, in a way — except for the whole slowing down thing.
There’s none of that here.
A colorful crowd
The Kandi World dance floor was crowded with Minions, like 50 of ’em.
It was a common sight on Friday: Packs of crowd members costumed as the “Despicable Me” characters were everywhere.
It was all part of a massive, fan-organized meetup initially intended to set a Guiness World Record, though those plans were ultimately abandoned because of logistical challenges.
Still, there were thousands and thousands of Minions in the house, underscoring the playfulness inherent in the EDC experience, other revelers costumed as naughty Girl Scouts, human disco balls, party-hard popes and, yes, a rave R2D2.
The crowd here is nearly as much a part of the show as the artists on stage — EDC colloquially calls its fans “headliners,” meaning that they’re the main attraction, and there’s more than a little truth to that.
The EDC grounds mirror the crowd’s frivolity: Where else are you going to scream your lungs out on a rave-themed spinning coaster ride at 3:30 a.m. or feel the heat of flame-spewing art installation pieces belching fire next to piles of cars stacked up like automotive club sandwiches?
Among the new diversions at EDC this year is Uncle Tony’s Social Club, a 194os-styled jazz speakeasy built in a warehouse setting where flappers dance on the bar and a showgirl trio called the Champagne Darlings works the stage to Dean Martin tunes.
“You’re nobody till somebody loves you,” Martin sang as the girls shimmied. “So find yourself somebody to love.”
Considering the surroundings, this was no problem: Right next door was “Up to Date,” EDC’s popular crowd member matchmaking show.
A trip through dance music time
It was a rhetorical question, but Karl Hyde posed it anyway.
“How am I at having fun?” the 67-year singer and one-half of British electronica pioneers Underworld asked in song during “Born Slippy” as he spun himself about the Cosmic Meadow stage like the hands of a clock moving backward.
That propulsive crossover hit — released in 1996 and featured on the “Trainspotting” soundtrack — helped introduce electronic dance music to a whole new audience, taking it to the fringes of the mainstream at the time.
You could say the same thing of EDC, which is why Underworld’s inclusion on the lineup felt fitting: EDM wouldn’t be where it is today without either.
Underworld seemed ageless on Friday, their melodic yet concussive songbook registering like a jackhammer chewing into concrete.
Speaking of hard-hitting, there was masked dubstep battering ram Ghengar wreaking havoc on the BassPod, where he merged raw-throated, tonsil-lacerating screams with thrash riffs and divebombing beats in the death metal of dance music.
Around this time, big-tent EDM hitmakers The Chainsmokers drew a massive crowd to the Kinetic Field, and Peggy Gou made the Neon Garden blossom with dreamy yet brawny house and techno. On the same stage earlier in the evening, female Spanish duo Mestiza stood out by blending full-contact techno with flamenco guitar and Latin music rhythms.
And so it went throughout the night, as dance music’s past became fused with its present.
This was highlighted by a walk down Memory Lane, a passageway through the center of the fest grounds where video footage chronicles EDC through the years.
“In this world of disarray, time marches on,” a narrator noted over images of previous festivals. “This is our sanctuary. This is our home.”
Contact Jason Bracelin at [email protected] or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.