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Personally I think Rock has been a bit of a museum peice since the late 80s at best. And to be fair it's a museum that I like wandering around and sampling probably more than any other. I love Rock music, it's what I listen to - in its various forms - a good 90% of the time. I wouldn't even say that I like particularly forward thinking Rock - whatever that might be, but safe to say it isn't Big Star!
My point isn't that people should like electronic music (much of which is as dreadful as any other type of music) but that equally they shouldn't dismiss it simply because of how it's made.
America's cultural conservatism may well reflect a certain underlying dread of difference, but as Europeans we can't become too smug about this, considering how we live in a place where a goth girl is literally stamped to death by kids in a park simply for looking 'weird'.
Significantly, I think that any stigma associated with dance music in the UK is class rather than race or sexuality based. I don't know what music so-called American 'white trash' listens to these days, but in the UK its quite likely that the kid wandering around a council estate in a Burberry cap and designer tracksuit is gonna be listening to some form of either Techno or Garage or Grime. I'm not sure what this tells us, either about the music or the people that listen to it, but in all of my time in the US I never once heard a single Nitro record pumping out of a trailer park.
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