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Electronic Dance Music Festivals in Riyadh: Pop Culture as a Space of Cooptation and Contestation

Within the course of a decade, electronic dance music (EDM) grew from an underground subculture into one of the most popular music genres among youth in Saudi Arabia. EDM parties developed from an intimate, semi-legal pastime practice of cosmopolitan youth into state-sponsored mass parties. In this article, I discuss the effects of the state’s embrace of pop culture as a strategy of the new Saudi nationalism, heralded by Vision 2030. In the name of the diversification of the economy, today the Saudi state invests in local music festivals. Yet, rather than understanding Saudi youth as mere objects of state policy, I suggest that Saudi youth navigate, reject, and appropriate these new cultural spaces, and turn them into an arena, where all kinds of subversive practices can become possible.