Concert review: Lights All Night 2014

If a fan of electronic dance music from a decade or two ago had been transported on Friday night to Lights All Night, Dallas’ largest EDM festival, they would have been in for a shock. And not just because of the amount of e-cigs and vaping.

It would have been over the genre’s post-dubstep love affair with hip-hop — through trap music, New Orleans bounce, Dirty South, and even classic old-school hip-hop — that radiated through the four stages set up inside the Dallas Convention Center like a seismic wave.

It was in the breaks and drops of Destructo -- the DJ alter ego of LA music exec and old-line rave promotoer Gary Richards -- who rotated photos of N.W.A., 2 Pac, and Too Short on the large screens behind him like patron saints. He even ended his boom-tastic set with some Snoop Dogg.

It was in the straight-up hip-hop drop-it-like-it’s-hot beats of DJ Mustard who even asked those in the crowd what they thought of Kanye West and was greeted with enthusiastic whoops. West has a lot haters these days but they weren’t at Lights All Night apparently.

It was in the bottom-heavy boom of Bboy Morris who was a DJ on one of the two silent-disco stages.

And, of course, it was in the grimy, sinewy grooves of headliner Skrillex who, while often dismissed as the king of “bro-step” who was knocked by fellow EDM DJ Deadmau5 a couple of years back for not being a real DJ, certainly is a crowd-pleaser. There’s a reason why he’s at the top of the EDM-festival game as, unlike a lot of his co-horts who are just content to bob their hands and raise their hands, he knows how to work an audience.

In his 90-minute set Friday, he seemed to have spent as much time standing on top of his deck as behind it, at one point exhorting everyone to go out and do a good deed for someone. He then jumped down and shook hands with those down front. In a genre often tagged as being faceless and devoid of personality, Skrillex brings a sense of the human element.

As for the music, from Wild for the Night to a pummeling snatch of Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, it is often repetitive and numbing but also oddly hypnotic.

For all the hip-hop elements, there was still a plethora of traditional big-arena EDM like second-billed Zedd (Anton Zaslavski) whose electro-house anthems like Clarity and Stay the Night have helped define EDM in the last couple of years. Yet despite those songs’ infectious pop melodies, Zedd goes for more of the bass-heavy, everybody-jump basics as a DJ, often falling into formula. None of this mattered to the hardcore dancers working on their version of the Melbourne shuffle all night.

More interesting were some of the performers on the supporting stages such as Brazzabelle (a female DJ in a testosterone-dominated field) turned in a set that was both funky and commercial, the Dallas duo Closed Caption who also brought some hip-hop and house flavor, French house DJ Tchami, and Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano who often had a distinct Afro-Brazilian flavor.

A spokesperson for Lights All Night said there were about 20,000 concertgoers on hand Friday night for the nine-hour event, a notable feat considering everyone had to go through TSA-style security, including full emptying of pockets, wanding and shoe removal, to get into the venue.

Lights All Night continued Saturday with scheduled headliners Armin Van Buuren and Disclosure.

This story was originally published December 28, 2014 at 11:26 AM with the headline "Concert review: Lights All Night 2014."