You really need to go to Red Bull Music Academys critical reclamation of happy hardcore to know what Im talking about -- and you totally should, btw, regardless of how you feel about the music -- but the smiley face graphics they have randomly popping up over the text is as inanely brilliant as the genre. Miles Raymer provides a critical perspective to a genre he says has been treated as "as an awkward phase in dance music’s teen years, the gangly, overenthusiastic cousin of the more sophisticated, intriguingly dark jungle scene." Miles goes on to observe keenly that "happy hardcore quickly became the UK equivalent of what pop punk was in the States at the time" and "like happy hardcore, EDM artists judge their work strictly by its ability to get large crowds moving, using a number of techniques drawn from happy hardcore’s playbook to do the job, from digitally altered pop vocals to aggressively noisy synths to huge drops that come at regularly scheduled intervals."
