The scene. It's everywhere you want to be: the fabulous clothes, slammin' tunes playing till the wee hours every night, a quasi-religious community of like-minded music fans, artists, and producers. Every movement in art, it seems, flowers from the soil of a self-described subculture, and electronic music is no different. Or is it?

The biggest influences in electronica these days -- dub, drum 'n' bass, and hip-hop -- all have their identifiable roots in a specific community: the Kingston dancehalls where reggae DJs invented the vast echospace of dub, the black English clubs where reggae was reinvented by techno producers as the anchorage of the early drum 'n' bass sound, the Bronx streetcorners that spawned hip-hop's ethic of boom, rhyme, and piracy. Like most new musical genres, these forms started underground, then spread outward in waves as commercial popularizers came onto the scene and "outsiders" adopted elements for their own purposes.

Techno and its kissing cousin, house, are the most visible "scenes" in electronic music at the moment (and have been so since 1989, give or take a couple of years). Big pants, flashy black-and-white sneakers, and stripy athletic shirts are de rigueur on the techno/rave scene; house fans follow similar lines but add a massive dose of feathery, sequined club kitsch to the mix. Both scenes, particularly in their home turf of the U.K., are arranged around the socialized use of drugs, with Ecstasy being the chemical of choice for most. And many ravers adopt a fuzzy, new-agey moral code: "PLUR," for "Peace, Love, Unity, Respect," which is integrated into the whole-lifestyle approach to raving as a necessary brake on the human tendency to bloody-mindedness and poor behavior.

Musicians, too, attach themselves to the scene as a way of taking their aesthetic bearings. The hip-hop ideal of "keeping it real" originally signified the necessary connection of one's own rough street experiences with the music, but the ethic has percolated throughout electronic music circles and now means (to many) a sort of artistic yardstick. Here, to "keep it real" means to stay within the implicit boundaries of a scene's style: the "real" is whatever conforms to standards of tempo, sample sources, bass sound, and so on. Fans use the same ruler -- the "real" must also, importantly, be untainted by commercialism, or at least produced with noncommercial intentions (whatever the monetary side-effects). A commercial drum 'n' bass track, say, is one that aspires to break the circle of scenester cool by appealing to the vague, unenlightened, non-club-going masses (hence the near-universal contempt for pop junglists like Everything But the Girl on the part of confirmed drum 'n 'bass "headz").

A fringe of avant-garde "invaders" is always circulating around the edges of a music scene, and this is where the world of electronica has been particularly notable. Progressive producers like the Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Luke Vibert (aka Plug, Wagon Christ) and Mike Paradinas (aka µ-Ziq, Gary Moscheles, and Jake Slazenger) steal shamelessly from the effects bin of drum 'n' bass, creating a living-room listening genre sometimes derided as "weirdstep." Scenesters complain that weirdstep sucks all the funk out of the groove, that it's a musical dilettante's idle diversion, that it doesn't work on the dancefloor.

But the weirdstep practictioners and dedicated fusioneers are mining vast record collections for any rhythm, any bassline, any drum pattern that could be remixed into a semi-boogie, ear-opening track, while the "strict" junglists seem to rely almost exclusively on a single breakbeat (the famous "Amen" break, possibly the only single rhythm line to spawn an entire genre of music). Innovation comes from distance. A critically detached perspective is necessary in order to rearrange the conventions of a style against themselves, to make the "hip" assumptions of scenedom work against -- and for -- the "strict" pattern

Of course, the avant-gardists align themselves into a sort of scene, creating a tricky paradox. How can you have a collective of artists whose whole aim is to undermine the idea of a collective? This seems particularly true in the case of the Cologne/Dusseldorf orbit of artists like Scanner, Main, Oval, Mouse on Mars, Microstoria, and others, who blend seamlessly the twin knives of technological obsession and semi-radical cultural critique. But the human will to gather and form exclusive societies, it seems, is far stronger than the critical perspective that would rather see scenes wither into irrelevance. Scenes carry with them a certain eschatology: act in such-and-so a way, listen to this sort of music in that way, and you will be blessed with grace. The slippery evasions of those hipsters who try to elude scenedom -- often buttered with a thick slab of postmodern theory, a la DJ Spooky -- merely show, as Nietzsche knew, how difficult it is to live without gods.

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