[Editor's Note: Simon Reynolds is the author of 1999's "Generation Ecstasy," an encyclopedic journey through the first decade of dance-music culture. This is the second installment of "Energy Flash," a monthly column about electronic music. He can be contacted at members.aol.com/blissout.]

Contributing Editor Simon Reynolds writes:

Trance rules the world's dance floors with a white-gloved fist. Occasionally, though, voices of dissent can be heard insisting, "That's not real trance; that's Euro." Uttered with a disdainful wrinkle of nostrils, the "E" word is code for cheese, for dance music that's too close to conventional chart-pop.

And these grouches have a point — the original early-'90s trance was harsh, trippy and cold, and it almost never featured vocals or song structures. Although it was drug music, and people raved to it, the first-wave Teutonic trance from Berlin and Frankfurt was actually born as a reaction against rave — or what hardcore rave had degenerated into (all goofy kids'-TV samples, vacantly euphoric piano vamps, anthemic choruses). As much as purist Detroit techno or progressive house, the original trance — by artists such as Hardfloor and Arpeggiators — was intended as a stripped-down, somber, cheese-purged alternative to rave.

Between 1994 — when first-wave trance was displaced by drum & bass in the hipster credibility stakes — and 1998 — when trance's popularity resurged dramatically, thanks to the return of high-potency ecstasy — the music changed substantially. Borrowing elements from commercial house (hands-in-the-air breakdowns and crowd-inciting drum rolls) and from Balearic (the spangly, MDMA-friendly textures and wistful refrains huge in Ibiza, Spain), trance reinvented itself as the populist softcore option: shamelessly cheesy. It became "Eurotrance," and, as far as connoisseurs were concerned, a repugnant thing.

What does the "Euro" really refer to, though? The first hallmark is an indecent amount of melody — the kind of clean, clear, soaring melody lines that put Eurotrance in the lineage of synth-pop groups such as a-ha or even classical music rather than rhythm & blues.

The other Euro signature is the influence of Hi-NRG, an '80s, gay disco genre whose distinctive butt-bumping rhythm is most easily identified by the words "Blue Monday" (RealAudio excerpt of the New Order song). Techno aficionados despise trance's clockwork rhythms and chugging basslines at the best of times, but Hi-NRG is held in even lower esteem.

Funkless, Sure, But Soulless?

Trance-phobes always accuse the music of lacking "funk" and "soul" — of being too white, basically. The "funkless" accusation is fairly undeniable. It goes back to Giorgio Moroder, whose productions for Donna Summer pioneered the first all-electronic dance music, Eurodisco. Moroder deliberately simplified funk's clustered beats and syncopations into an even flow of metronomically precise pulsations, all synched to the pounding, four-to-the-floor kick drum. As children of Giorgio, trance DJs such as Paul van Dyk emphasize seamless transitions between tracks, creating the sensation of surging through a frictionless soundscape. And without friction, where's the funk?

The "soulless" accusation is unfair, though — if anything, trance can be too E-motional. Besides, there is a European soulfulness to trance, a quality that descends from the serene glide of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" (RealAudio excerpt) and "Neon Lights" (RealAudio excerpt), both hymnal songs about falling in love with the modern world while in motion through it.

Listen to today's trance, and you think of the pristine beauty of a modern unified Europe — the high-speed trains, the pedestrian-only boulevards of city-center shopping districts. It's why Eurotrance flourishes wherever the romance of streamlined, sterile modernity holds sway, from Hong Kong to Sao Paolo (the most European of Brazil's cities).

It's also why this music, so rootless and synthetic-sounding, comes from the Old World. On a recent vacation to Tuscany I began to understand how the omnipresent ancient stuff — medieval hill towns, cobbled streets, long-forgotten farmhouses — could feel oppressive to the youth.

I'm sure it's no coincidence that Italian kids have long favored shiny manmade fabrics and shiny machine-made music. Italian pop radio plays nothing but Euro (plus the occasional Bon Jovi tune — rock at its most glossy). And Euro is perfect precisely because it doesn't fit the picturesque patchwork landscape of olive groves and sunflower meadows scrolling past your car windows. In the land of terracotta, plastic has a liberating future-buzz about it.

Trashing 'Euro'

The Italian contribution to rock is negligible even by Europe's standards, but they did play a major role in the history of house and techno. Moroder came from the northern province of Tyrol, culturally poised between Italy and the German-speaking world. Italian post-Moroder electronic disco was popular in Detroit, where it was known as "progressive" and produced by artists such as Klein & MBO and Alexander Robotnik. The latter's "Problemes D'Amour" was actually the first dance track to use a Roland 303 bass synthesizer, the basis of acid house and a staple in trance's sonic arsenal.

Later, Italo-house artists such as Black Box and Starlight — all tingly piano riffs and shrieking divas — were hugely influential on the British rave scene. Even today, Italian producers such as Tigino & Legato (the team behind The Love Bite's "Take Your Time") more than pull their weight when it comes to fueling Ibiza's midsummer bliss-fest.

Which sort of brings me back to the original point — the fact that the word "Euro" is an insult. It's puzzling because at the dawn of electronic dance music, European-ness was the quintessence of cool.

Detroit techno, for instance, began as a scene of affluent black teenagers who defined themselves through their obsession with all things Euro, from music to fashion. It's not inaccurate to describe techno and house as white European music that black Americans "got wrong" — a sort of reverse parallel, with the emergence of rock as a white misapprehension of the black blues. Detroit cognoscenti fetishize the obscure Italian records that Carl Craig and Derrick May spun back in the day, at high school "socials," alongside tracks by Yello, Depeche Mode, Liaisons Dangereuses, Telex and other '80s Euro exotica. But they have no interest in contemporary Europop, which has clear ancestral links with that music.

"Deep" — the supreme accolade for house and techno purists — basically means "not too blatantly tuneful." But music that's too subtle and tasteful is actually tasteless, insipid. In music, as in food, the Italians have centuries of experience when it comes to using just the right amount of cheese — think risotto, pasta, pizza. Too much, and the results are nauseating, inedible. But no cheese at all, and you've got a dish sans savor, a track without flava.