This summer was supposed to be the Summer of Rave in L.A. But the death of a young dance music fan after attending the Electric Daisy Carnival in June threw a bevy of high-profile events into a tailspin, leading to cancellations and logistical scrambling to meet new city-authority attention.

This Saturday's Monster Massive at the L.A. Sports Arena is one of the few major electronica events to come in the aftermath of EDC. The success or failure of the concert, which features a top-shelf lineup including Carl Cox, Moby and U.K. house vet Steve Lawler, could indicate whether the bustling L.A. rave scene is in recovery mode, especially considering that the sounds of four-on-the-floor beats and scintillating synths are now the default mode of most of rap and pop radio today.

We talked with Lawler about rave culture's second wind, and how it's still misunderstood in the mainstream.

So much of American pop and rap music is informed by the sounds and structures of techno and electronica today. How has that mainstreaming influenced or changed the ambitions that longtime dance music artists want from the genre and culture now?

I’ve never been drawn to the more commercial side of music. What excites me about music are things that are new and creative; the birth of something is always where it is most exciting, in my opinion. What tends to happen is artists ... start music trends and fashions and they go on to become commercial. By the time it has become commercial, we usually have been a part of developing and creating something new. Pushing a new direction.

And that’s the pattern that I’ve always found myself falling in. The whole idea of the R&B and hip-hop scene using elements of house, techno, and electro, I don’t really know how to view it. In one breath, it’s a good thing because it’s introducing new people to electronic music, but on the other part I feel like something has been stolen, because something that we have nurtured and created in the basements of the world is now being capitalized, marketed to death and commercialized and used solely to make money.

What this crossover has done [is] opened up electronic music to people who might have never listened to it before. What that means is, big events like Monster Massive and Electric Daisy Carnival will become busier and attract a much broader audience. You will find, in some cases, people may go to these events in search for their commercial fix and stumble across an arena with someone like myself or Carl Cox, Digweed, etc. playing and think, “I really like this, actually I prefer this than what I heard on the radio.”

I remember when I stumbled upon house music for the first time it was by accident back in 1989. Just by pure accident I heard this music and I then spent the rest of my life following it. So if this does open that door and bring more people in, then it’s a positive thing, in my humble opinion.