By Adrian Covert | MOG Associate Editor

If you haven't seen David Guetta's latest music video, the most important thing to know is that it reeks of cheese. The electronic music mainstay manages to combine Fergie and LMFAO with his pet vocalist Chris Willis, the visuals look like an overblown Sprite commercial, and the song is trapped beneath so many layers of bubblegum dance music that you couldn't take it seriously if you tried. This is a problem.

To really understand why David Guetta is such a threat to the genre, you have to go back 15-20 years to the last big backlash. In the early '90s, electronic music largely hinged on euro-influenced dance tracks. Everyone still hated disco, electro and freestyle had peaked, and America was too busy with rock, pop, hip-hop and R&B to care about much else. Then something quietly occurred.

Detroit and Chicago started nurturing vibrant techno and house cultures, respectively. The UK embraced the rise of the reggae and jazz-influenced Jungle/Drum and Bass, and by the mid-90's, trip-hop was helping to bridge the gap between American pop sensibilities and the more foreign sounds of dance-based music. MTV even launched a second station, which focused heavily on '90s electronica. When sounds of Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk landed on US shores between '95 and '96, and they managed to get a handful of songs, including "Red Alert" and "Around The World," on the charts.

Just when electronic music seemed poised to become the next big trend in pop music, along came the rise of big beat house in '97. Cue the The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, and The Crystal Method. Sure, they had been putting out material throughout the '90s, but none really caught on in the US until the later part of the decade. Once they did catch on, however, they all shot up to the top of the charts. Soon, the sound was everywhere - movie soundtracks, advertisements, background music in TV shows.

It's hard to argue that these artists didn't kick out their fair share of classics. But many of the critically-respected electronic sub-genres of the day built their reputation strictly around the music. So when the big-beat dance culture rose up, label execs and marketing teams latched on to the outlandish sound+visuals of these groups and tried to push it onto everyone. A flood of derivative and crappy acts followed in their wake and failed. (We weren't trying to listen to Eiffel 65 and Junkie XL and Paul Van Dyk) This strain of big sounds (and bigger images) caused a backlash in the music world that would take nearly a decade to dissipate.

So what does this have to do with David Guetta? Electronic music has been following a similar trajectory as of late. After being put through the ringer by critics and consumers alike, many of the major genres spent the first half of the 2000s repairing their reputations. Relatively accessible acts like Radiohead and Daft Punk had enough pull to make people to take electronic music seriously again. J Dilla couldn't stop talking about the influence of Kraftwerk and Carl Craig in his productions. Indie bands started to use keyboards for sounds other than that of pianos (David Sitek and Kevin Barnes, hello!). The internet decided that the loungy, cool feeling of Air was OK.

Then by the middle of the decade, things got more serious. Cool kids embraced LCD Soundsystem, whose neo-disco sound and Daft Punk-referencing title gained them some pop notoriety. Kanye West also sampled the French house kings, bringing them even greater fame. Dubstep became the darling of music critics. Justin Timberlake started flirting with disco and electro. Hip-hop producers in the south even took to sampling old trance and rave anthems, reinventing them as drugged-out, hip-hop gems. Then Justice and Simian Mobile Disco caught the eye of internet publications, spawning the new term "blog house" to describe the rise of electronic acts with indie credibility.

Inevitably, this led to the spillover of dance music into pop. Britney Spears and Christna Aguilera had been flirting with dance music earlier in the decade, but the arrival of Lady Gaga in 2008 gave us one of the first artists to be fully embraced and categorized as an electronic artist. Soon after, the Black Eyed Peas moved further away from their hip-hop roots into dance territory. Since then, every artist under the sun has been quick to throw a synthesizer on top of a track. Meanwhile, David Guetta has been lurking in the background, spending the last year plotting his rise to fame.

The French producer has been a stalwart in Europe for the last 10 years, embracing the sound of ultra-cheesy, Euro-disco dance music. Once dance, house, and techno became not-so-dirty words in the US, he linked up with the Black Eyed Peas to produce, arguably, the most annoying song of 2009, "I Gotta Feeling." He's since worked with Kelis, Gaga, Fergie, Madonna, Rihanna, and Akon and is on pace to become the next huge name in pop music.

This will not end well: just as in the late '90s, his particular sound is making money and threatening to open the doors for a flood of painfully cheesy imitators (American Idol's Randy Jackson knows what I'm talking about). Just when scores of Electronic music genres have reached relatively comfortable spots with music critics, and are starting to trend in American pop culture, they're once again about to be generalized, flattened, and over-exposed. I can't help but think that history is doomed to repeat itself.

Of course, Guetta isn't alone: Gaga and Will.I.Am also deserve part of the blame: they've pumped their share of mediocre dance hits into the music pool. But Gaga has reached such iconic levels that it's hard to imagine serious backlash. And when Will.I.Am goes down, it will be more for his corporate shilling than anything else Guetta on the other hand, seems like he could easily become America's most hated musician.

His current album only reached #70 on the Billboard charts, but it came out 10 months before he had any exposure on this side of the pond. As he works with more big name artists (and he will), his name will grow. And after he gets a few more number one singles under his belt, I'm sure his next release will be huge. We need to start worrying.

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