While electronic dance is a wide genre, most people only think of the repetitious, synthesizer laden music that sounds completely artificial (even though there's plenty of electronic dance out there that just uses sampled instruments without artificial modification). The artificial sound of it is used to either designate the far future or advanced machinery. Due to its popularity in Europe, it often gets used to portray a character as being "Eurotrash". Sometimes gets used as part of a True Art Is Incomprehensible gag, where a character extols his/her love for a musical artist and it turns out to be techno that next to no common person would like (and believe me, it will be exclusively horrible if used for a gag of this type).
Examples:
- Any time Club Technochocolate shows up in Homestar Runner animations.
- Used in the Men Behaving Badly episode Cardigan, where in order to prove that he is not getting old, Gary insists on dragging Tony, Deborah, Dorothy and Deborah's new student friend to a rave. At the end of the episode, worn out and after a bad trip, Gary and Tony prop themselves up on the sofa with tea and toast listening to old-style easy listening music claiming they are done with all that rave stuff. (The exact song is "Magic Moments", a song which the audience at the time would associate with the Quality Street chocolate adverts, which attempted to conjure up deliberate nostalgia.) A Gilligan Cut provides the punchline - they are in the pub vibrating to a suitably fast rave tune - with the other, more traditional patrons also participating in the scene.
- 'Those who slither in the dark' from Fire Emblem: Three Houses has a dubstep theme, 'Those Who Sow Darkness', which contrasts the general orchestra theme of the other musics. Then the Magitek ICBM starts falling, and you realize just what kind of enemy you're dealing with.
