After she's tenderly greeted me at the start of our weekly telephone conversation, my mother immediately detects the fatigue in my voice. It's Sunday evening, after all, and I've had a long weekend.

"Well, you've been such a social butterfly since you were a little girl," she muses nostalgically. "But I just don't understand when you get the time to listen to the music you write about if you're going to all these parties."

Because it's my own mother, I consider the cluelessness of the remark endearing. There's simply no point in getting too worked up about the fact that a woman well into her sixties has yet to understand that I'm not spending my weekends eating birthday cake or doing keg stands. At the same time, the comment makes me spiral into endless thought over the linguistic boundaries within music-speak.

One of my formative experiences of musical performance was hearing the Ramones still fumbling to play the same few chords they'd been practicing for the last two decades during their valedictory 1994 tour. I'm a woman of rather slight constitution now, so I grimace at the memory of myself at precisely half my current age thinking it would be a fantastic idea to have the man with DIE MOTHERFKER emblazoned across his shoulder blades lift me up for some crowd-surfing in one of the nastiest mosh pits I've seen to the tune of "Rock'n'Roll High School." It wasn't exactly wholesome, but the word "concert" still applied, as if to link the experience with a night listening to Mozart in a symphony hall.

Later in my years, I've watched in awe as one man standing in front of four turntables, a sampler, and a laptop with sweat pouring down his brow operated everything without losing sight of the crowd before him's reactions. It was one hell of a party, but a party nonetheless. When I tell people that I write about electronic music, I wonder if they're under the impression that I'm simply a socialite who pens a gossip column, or a glorified Paris Hilton with a better iPod. The word "party" renders an entire world and culture of music with a certain frivolity, as if whomever was in charge of the soundscape for the evening and early morning were nothing but a social puppetteer, rather than a genuine artist.

I've heard from a lot of people that electronic music simply isn't accessible. Many can tolerate it at a club for short periods of time, but would never dream of sticking on a pair of headphones to listen to it in their free time. They relegate the entire genre to the stuff of a background soundtrack for a specific context.

I've been asked on countless occasions how I became so heavily invested in a scene, and I've given all sorts of answers: that I'm a classically trained musician, that I've spent the majority of my adulthood living with one DJ or another, that I'm Cuban and that dance music is something I grew up with, or that I came of age in a city where electronica was the daily bread. In retrospect, all of these theories fall flat, because they don't take everyone else who doesn't share my background into consideration. Plenty of individuals share my love for this music; so many, in fact, that I wonder why anyone would even ask how someone else came to like it.

Interestingly enough, I also encounter confusion from friends and family back in the United States at the fact that I speak Chinese, a language used by a billion others in the world every single day. Of course, my still-barely functional skills in Mandarin are the product of hours of my time sitting in classrooms, crouched at a desk copying characters, and making every attempt possible to practice with locals, but I certainly didn't understand a word of the language when I first arrived in China. I'd like to think that I'm fairly intelligent and that my greatest talents lie in the verbal arena, but I clearly remember a time when all the characters appeared more or less identical and I simply couldn't distinguish any of the the tones from one another.

Proficiency in Mandarin required steady doses of bo-po-mo-fo, a great deal of patience from teachers who never doubted my intellect in spite of the fact that I had the ability of a toddler, but most importantly, my own refusal to feel condescended. After all, Chinese may be the language in which nearly a fifth of the world's population communicates, but it's not one to which I was exposed until well into my twenties.

As a native Spanish speaker, I have little difficulty comprehending the dialogue in Fellini films, and can still hold my own in French after years without practice, so it was quite a shock to me that I would have to start essentially from scratch in Chinese, trying desperately to make sense of the limited number of phonemic combinations until I learned to listen to the subtlety of the tones. I became a little girl again studying Chinese, and grew to appreciate it because it was a language that contained a richness that I had to seek out a bit, and to which I had to pay attention.

I suppose that electronic music is much the same in many ways. A DJ or producer generally doesn't have the immediate, visual appeal of a rock star; no matter what sorts of antics Tiesto has up his sleeve to hype up a crowd, the aesthetic element can never really match Iggy Pop breaking a bottle over his own head, Karen O spitting water over a crowd while wailing "SOMEONE GET ME A BEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRR!" or even Beyonce showing off just how bootylicious she really is. There may be some stunning vocal tracks within dance music, but at the end of the night, it's the beat that makes the genre what it is, so the poetic drive of everything from rock auteurs like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to even Top 40 contemporary r'n'b or power-ballad hits isn't there.

There's something almost primitive about so many of the arrangements within electronica, crafted largely on computers and based mostly on simple, repetitive structures, and relying on rhythm more than anything else. Very few first-time listeners understand the work it takes to put together those tracks, the hours that go into matching beats and tiny pieces of sound to create music that will bring someone onto a dance floor even at six in the morning.

Like so many other great flavors, I would argue that electronic music is an acquired taste, and one that requires a great deal of exposure to appreciate properly. Anything foreign will seem esoteric until someone grows accustomed to its idiosyncrasies. I'm sure that a plethora of scenesters will excoriate me and roll their eyes at the fact that I imply that it's not simply something that you like or you don't like, that there should be any rules for how it's consumed, and that maybe a bit of education should be in order to bring more fans into the fold.

There will always be people who want to keep their likes exclusive, and who scoff at anyone who make an attempt to take someone uninitiated by the hand, little by little, into the water. There will always be naysayers who affect the "too cool for school" attitude, or who claim to have been conoisseurs of a niche form from the very get-go. And those people can keep on dancing in their smoky clubs undisturbed, but I hope that they don't complain when a great artist comes into town, only to stand at the decks looking in boredom and chagrin to an empty dance floor as all the ten thousand other nightlifers are complacently ensconced in their KTV booths, utterly unaware of what they're missing.