Perhaps you're right, though I thought the kids he previously had sympathised with seemed outsiders, culturally speaking, rather than the jock types depicted in spring breakers. I didn't really know what to make of Spring Breakers, aside from admiring the neon-saturated visuals, but I generally got the feeling that he was satirising (albeit sympathetically) the search for spirituality in a soulless hedonist phantasmagoria.
This again brings to mind Wolf of Wall Street -which depicted hedonism so seductively that it doubtlessly left a lot of its audience yearning to take part in it all rather than seek to destroy it. Spring Breakers didn't make me want to go to EDM parties but it certainly makes it all seem somehow bewitching and exciting, which of course it IS for those who participate in it.
After all, despite the social values attached to the birth of rave/acid house (rebellion against the state and so on), for many people the real attraction of that world must have been sensationalist - the drugs, the kinetic light shows, the sheer spectacle of a field full of thousands of ravers etc. I can see why Reynolds draws those comparisons between Ardkore and EDM - both are music as psychedelic thrill ride, utterly disdained by fans of ''deeper'' genres, derided as tacky, melting pots for different styles.
