3/27/2023 0 Comments Dude stop game music![]() ![]() Knowing his eat-sleep-rave-repeat approach to the industry (“If I have any time off, I get antsy,” he once told Rolling Stone), there’s a sense that he’s working at his physical limits here, straining to deliver the “v99_final_FINAL.wav” of every good idea he’s had in a decade. In the years since Recess, he’s spent many days and nights sharpening his mind to the fundamentals of pop-not just the technical craft, at which he already excelled, but the real juice: what makes a melody stick, what makes a listener rewind. Again, guests on every available surface: old bud Justin Bieber, rappers Chief Keef, Kid Cudi, and Swae Lee, and viral pop arrivals PinkPantheress and Prentiss. Oizo) to underground choices primed to surprise the music nerds-artists like Bristol bass sculptor Joker and experimental percussionist Eli Keszler.ĭon’t Get Too Close, the more adventurous but marginally less successful of the two, scores the interior world of our hero’s adventure in a very-now merger of emo, rap, J-pop, memecore, video game music, and angsty boy-girl duets. Special guests are stuffed in tight, from headline-grabbing heavyweights (Four Tet, Missy Elliott, Mr. In Quest for Fire, Skrillex goes in search of-obviously-the most fire beats in the land, plus a few of the sickest drops for good measure. And to do it, he’s lined up a deft pincer move: By dropping one album of super-massive bass juggernauts and one album of dizzy emo-rap, he intends to claim the whole territory. More likely he’s been working out this move for a while, aiming for pop domination-but also underground cred, rap co-signs, and begrudging nods from Four Tet fans. It is both apt and revealing, then, that one month later, Skrillex returns with two albums and four hyped DJ sets around New York City, including a last-minute sold-out show at Madison Square Garden-all in five days. After his mom died in 2015, he “drank the pain away” and last year found himself “with no drive and purpose for the first time.” Posting those tweets on his 35th birthday, he made it clear, however, that he had turned a corner, that he was ready for a new chapter. In 2022, he reached his “ tipping point,” pulled out of two festivals, and stepped out of the public eye. Yet he hasn’t put out a solo album since 2014’s Recess, and by his own account, the last few years have been tough. In the last decade he’s worked with industry giants ( Diplo, Ed Sheeran) and edge-curious artists ( Vic Mensa, Kelsey Lu), scored a Harmony Korine movie ( Spring Breakers), briefly reunited with his old screamo band From First to Last, collaborated with Japanese megastar Hikaru Utada for the whimsical RPG Kingdom Hearts III, and somehow released a song with the surviving members of the Doors (“Break’n a Sweat”). Before EDM’s billion-dollar bubble burst, he’d hopped to safety in pop’s upper tier. But Skrillex was the master of brostep, a technical wizard, and the most imaginative of the new breed of festival behemoths. It was very much also about the music: the fairground drops, the skrrr-eechy synth leads, the idiotic samples, all the ways a bassline can be compared to an unwell digestive system. The snobby response wasn’t just about the money, the perceived inauthenticity, or that EDM was such a straight, white, and male phenomenon. Here was an emo kid from Los Angeles with half a haircut, making $15 million a year from a corpulent mutation of real soundsystem culture so that raging frat dudes and lidded suburban teens could run amok on giant racetracks while a few industry suits cashed in. (They are “the Croydon dub guys that started this,” as thanked by Skrillex after winning three Grammys in 2012.) Sonny Moore changed the definition of a genre, and the heads hated him for it. ![]() To this day, n00bs are still getting flamed on r/skrillex for not knowing who Benga and Coki are. Thousands of people used the word “dubstep” for the first time because of Skrillex. ![]() It was as if Steve Jobs had clicked his little clicker and shown us the future. Then, sometime in 2010, yet seemingly overnight, there was Electronic Dance Music. For decades, there was only dance music: a patchy network of underground nodes and connections that made sporadic incursions into the mainstream. Skrillex is what tech folks would call a disruptor. ![]()
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