There’s this window of the early 2010s that I’m obsessed with: let’s say from Flockaveli in October 2010 to when Avicii unleashed “Levels” in October 2011. The 2000s were over, but it didn’t feel as if a new decade had begun, and for a weird, autonomous stretch, a few iconoclasts attempted to invent the 2010s by throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. At least that’s my explanation for why the music, fashion, everything from that period felt so… extra.
It was the era of Givenchy Rottweiler t-shirts and Comme des Fuckdown beanies, of Glass Swords and Pink Friday and 676-track Lil B mixtapes, of Kanye tweeting urgent bulletins like, “I specifically ordered persian rugs with cherub imagery!!! What do I have to do to get a simple persian rug with cherub imagery uuuuugh.” Meanwhile, an emo kid with a meme haircut had dropped a handful of EPs—among them 2010’s two-time Grammy-winning Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites—that thrust electronic music back into the American mainstream and possibly also destroyed it, depending who you asked.
My own relationship with Skrillex was, umm, complicated. I was what you might call a maximalist, digitally and otherwise—prone to tweeting in all caps about some bullshit or other, with a wardrobe of garish prints on polyester fabric mostly derived from the Versace for H&M collection. I would torment my downstairs neighbors with loud, incessant replays of AraabMuzik’s Electronic Dream or DJ Nate’s Da Trak Genious, or hijack the TouchTunes of my local dive to play “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)” or “Pretty Boy Swag” until I’d had my fill, the way Kanye and Jay-Z were known to perform “N**** in Paris” nine, 10, 11 times in a row on 2011’s Watch the Throne tour. (One guess as to whether my own half-haircut and I made it to the hallowed pages of “Girls That Look Like Skrillex dot Tumblr dot com.”)
Clearly it wasn’t the belligerence of Skrillex’s carnival-esque dubstep that turned me off back then, but rather the noob factor, the entry-levelness of it all. We’d not yet entered the “let people enjoy things” part of the 2010s, and no sooner than he’d blown up, the artist born Sonny Moore, former screamo band frontman, had become an avatar for what was deemed a low-vibrational relationship with music, drugs, and dancing. (“I heard he’s a super nice guy, though,” hipsters used to say after declaring his music an affront to those with ears.) When Moore posted an Aphex Twin song to Facebook in 2011, leagues of brosteppers spammed the comments to inquire, “Where’s the drop?” and I laughed at them as if I hadn’t gotten into dance music only a few years prior by way of Justice’s † album and Daft Punk’s pyramid tour.
It took a Harmony Korine movie for me to come around. Soundtracking lurid vignettes of beachfront hedonism in a squealing serotonin rush of perfect artifice, it was clear that “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” expressed something true about its time, a feeling almost beyond words. In the same way, Spring Breakers functioned like a pop prism, a shimmering refraction of the early 2010s zeitgeist. During the press run for his fifth feature in spring 2013, Korine spoke of wanting the film to feel more like a piece of electronic music in its looping rhythms, or like a video game in its trance-like momentum. The story existed within “the culture of surfaces, an almost post-articulate culture,” he attempted to explain. “I wanted the tone to be pushed into a hyper-candy-textural, hyper-stylized reality.” But you get just what he means when you hear “Scary Monsters,” which sounds simultaneously violent and naive, dreamy but psycho in an all-American way. The way Skrillex designs them, synths take the shape of almost-words, straining to express desires they barely understand.
Is this the part where I confess that I was brought to tears by FUCK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3, surprise-released, as per custom, on April Fool’s last week? I believe it happened somewhere around “THINGS I PROMISED,” when a DJ tag from someone who isn’t but sounds a lot like Shadoe Haze, narrator of the iconic Trap-a-holics drops, bellowed “FUCK SKRILLEX, THIS IS SONNY MOORE!!” For 57 seconds, sticky-sweet EDM chords evoke a fireworks display with your best friends on a summer night. Then it’s all swept away in a squall of whirring machinery, grotesque basslines, increasingly unhinged DJ drops: “I HAVE SKRILLEX TRAPPED IN MY BASEMENT!! PLAY THIS AT FULL VOLUME OR I’LL PUT HIM IN THE HOLE!!” Its 34 tracks in 46 chaotic minutes pass the way that life does—just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, boom, on to the next one. It’s fast and loud and poignant and exuberantly stupid, a victory lap and a midlife crisis all at once.
There’s something just so free about gratuitous DJ drops: You’ve toiled over your art, now it’s time to let some random guy scream non sequiturs on it. Even reproduced, the tangy bark of the now 50-something-year-old Shadoe Haze is madeleine-like for a 30-something like Skrillex or I, whose formative years were soundtracked by demented utterings over Lil Wayne mixtapes: “EVIL EMPIRE GANGSTERS—THEY’LL EAT YOUR LUNCH AND WRINKLE YOUR SCHOOL CLOTHES!!” The idea brings me back to the women of Spring Breakers—ex-teenybopper starlets plus Korine’s wife Rachel, all solidly millennial. Their characters hang Lil Wayne posters in their kitchens and amuse themselves with Kimbo Slice videos on laptops in the dark. (To those who weren’t of college age during the early YouTube days, I can’t explain the omnipresence of the jacked-up Miami street brawler, beating guys’ faces off in grainy videos boys stayed showing you at parties.) They’re low-stakes daydreamers, the parameters of their wildest fantasies set by music videos and lo-res indecency online. Before they rob their local Chicken Shack, they hype themselves like so: “Just fucking pretend like it’s a video game. Act like you’re in a movie or something. Let’s just get this fucking money and go on spring break, y’all.”
The other, much dumber movie I associate with “the EDM era” premiered ten years ago as a spectacular box office flop. In We Are Your Friends, the directorial debut of Catfish’s Max Joseph, another ex-Disney Channel child star (Zac Efron) plays a 20-something DJ out here trying to make it in L.A.’s fast-paced EDM scene alongside a ragtag bunch of sleazy coke dealer friends. They promote their shitty DJ nights, sell drugs at EDC, work a day job at a predatory real estate solutions firm, and all the while, they wonder: could this be all there is? The posse’s moral nexus is their nerdiest friend, Squirrel, whose ear gages suggest he’d made that old familiar leap from early 2000s scene kid to late 2000s raver. “Are we ever gonna be better than this?” he asks, hungover at a diner in the Valley. Spoiler alert: Efron’s character turns his friend’s quote into a DJ drop for his biggest gig yet.
The quote came back to me on my third play of FUCK U SKRILLEX as I barreled through the high desert of New Mexico last week, feeling as if I’d been sucking lithium batteries through a straw. And yet there was something unspeakably moving in Moore’s own vocals on the album’s second-to-last track, “VOLTAGE”—the working title of what was meant to be the debut Skrillex album, which he called off in 2011 after his hard drive was stolen. As plaintive piano keys weave through the thuds and revs of the Platonic filthy dubstep banger circa early 2010s, Moore belts out with evangelical gusto: “You gotta believe there’s something more!” Is it cringe to say I do?
