Jonathan Bradley: Skrillex is one of those acts I’ve read more about than I’ve heard, and what I’ve read is damning: Skrillex is bro-step, some kind of terrible music for bros, that happened when intelligent genteel English electronic compositions were bastardized for uncouth American college students. I don’t know much about bros — though I expect they’re the polar opposite to Bros — but the Internet has made it clear that I definitely don’t want to be one, and that listening to Skrillex is the best way of becoming a bro. Besides, brostep is dumb and not subtle at all. So listening to this song requires chopping through a bunch of preconceptions that individually matter little to me, but are together rather daunting. I like dumb music (crunk! Rick Ross! Katy Perry’s good songs!). A genre, like dubstep, that claims superiority because it eludes mass audiences should be treated particularly warily. Subtlety is overrated. I especially like something Skrillex provides here: crazy noises that ricochet all over the place and make the track sound like it’s tearing itself apart. Is brostep all drops? So what? Hip-hop started when DJs decided music could be all breaks. And Skrillex is so single-mindedly focused on dancefloor efficiency that he has a sample announce “This is the breakdown” before the breakdown, just in case we were going to miss it. And yet none of it as thrilling as its component parts would suggest. It plods where it should plotz. The vocal snippets are big and obvious, but couldn’t they be bigger and more obvious — Baltimore Club-level obvious, perhaps? Maybe it just needs more drops.
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[5]
I hate to get embroiled in this argument again, especially over someone as fundamentally misinterpretation-spurring as Skrillex, and with someone as generally smart as Jonathan Bogart Bradley* as the (proxy) target, so I’ll try to make a few points in an open-ended way:
-Why is it fundamentally wrong for people to get irritated when an area of once-niche cultural interest they have an investment in — even one as scenestery as a (British-originated electronic!) subgenre of music — is suddenly represented, often for the first time, to a mainstream audience by someone who significantly bulldozes over the things that give it value and spurs a rejection (by detractors and bandwagoners) of the whole genre that preceded it? Isn’t mocking the early adopter just another way of biting the hand that feeds — “thanks for the inspiration, now go crawl back into your hole while the real world makes your tedious crap into something actually fun”? Again, knowledgeable and savvy critics of a poptimist bent would be losing their shit en masse if people said the same things about R&B and Frank Ocean that they do about Skrillex and dubstep — but I suspect they don’t because instead of “boo dilletanteism” vs. “yay depth”, it’s framed as “yay populism” vs. “boo snobbery”.
-How can subtlety be overrated when there’s practically little to no sign of it anywhere in mainstream pop culture? I guarantee that finding anything that pulls off subtle pleasures is difficult when the media, especially the entertainment press, is trying to bury you in fuckin’ awesome!!! Maybe it’s the circles I run in, but the two most common complaints I read about music aren’t “dumb” or “childish” — they’re “boring” and “pretentious”.
-Is it even possible to have deep love for a niche genre without becoming a facepalming crank when it catches on — or, the once-common inverse, a dilletante who gets into a genre via its most obvious mainstream points but still finds a way to value the less-glamorous historical precedents? Putting me on the former side of this equation and the “SKRILLEX SAVES DUBSTEP FROM TEDIUM” camp in the other, I’m not too optimistic.
*whoops.
