Hating on Skrillex is officially over - - Mixmag

Hating on Skrillex is officially over

Why it's time to celebrate Sonny Moore - and save the vitriol for the real villains

  • Joe Muggs
  • 6 March 2014
Hating on Skrillex is officially over

You've got to feel for Skrillex sometimes. I know it's not natural to have sympathy for someone who sits on top of a mountain of gold and adulation from EDM kids across the world as he sorts his diamond-encrusted skateboards or whatever it is he spends his money on, but the bullshit he gets is really, truly not fair.

Just look what happens when one tiny clip of the man's music, distorted to the point of being barely audible, makes it onto the web: a legion of opinion warriors start pounding out their hatred and explaining how this is the death of all that is honourable and beautiful in the world.

I interviewed Sonny Moore for the Guardian back in 2011, just as his success was going into hyperdrive, and I have to say that he was really quite extraordinarily nice: funny and charming without sucking up, and self-effacing without ever dipping into false modesty or doing down his very real achievements in getting to where he was. He was scrupulous in bigging up those who'd influenced or helped him, and was at pains to point out that he never considered himself a dubstep producer, even though the dubsteppers themselves were supporting him (Skream admiringly said "he's done to dubstep what we did to garage!")

Unfortunately, because I happened to mention a lot of the flak he was already getting, the piece ran under the headline "Is Skrillex the most hated man in dubstep?" He took great exception to this, and ended up cancelling a load of UK press as a result. Quite a few people took this as a sign that fame had gone to his head, but to me it seemed a pretty natural reaction from someone who had fought so hard to be liked and respected only to find out that he was being defined entirely by his haters.

Those haters have been there from the beginning. Of course someone coming from being in an emo band into dance music was always going to have a hard time, but there was the added factor that he did it just at the moment that dubstep was breaking big into the mainstream, and the accusations of bandwagon-jumping were early and loud. The silly thing was that if he'd wanted to claim dubstep credentials he could have done it, having been a passionate attendee of the Smog raves in LA and quickly earned the respect and even friendship of OG dubsteppers like Skream and Hatcha.

But he didn't: he made very clear that he was doing his own thing – after all most of his early tracks and remixes owed far more to Justice than to Benga – so he had no pretence to authenticity, and could people please stop judging him as if he were trying to be something he wasn't? If only it was that simple. Internet forum warriors and embittered musicians are nothing if not scrupulous in ignoring the facts of a case once they've got their teeth into it, and the screams of "SRILLIX IZ DESTROYING TEH DUBSTEPZ!" echoed across the planet.

Now you may not like Skrillex's music. That's anyone's prerogative, I certainly have found his tunes hit and miss over the years, and his cheese threshold is certainly set high. However, when they do hit the spot, they are so full of life and fun and derangement that it's hard to understand how anyone could hate him when there's so much that's as popular but is just formulaic blah.

Likewise his lightshows are so much more joyfully insane than the average EDM spectacle (spaceship DJ booths? Fleets of Nyan Cats flying across the sides of an arena? Come on!!) that it's easy to see why he sends his crowds quite so apeshit. And he really does: his crowd aren't just the stereotypical muscle-flexing bros, but kids who truly love to go mental to his music.

Yet still the haters come. As the EDM juggernaut rolls on, Sonny has become a symbol, for everyone who desperately wants to show that they're more-underground-than-thou, for a perceived destruction of dance culture, for everything that's wrong with humanity goddammit. He's become an outlet for the fury of a million frustrated bedroom DJs, probably in many cases consumed by impotent jealousy at the fact that girls they fancy would rather party hard to Skrillex tracks than listen to their latest two-hour boreathon.

Yes, that's right: in many ways, that position as a lightning conductor for sexual jealousy makes him the Justin Bieber of 21st century dance music. (Now watch that phrase get misquoted and used to beat him with!)

He doesn't produce his own tracks! He's ripping off Burial! Now he's jumping on drum'n'bass bandwagon! Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeez, some people need to get some fresh air. Sonny Moore is a guy who has tried his hand at a bunch of musical styles, a producer with more skill than most, and someone with a natural ear for what audiences are going to like. These are not crimes.

So he was a rock kid who turned to dance? So were Ben Pearce, Ryan Hemsworth, Daniel Avery, even Erol Alkan.

If there's a degree of luck in his success, he'd be the first to admit it, but he's also an interesting-looking, hard-grafting, individualist, passionate and talented producer, who's 1,000,000 times more deserving of that success than plenty of the awful fully-synched, ghost-produced, permatanned egos-on-legs, prettyboy mannequins and personality vacuums who are also cruising at his level off the back of one tacky and half-arsed musical schtick.

In fact, you know what? If that drum'n'bass track with Chance The Rapper that's floating around is half as good as the phone-filmed clip from a gig suggests, then he deserves to maintain his position too.

He has the capability and the platform to bring some really good music to huge audiences, he brings other good producers and DJs along for the ride, and he is well liked not only by those who benefit but by anyone who meets or plays alongside him. His friends include not just dubsteppers and commercial EDM producers but the likes of Claude VonStroke, Boys Noize, Tensake, Jack Beats, Lunice and Richie Hawtin (who, you'll remember, actually chose to show his respects to Sonny by interviewing him for his Mixmag takeover issue), and he is happy to learn from all of them and expand his musical palette as he goes.

And, well, if he can cause a few misery-guts web-warriors and self-appointed scene guardians to have embolisms along the way then so much the better. In fact – bring on the Skrillex-hate; we can all have a good laugh as he proves you wrong. The backlash against the backlash starts here.

Watch Kill The Noise (signed to Skrillex's OWSLA imprint) play The Lab below

[Photos: Tom Horton for Mixmag December 2011]

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