Futureproofing #16: Growing up with Skrillex

Or: how I learned to love the wubs.

Edited by Tom Gledhill

A few weeks ago, once Skrillex had released his newest album via Dropbox link, an editor at Pitchfork emailed me to "make sense of it" for them. It was a funny request, as my own personal history with Skrillex's music is slightly tortured. The beginning of my career writing about music was entwined with the culture clash—maybe culture shock is more accurate—started by Skrillex's crash landing into dubstep. It caused wider reverberations and hand-wringing across all of dance music that's still being reckoned with today. (I tried to make sense of it in a review that was published the week after.)

Skrillex is a titan of electronic music over the past 20 years. Few artists, even fellow EDM superstars like Avicii or Steve Aoki, have had an impact close to his. That's because, while Skrillex was a key part of the massive corporate cash infusion into electronic music of the 2010s, his music also connected on a deeper, nerdier level with a new generation of club kids and bedroom producers. 

From rap music to digicore/hyperpop to underground dance music, Skrillex cuts a hero figure for a number of factors: his brashness, his niceness, his ubiquity, and most importantly, the over-the-top, unabashedly earnest feelings of it all. That latter part was anathema to a London-Berlin dance music axis that prized dark corners, impersonal tracks and more guarded emotions—the scenes covered by websites like Resident Advisor, Little White Earbuds, XLR8R, and even Pitchfork at the time. 

If you were remotely interested in dance music in 2010—and especially if you were a fan of what was then morphing from dubstep into a wider, ultra-creative scene—then you remember the seismic impact Skrillex made with Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. It was a complicated time. What was once one of the coolest corners of independent music, dubstep (which reached its previous crossover height with Burial's 2007 album Untrue), was overrun with bros and a sudden mainstream attention that focused on all the "wrong" parts of the genre. It was like someone had Frankensteined a whole scene out of Coki's "Spongebob" and let it run amok. 

To be a pre-2010 dubstep fan was suddenly to be defensive, to clarify that you weren't into that kind of dubstep, as chronicled by the YouTube film All My Homies Hate Skrillex. It was to navigate an avalanche of media lauding the business and cultural impact of a scene that made a mockery of what you thought your scene was about. These artists who had built scenes in working-class corners of London and Bristol were suddenly being co-opted and bulldozed by a mainstream music force that was the musical equivalent of a monster truck rally. For those of us who cherished the largely obsolete model of underground-dance-music-for-art's-sake, it felt like an assault on everything we held dear, bringing a level of frivolity and bad taste that felt completely foreign.

As I said in that Pitchfork review, a lot of people lost their minds in 2010. Shortly after Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites came out, I wrote what was more of a polemic than a review for RA with a score of 1.5/5. The review reads a little wordy to me now, but at the time, it felt deadly serious, and captured what people in the dubstep scene were feeling at that time. It was the kind of thing people would talk to me about for years after, and underlined the conflict at the heart of the mainstreaming of dubstep: what was the lifeblood of cities, scenes, and artists was in danger of becoming a fad, or even worse, a fratboy joke. 

For his part, Skrillex simply wanted to make good music, fit in, and have fun. I have a core memory of being at Corsica Studios in London in 2011 (a party with Shackleton, Mark Ernestus, Addison Groove, Pinch, EPROM and more) when my American friend Dean, who was also playing under the alias DJG, ran up to me and some other friends and yelled, "Skrillex is here!"—as if a movie star had walked in—with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. This was around the time the refrain "but he's such a nice guy" framed every conversation around Skrillex. 

That Corsica Studios appearance was one of the first in a chain of cred-building events that culminated in shouting out dubstep homeland Croydon at The Grammys in 2012. He clearly had respect for the genre's origins, he had obvious musical talent, and it was hard to find anything bad to say about him. 

At that point, underground dance music started an uneasy friendship with Skrillex. If he came down from his famous EDM cloud to bestow recognition on a smaller producer, they would usually welcome it with open arms. That was understandable, even if you would be hard-pressed to find people who were partying at small clubs or festivals around the world purposefully going to see Skrillex DJ. 

My own experience of "I guess I have to get used to this" was when Skrillex played Barcelona’s Sónar Festival in 2013. Kraftwerk here headlining the stadium-sized main stage, followed by a lineup that could have been photoshopped in from an EDC flyer: Baauer, Major Lazer, Alvin Risk, and then finally Skrillex around 4 AM. It was jarring to hear all that music after Kraftwerk, but it also put everything in perspective: these artists are going to play after Kraftwerk because they matter.

I can't say I enjoyed a lot of the music in, but it was a humbling and important experience, even if I didn't realize it in the moment. In the years following, Skrillex would become a beloved figure—like a rich and benevolent family member who takes you out to dinner and knows a lot about culture, even if they seemed removed from it. 

The most pivotal year, the beginning of Skrillex 2.0, was 2015. In the span of two months, Skrillex changed underground dance music forever. And I'm not exaggerating. It started with the February release of "Where Are Ü Now," the collaboration with Justin Bieber and Diplo that rewired even the stodgiest of dance music heads and critics' brains: this titanic track, so beautifully produced that pop music people and dance music heads alike couldn't deny. Two months later, Skrillex played a back-to-back set with Four Tet in London. That night instantly recalibrated his DJing in the greater dance music imagination as a connoisseur, someone who could do all-night sets at credible venues and balance rowdiness with tastefulness. 

That's the Skrillex who went on a world-conquering, Coachella-headlining adventure with Four Tet and Fred again.., the Skrillex who can sell out Madison Square Garden in minutes, the Skrillex that everyone from knuckleheaded rock musicians to underground purists can recognize is a special force in music. So, what changed?

For me, it was a matter of growing up—even if that "growing up" means coming to terms with an approach to music that once seemed immature. It's hard to imagine being as upset about any kind of music that wasn't actively (or politically) harmful as I was back in 2010—like, who cares? Then again, it was the start of what was a tight-knit scene being invaded by the rest of the world. But nothing can stay the same forever.

When Skrillex did his flashy double-album drop in 2023—Quest For Fire and Don't Get Too Close—it was hard not to root for him, even if I didn't love the records all that much. They were ambitious, full of cross-scene and cross-generational collaborations, and even connected his dance music and screamo history in a way that felt honest. But I can't say I listened to either record more than one, maybe two times.

Something felt different with Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! Maybe that's because it harkens back to Skrillex's original glory days, which are also intertwined with my most formative memories. Maybe it's because I take things a lot less seriously these days. But after that first avalanche of voiceovers gave way to a dubstep drop that I would have hated in 2010, I didn't grimace—I liked it. 

This silly (on purpose) music would have made me mad in my early 20s. So why, at age 35, was I suddenly enjoying it? A friend of mine described the Skrillex album as a "how do you do fellow kids" album, while my husband said it was like listening to a 37 year-old try to DJ a party full of zoomers, both of which I agree with. But those ideas don't take away from the fact that the album kind of rules, and I gave it an 8.0, which is the second-highest score I've given on Pitchfork since I started writing there again (and the same rating I gave Floating Points' late-career masterpiece Cascade).

I think it's a two-pronged thing. After a while, no matter how much you dislike something, you can't pretend it's not important, or that people don't like it—so sure, this objectively silly music is fun now, because it wore me down. But there's something else, something I think that Skrillex probably feels too. We're almost the same age. He's about a year and a half older than me. But after a relatively serious double-album project, he's had the most success and good publicity in a while for an album that doubles as a convoluted practical joke, full of ironic voiceovers and pithy one-liners. At this point, we've come this far—so why not just do what feels good, or comes naturally?

Diving deep into Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! taught me that "good taste," so to speak, doesn't matter in the same way that it used to. That isn't an inherently good or bad thing. It all comes back to "Where Are Ü Now," the exact moment that dance music became pop music and EDM became underground dance music.

Some people see underground dance music as a serious community with a shared value system. But when that seriousness becomes self-seriousness, it leads to infighting, cliquishness, and internecine conflicts. What artists like Skrillex do is throw that aside in favor of fun, big-heartedness, and humor. We've seen from his recent DJ sets that there's nothing wrong with heads-down, serious dance music, either—but it can coexist with inside jokes and larger-than-life drops. There are no rules anymore.

The truth is I still don't like Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. I don't think I ever will. But Skrillex represents something bigger than himself in dance music: a big tent mindset that actualizes what more conservative dance music fans like to imagine they're creating. He's the everyman, the equalizer, the star. I'd like to think that both Skrillex and I have learned a lot since we were kids making sense of dance music. I've certainly learned a lot from him.