Skrillex - “F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3”

I went and listened through “F*CK U SKRILLEX…”. It’s an interesting trip so if you haven’t tried it out, go for it. It’s somewhere between the previous brostep stuff and SOPHIE-style hyper pop.

There’s some synthwave and chiptune aesthetics sprinkled here and there. It’s a single set maintaining the beat throughout. Every section/track is like 1:30 in length, literally the longest one is 2:56. So kind of made for the TikTok/Instagram era of fruit-fly attention spans. I’m pretty sure that was deliberate. “Made for cropping”, and therefore derivative works, and therefore pop art, and therefore the Warhol reference holds more water than I’d expect.

A few friends of mine said the record is busy, and that Skrillex is busy in general. I agree with that, but while brostep in general is just very “in your face”, on “F*CK U SKRILLEX” the busyness stems largely from how quickly one track flows into another. It’s a stream of builds and drops. And some of the builds are just transitions between tracks, so many of those 1:30 sections have even less actual content since substantial parts are only there to glue one track with another. And yeah, it’s loud pretty much all the way through, which Burial-style dubstep was not. 1

Another thing that I found tiring is that the record is entirely self-obsessed. The fourth wall breaking movie trailer guy is fun at first but at some point I just wanted bona fide music and that only arrives in tracks 30-33 and is ruined by the final track 34 that’s essentially a list of shoutouts. That last track in itself could be somewhat endearing to me, because it reminded me of the classic demoscene name drops (called “greetz") that usually happened at the end of a demo in a long list of scrolling names. But I’m doubtful that was his point of reference.

In any case, I could easily see myself spending 46 minutes less satisfactorily than this. And if you’re like “nah, I don’t think I can do 46 minutes of Skrillex” then tracks 30-33 are where it’s at for me.

  1. The eponymous "Burial" from 2006 might very well be one of the best albums of all time. I need to write about it at some point. If you like that style of dubstep, there’s a good Bandcamp article about new dubstep music and it tends to be in that style! ↺

#Music