SKRILLEX & THE DOORS - BREAKN’ A SWEAT
[4.70]
I think it’s an equal stretch to call either of these collaborators the sound of 2012…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.
[5]
[Read and comment on The Singles Jukebox ]
I try to avoid writing about critical response instead of writing about the song itself, but this is only the second Skrillex song I’ve heard, so given the amount of discussion around this dude, this was all I could do. Conclusion (tentative): We need a better Skrillex and Skrillex needs better criticism.
