PTSOTL: I went to a Skrillex show by Luke O'Neil from the internet

Monday, May 28, 2012

I went to a Skrillex show by Luke O'Neil from the internet

I went to a Skrillex show the other night. For the lulz. Ok, for work mostly. Ok, ok I was kind of interested in going to be honest. I wrote about it for the Boston Globe which you can read here. Words from the review and tons of pictures from this insane-ass Miami-style outdoor club it was at below.

There's an inherent difficulty in writing about a live DJ performance. Aside from a nod to the track selection, the best of all possible outcomes is “it sounded like the records.” For a superstar DJ like Skrillex, who played in Quincy on Friday night, the performative takeaway is more tenuous still. Did he materialize on an elevated balcony like a wan boy prince surveying his kingdom and fiddling with his headphones? Did he pantomime all manner of intense knob-twiddling concentration?

He did. For Skrillex, a dubstep producer who's transcended the genre and become a cultural signifier, the performance isn't just about the automated nuts and bolts being pushed through the speakers (the sound was largely swallowed up here in the breeze off the water and carried off with the smoke machine-exhaust), but also how adeptly he projects his personal brand.

Surprisingly, the people who live over there don't take kindly to the noise levels being too high, so the show was weirdly quiet

The stronger identity here, however, belonged to the club itself, one of the more vertigo-inducing and unique venues in the area. A sprawling, open-air seaside complex bordered by luxury table-service cabanas, palm trees, and shallow pools, it was, to use a technical term, “bonkers.”

THESE PALMS TREES EFFING KILLED IT

Speaking of technical terms, it's no coincidence that the language commonly used in talking about Skrillex is a vernacular of exclamatory violence. “SKRILLEX KILLED IT.” “RAGING AT SKRILLEX RIGHT NOW.” “BANGERS!” His original tracks, like the recent, exhilarating “Bangarang” or “Kill Everybody”, both of which he pushed play on his laptop for, sound like a grabbing claw of robotic destruction.

It's no more or less viscerally cathartic for the listener than the hard core punk of a previous generation, but there's no subtext implied, political or otherwise, save hedonism. That's a philosophy well-suited to the denizens of this club in particular, a mix of pugnacious hard-bodies and raver kids waving floppy glow sticks in the air like an aimless group lightsaber battle.

But instead of moshing, the more tightly-wound musical parameters of pop dubstep, with the noise bursts bracketed within the upstroke dub beats, constricted the hypothetical physical reactions on the dance floor. The sound is claustrophobic, and its strictures trickle down to its attendant dance moves. Perhaps that's why people looked so awkward dancing to it?