I Just Bought Tickets to His Berlin Show

Someone asked Charlotte Free how sex with Deadmau5 was. Free—the model with the pink hair, eighteen at the time, on the cover of everything that year—answered by posting an accusation on Tumblr. I personally know girls under 16 who have been taken advantage of by him. Deadmau5 is a pedophile. And his style is so fucking unoriginal.

The style comment I find weirdly perfect. You could lead with the criminal allegation, but she went for the artistic critique first, and something about that order makes the whole thing feel more real. She went further: the rave scene is full of them, she said—men in furry cat ears and kandi bracelets hunting fifteen-year-olds rolling on pills in club basements, kids wandering around in their underwear in the dark. Joel Thomas Zimmerman just happens to have a laptop.

The uncomfortable layer is that Free had apparently slept with him herself. The accusation came in direct response to the question about how the sex was. So this wasn’t solely witnessing. The timeline there is worth sitting with.

Nothing came of it formally, as far as I could find. The allegations cycled through Tumblr for a news week and then receded into the general ambient noise around him. The music kept getting played. The tours kept selling out. I had just bought tickets to his Berlin show, which felt suddenly naive in a way I couldn’t quite articulate. Not guilt by association—that’s not a working moral framework—but more like: you can’t unknow something, and once you know it, the music sits differently in your head.

Raise Your Weapon is a genuinely good track. I’m aware that this is not an adequate moral response to anything. You know it won’t resolve anything, but the pull of the thing you liked before you knew what you now know doesn’t just disappear. I hadn’t decided yet whether I was going to go.