Sonny Moore

I was thinking about Skrillex the other day, after he picked up those Grammys, and I realized I actually cared more about who he was before—back when his name was just Sonny Moore and he was playing in an emo band called From First To Last. There’s something interesting about that trajectory, the way someone can come up in one scene entirely and then end up defining something completely different.

The thing about dubstep right now is that everyone acts like it appeared out of nowhere, like Skrillex invented it in a lab or something. But he didn’t. There were people doing this stuff for years—Mary Anne Hobbs was championing it on BBC Radio 1, Joe Nice had been pushing it, Zed Bias was making moves. But Skrillex’s version, with all the drops and the wobble, that’s what people latch onto. That’s what made it a mainstream thing. And now his fans think he’s the whole history of dubstep rolled into one person, which is funny if you actually know anything about the genre.

But before all that, he was just some kid in an emo band. I think about that a lot—how you can be in a scene for years, take it seriously, and then just become something else entirely. The emo kids I knew, or knew about, they’re scattered now. Some grew out of it, got normal lives, found other music. Some are still there in that same headspace. And then there’s Sonny, who went from selfies in a bathroom mirror to being this giant in electronic music.

I don’t know where this is going exactly. I just think there’s something worth sitting with about the whole thing—how you can be completely embedded in one world and then just step into another and become the face of it.