The Getaway Artist
Three Grammys in one night—the ones Adele left on the table—and Skrillex already looked like someone who’d won an argument the rest of us forgot we were having. Best New Artist. Best Dance Recording. Best Dance/Electronica Album. For a guy whose real name is Sonny Moore and who’d spent his mid-2000s teenage years in a post-hardcore band from Florida called From First To Last, it was a considerable distance to travel.
His followers had crowned him the resurrected Jesus of dubstep, and they were not being ironic about it. They wore his undercut the way an earlier generation had worn Bill Kaulitz’s asymmetric swoosh—as a declaration, as membership. The problem being that most of them had no real idea what dubstep actually was or where it came from. Joe Nice. Zed Bias. Mary Anne Hobbs, who was championing this music on BBC Radio 1 years before it became a meme. A genre with a specific history—UK garage mutating into something heavier, South London soundsystems, pirate radio, warehouse parties—got compressed into a drop, a haircut, a GIF of someone’s neck snapping back. Skrillex was the face on the compression.
Before he was Skrillex he was photographing himself in bathroom mirrors with the particular combination of studied vulnerability and genuine awkwardness that defined MySpace in its peak years. From First To Last were a real band—not great, but real—and Moore had a voice too theatrical for the format, which is maybe why he eventually found a format with no vocals required. He left in 2007, spent a few years producing in his bedroom, and then Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites happened and there he was, unavoidable.
The emo-to-EDM pipeline makes a certain kind of sense in retrospect. Both subcultures traffic in extreme emotional states, both use spectacle as the delivery mechanism, both demand a specific aesthetic commitment from their participants. The kids who’d colonized every shopping mall staircase in 2006 with their fringes and their black hoodies and their elaborate MySpace profiles didn’t actually disappear—they migrated. Changed the uniform, kept the intensity. Skrillex crossed the gap cleanly because he’d lived on both sides of it.
Still, I want to know where the actual emos went. Not the ones who became EDM fans—I can track those—but the committed ones, the ones who treated Fall Out Boy lyrics as load-bearing emotional infrastructure, who sent each other long messages at 2am, who had a relationship with feeling publicly sad that I remember as both embarrassing and kind of moving. Did they grow up? Become normcore? Discover irony? Somewhere there’s a guy in his thirties with a mortgage who still knows every word to From Under the Cork Tree. That’s probably enough.