Update – July 18th, 2013: Okay we’ve officially had enough now. Rappers beef and they’re spitting hateful bars at each other on mixtapes. Producers beef and we get poor progressive dutch house tracks with spiteful undertones. Maybe Deadmau5 has ended it all with this last release, but who really knows.
Update – July 17th, 2013: The motherf*ckin’ saga continues as Afrojack posted GotDrop? (Hypebeat) on his Soundcloud page. It’s pretty awful and I’m not sure where this thing is going, but we’re all paying attention.
For some reason Afrojack disabled embedding. Listen here.
Update – July 16th, 2013: Recently deadmau5 released “Drop Da Bomb outerspace mix” on his Soundcloud page. It pokes fun at the simple, commercial dance style that has been topping charts and taking over festivals. This might be Joel’s way of getting back at Afrojack for trolling him with a poorly engineer piece of sound titled “something_“. Listen to both below.
July 10th, 2013 – If you can recall, a while back Deadmau5 and Afrojack exchanged words after the pull-no-punches Canadian producer made his now-infamous assertion: “we all press play”. The beef subsided, but now months later it appears annoyances have been rekindled. The impetus this time? An article on Beatport regarding the EDMBiz conference which took place in Las Vegas last month. Included in the event write-up was a statement made by Afrojack that pushed Mau5’s buttons, and it wasn’t long before he took to social networking to express his frustrations.
Note: Afrojack’s statement is in response to the question “is there a dance music bubble?”
By now it’s almost expected to hear these types of rants from Zimmerman – a highly opinionated person who has no issues vocalizing his displeasures – but there’s often a thinly veiled, valid point hidden behind the guise of mere trolling. In this case, it’s dance music’s increasing homogenization, and it’s hard to argue there: much of the EDM sphere – at least the genres and artists closer to the center of the “mainstream” spectrum – is starting to sound a lot alike. To new listeners, simple big room four on the floor records make sense: it’s different enough to be new and exciting, but it’s safely within the steady-beat realm of non-EDM pop/Top-40. It’s the best of both worlds for many: You can experiment in electronica without getting covered in all the grime and filth that dubstep apparently exudes.
But after someone has spent a good portion of time exploring different subgenres and artists, they most likely will start itching for something different and more interesting. And that’s where Zimmerman may be making a misstep in criticizing Afrojack’s comments. By automatically assuming when Afrojack says “good music” he means music similar to every other successful record out right now, the Mau5 is making a sweeping generalization.
The issue here is that “good music” is based on opinion. For example, people who love an act like Bassnectar may hate an act like Afrojack, or even deadmau5. It comes down to differing tastes, and at the end of the day I think that there is no point in even arguing Afrojack’s statement; it’s just too open-ended.
Below you can read their entire Twitter bickering (which gets very childish at times).
The full conversation (top to bottom):
Then a fans comments join the conversation:
Another fans comments ignite the conversation.
Afrojack trolls deadmau5 with a horribly engineered preview titled “something_”:
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