This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic. I was reviewing Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, the single by Skrillex.
I found a drawing I did as a child, a picture of a big robot. It had a ketchup stain on the corner, which I think means I must have drawn it at a table in a motorway service station quite late at night on a long drive from Cornwall back to Nottingham. Motorway service stations at night work sort of similarly to airports for me, atmospherically. When I'm in an airport I'm either excited or exhausted, depending on the direction I'm going. This means that while in practise the experience of being in the airport itself is not especially emotionally complex, the idea of being in one, informed by finding the mean amongst all memories, blends the poles together into the electric vertigo of sleep deprived giddiness. An empty KFC in a motorway service station at 4AM gets me into the same emotional place. Fast food chains in general, but especially KFC, are pretty repulsive to me: I would be happy if they were abolished. There is an undeniable magnetism in art towards ugliness though, and experience becomes a kind of art if one is receptive to the idea. The slime of the food is transfigured into a perverse ectoplasm that haunts the KFC at midnight, and is physically coupled to an obnoxiously bright, shiny environment. The smell is overwhelmingly oily and greasy but the visual experience is that of an airport.
Brostep was a really important cultural movement. Even if you don't accept that any of the actual music it produced is good it was obviously important in shaping the landscape of popular music, both in how other scenes borrowed from it and how other scenes intentionally moved away from what it represented. Looking back on the hysterical outrage that Skrillex brought out of many people is fascinating now, but I think they had every right to be outraged since the very reason this track is so interesting (and good, without qualification) to me is that it deals in curated ugliness. I find it difficult to describe this song both accurately and in a way that doesn't suggest that I actually secretly dislike it, which is why I empathise to some extent with the boring position that brostep is just bad on principle, even though it obviously isn't. Even when I like this, it's hard to describe why it's good without making it sound bad. The sound design is built from the ground up to scream at you as much as possible: the meat and potatoes of the track is a bass that sounds like a cross between a groan and a shriek and even the melodic section is full of sharp saws and difficult high end. Skrillex fully explores the one bass sound and doesn't busy the mix up with too many other less interesting ideas (aside from a tasteful gasping now and then) which is unlike most of his other tracks and almost the entire genre. The track avoids overcrowding and satisfies the need for irreverent mayhem by having the bass twitch and unfurl slightly differently from bar to bar. It has a lot of life to it, it quivers and reacts and bounces in a properly satisfying way. The four bars of sickening sugary melody that drop in after every 12 bars of screaming manage to bring that veneer of cleanliness to the otherwise meaty, oil mess that makes up the rest of the music, which is why, like the midnight fast food excursion, this music is charming and enjoyable. Unlike KFC though, I do not want to abolish Skrillex.
I like to think of the Noisia mix as a B Side to this incidentally, since it compliments the original perfectly. Noisia do little more than retool the sounds of the original, it's actually pretty lazy, but they are better producers than Skrillex and the bass sounds and especially the drums (by far the weakest aspect of the original) are so much more muscular, even if it has less soul. Oh, and the reason KFC is so especially repulsive to me is that my Dad once got a box of chicken from there while we were working on a building job together, and it looked like a fucking brain. The chicken itself was just this slimy wrinkled lump, and most of the batter had slithered off the meat and into the bottom of the box like rubbery slop, growing cold apart from its mother's breast.