With Me Or Against Me

Alright, to set the tone of things - Joel Zimmerman, aka Deadmau5, roasted Miami nightclub Mansion during a New Year's Day show he was the star of: “Putting fans in the back and trust fund kids up front is fucking stupid as fuck,” waxed the Toronto-born DJ on the private subscription part of his website, referring to a photo he took of preppy fans taking selfies in the front row. That wasn't the end of it. On 4 Jan, house DJ/producer Porter Robinson said he was going to Miami and that he loved the city. A fan told Deadmau5 via Twitter, and Deadmau5 started tearing into Robinson via twitter. “He's a fucking dickhead,” wrote Zimmerman, and things escalated. Robinson bit back hard. “You might want to put less weight into twitter: ie, fewer meltdowns, contrived controversies, marriage proposals, etc,” countered the 21-year-old. “Dickhead status confirmed, little fuckin dickhead” wrote Zimmerman. “lmao dude - don't you have an anime porn tattoo?”

It's one battle in the online war conducted by Zimmerman against almost anybody and anything that pricks him in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He's called Lady Gaga's fans “braindead”, and alleged Justin Bieber ruined his chances of “getting on Top Gear”, verbatim: “You little prick. You just fucking ruined every chance I ever had of getting on fucking Top Gear,” tweeted Zimmerman.

Depending on your perspective on gamers, the DJ demonstrates the fearless honesty and/or mild sociopathy evident among the 4chan anons and gaming community forums from which Zimmerman drew his name: Deadmau5, the five being (permit a cringe) an S in the 1337-speak of internet yore. In our interview, he is concise and polite. “Twitter is Twitter, tweeters gunna tweet… Mind vomit conduit extraordinaire. Prone. Expected. Not really affected by it,” Zimmerman explains. And at the moment, the self-styled “expert griefer” with his own Minecraft server is playing “just Minecraft and CS Source… maybe a bit of Diablo III”. 

He is a brawler. There is a duality to the yin of the bullshit he gets into online and the yang of the largesse with which he rewards the faithful: the Machiavellian cliche of 'I can be your best friend or worst enemy', gone everywhere by the internet. Case in point: on January 3 of this year, a Deadmau5 show was scheduled at New City Gas in Montreal, with initial ticket prices set at $100 (plus a $17 service charge). After fans complained (perhaps unfamiliar with what Australians have to fork out) about the prices, Zimmerman announced he was apparently unaware of what was being charred, and he hammered the venue on Twitter: “nice ticket prices… didnt i do a full production / cube show in MTL for 50$ once? yeah. thanks for throwing me under the bus.” In a matter of hours, Zimmerman announced the price tag had been halved and that an extra show had been added to his tour's run. “Okay MTL, here we go! tix are now 50$. AND imma do 2 shows for you. :D okie? thanks to @newgascity for working this out with me :D <3 MTL,” he tweeted.

Besides the gladitorial spectator sport that is his Twitter feed, Zimmerman does try hard to do right by his online legion. It's difficult to find another act in electronic dance music of Zimmerman's profile who gives their fandom such involved love, tempered as it may be by the occasional outburst or tantrum. Zimmerman regularly updates and interacts with users on his Deadmau5 reddit. He supports and regularly references indie game Minecraft, on which he has several in-game skins modeled after the trademark mouse-head (and that whole entire dedicated server). He met an 8-year-old fan backstage at a show in Edmonton, Canada, after the 8-year-old started a Twitter account devoted to images of the mouse-head.

The Music asked him what the recently launched subscription service section of his website, suckscription, offered fans. “Eh, to be simple about it, I just wanted all my shit in one place for the Deadmau5 fan. Simple as that,” he says. “And by doing so, it kinda costs me a good chunk of change, and, well I'm sure the fans get that, and they contribute, and I give back with all the goods. S'basically it.” Do good by Zimmerman and he'll treat you good, wrong him and he'll wrong you worse.

The internet being the internet, Zimmerman's profile as a shit-stirrer is huge. He's the kind of culture warrior perfect for the click-bait churn that keeps those miserable pop-culture web ad dollars ticking over. But regardless of the perennially banal debate about the legitimacy of alternative/independent going mainstream, Deadmau5's third record, 2007's Random Album Title, arguably broke the wave of stadium-sized electronic music for better or worse in America during the late '00s. Zimmerman was and is still and transformative figure within the art of popular music, whatever you think of the art. The States gave birth to electronic music, but for two decades the increasingly divergent subgenres of house and trance and D&B et al were largely strangers in their homeland - dance music's first wave spent the 90s across the Atlantic, evolving in the clubs of Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Birmingham and Ibiza. Zimmerman's adopted progressive house sound is an offshoot of continental house music, a distant relation to the Euro-house of Tiesto (which is also good at filling stadiums too). But why is EDM so big in North America? Why now? Who brought it home? “Popular music needed the competition,” argues Zimmerman. “Now, it's just kinda absorbed it, as it does everything else. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Right Limp Bizkit? 'Rap-rock is awesome', they said, 'it'll be fun', they said. And after pop culture shits out EDM as it inevitably will... I'm sure we'll move onto something else. That's the basic truth,” he says.

The Toronton has been producing music since about the new millennium, his debut record is now almost a decade old: Get Scraped features the sound of genre fossils like trip-hop and chip tune and noise-pop. Random Album Title's success was also the watershed for Zimmerman's development as an artist, but he's circumspect about the record's impact. “Like I said, it was at a time when I wasn't so market-savvy, or popular for that matter. In fact rather fringe, at least in my parts”, he believes. “It was nice to be able to carve out an identity at that time... it was the perfect time. A guy wearing a mouse head playing with a five-piece boy band just wouldn't have worked. Kinda like staking your claim, it's timing.” he says. If Tiesto didn't do what Tiesto did at the time, he'd be nowhere on the fucking map right now. But he did, so yay, same with me. The newcomers to EDM now don't have staying power. They're fucking in and out, it's kinda scary. Thank GOD for DJing. 99% of the market would implode in on itself if we weren't allowed to play shows for 500k whilst playing other fucking dudes' music. Fucking weird man, but whatever. 'Hey man, I'm a DJ, you need us'. Why? You don't buy our shit. You download it off a blog, and play it. Fucking good on ya mate.

He prefers production, though. “Of course. While technically most of “us” aren't fucking Mozart, at least there's an effort [in producing].” What's more, he doesn't believe young producers need to know how to DJ. “What's wrong with being a young producer? Be a producer.” He'd also advise an up-and-coming producer to give away music through an online platform like SoundCloud. “It's a good jump-off platform, yeah. Obviously not everyone can just magically start up a subscription model and be all hey, but I think artist development take tiiiime man, lots of it. Ten years in before I made a dime doing anything. Just put in the time,” Zimmerman says. Put in the time.