The sound of the future is Stuck in the past: Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” 10 years later

by daniel bernas

There are few instances where it is nearly impossible to ignore context when listening to music. I’m not talking about the tired debate on separating the art from the artist, it’s 2020 and no one should care about that anymore. Right now, I’m talking about dubstep. Yes, that genre we all called the sound of the future that is now the sound of the past. Any pop song from 2010 to 2015 that had a dubstep drop might have been interesting at the time or even cutting edge for the radio. Now, with rare exceptions, it’s hard to listen to them without viewing these songs, with the deep, distorted bass and half-time drums, as merely following trends of the time.
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But the word “dubstep” carries different meanings depending on who you talk to. To music nerds born before around 1995, dubstep is a genre born out of the underground, rooted in UK garage, grime, drum ‘n’ bass and dub music. Notable artists like Skream and especially Burial will come to mind. To Millennials and Gen Z, it’s that music your annoying friends played in middle school or those bleeps and bloops during the intros of Minecraft tutorials. Some kids allowed the trend to pass, maybe enjoying it on a cursory level, others, such as myself, fell head first into this futuristic sound and culture. Within a year or two I found myself fully immersed in the seemingly vapid world of EDM.

In the EDM community, Skrillex was certainly polarizing, a figure many loved to hate, but no less influential. He wasn’t exactly dubstep, the term  coined for his style was “brostep,” which was basically dubstep’s older, angrier, more-tasteless brother. But with the way the sounds are so  removed from each other, it might make more sense to say cousin. Skrillex did not invent this sound but he certainly brought it to a more mainstream audience out of nowhere. He was also responsible for causing many a teenager to find interest in electronic music. He was the center of a spider web that extended everywhere from teenagers on SoundCloud to 2000s metal to classic house.

But Skrillex, often to the dismay of his die-hard stans, was not a one-trick pony production wise. While many fans turned on him after the release of his debut, and as of today only, album “Recess” in 2014, his refusal to stick primarily to the brostep sounds he made his name off of showed a lot more maturity than many of his contemporaries and especially his fan-base. Brostep was becoming stale and he was taking his over-the-top production techniques to different territories, and even when he was sticking to that sound, he was often doing so in such unconventional ways (just listen to the “Red Lips” remix). 

But even with Zomboy, Kill The Noise, Knife Party, Bassnectar and the hard-to-keep-track-of amount of EDM producers brostep fans grouped together that could certainly scratch this itch, Skrillex still stood out as a sort of ringleader of the cult. Personally, I remember my daily Google News updates and my routine r/Skrillex checks to see what new unreleased remix was played live or what collaboration was announced and all of the other updates for songs that will likely never see the light of day. It was such an obsession that even years after it was over I nearly broke my computer pressing play when the long awaited What So Not collaboration “Goh” was finally released, a song whose best-quality leak I listened to constantly on SoundCloud.

But it took a while for Skrillex to get to so many kids’ iPod Nanos. In fact, it took a while for Sonny Moore to get to Skrillex. Surprisingly, while also citing artists like Daft Punk, Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, as well as the legendary label Warp Records, as influences, his musical interests began on the opposite side of the musical spectrum. Before discovering electronic music, Moore was inspired by the likes of Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and The Doors. He didn’t start out with a keyboard and laptop, he started learning to play guitar and singing and took it from there. It led him to front the post-hardcore emo band From First To Last in 2004, providing lead vocals, guitar and keyboards. After leaving the band in 2007 and becoming more interested in the futuristic sounds of his electronic influences, it led him to his releasing the “Gypsyhook” EP as Sonny in 2009, where he showed early traces of what would end up blowing the mind of the general public. This journey ultimately ended with the beginning of Skrillex in 2010, making his bold introduction, declaring his name in the title of the “My Name Is Skrillex” EP, released free onto MySpace.

That EP is nearly unlistenable, but not ignorable when it comes to the reason Skrillex became such a large force in electronic music. That reason is, of course, “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.”

Most of that history wasn’t known to the people who stumbled upon this release in 2010. If someone had been following Sonny Moore since 2004, much of what was on this 6 track (9 if you count the remixes) EP wouldn’t come as much of a surprise. But those following the legendary house producer Deadmau5 and his label Mau5trap, which initially released the EP, were probably quite baffled, especially to see their beloved mau5 gave it the cosign, let alone signed it to his label.

While I can’t speak to what ultimately brought it to #1 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart, but I can certainly speak to the shock it was to someone whose music taste consisted almost entirely of Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj. It took a good year or two to stop saying “it’s just noise” and become the Skrillex fanboy I was for a good chunk of my adolescence, but there really was no middle ground between the two. 

While I can certainly understand the other side, listening to “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” 10 years later gives me a similar excitement as it did back then right from the hook on the opening track, “Rock ‘N’ Roll (Will Take You To The Mountain),” “hello, again, to all my friends, together we can play some rock ‘n roll.” It’s a funny line for a song of this style, but it also makes sense. The people listening to ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ were generally the ones who hated and probably still hate Skrillex, but with the distorted bass and driving kicks and beautifully overcompressed mix, Moore seemed to be spiritually inspired by those rock bands that influenced him as a child. He even acknowledges this juxtaposition with the self-aware spoken word sample at the end of the track, some Boomer saying “they are not artists because nobody can play the guitar.” It’s a track that serves as the perfect opener for not only the artist who took the world by storm, but also for the next half decade of EDM sounds penetrating the mainstream.

However, it will forever be the title track that remains the most iconic, the most recognizable, the most popular brostep song ever. Everything about it is just ingrained into my brain -- and the brain of every other early 2010s middle schooler: the woozy synth melody, the strange vocal chops, that shrieking drop. It’s a song that doesn’t have any words (until the last minute) yet so many kids could sing along to it, and to this day I mostly know it by heart. It’s the reason why it’s used both as a meme and as a throwback. Heck, you can even use it as mosquito repellent.

​The dance influences from the opening track continue onto “Kill Everybody,” a song that, among Skrillex fans at the time, is about as memorable as the first two songs and one that I did not let my Catholic parents anywhere near, as the pre-drop hook of “I want to kill everybody in the world” felt like the edgiest, darkest song imaginable to a middle schooler. Additionally, I always felt that “Scatta” with the Foreign Beggars and Bare Noize was one of the heaviest songs on the project, even if being maybe the least discussed among fans.

Even with these heavy tracks, Moore was able to prove he isn't a one trick pony. “All I Ask Of You,” featuring singer Pennybirdrabbit, is an obvious homage to Deadmau5, as if “I Remember” had a more radio pop appeal complete with a synth line that sounds lifted from Alice DJ’s “Better Off Alone.” It’s a nice club cut and one of the two songs that stand in a sharp contrast within the heavier tracklist, the other being the oddly beautiful closer, “With You Friends (Long Drive), a less dance-friendly remix of a track from the “My Name Is Skrillex” EP. If “Kill Everybody” was the most terrifying song imaginable to a middle schooler, “With You Friends” was the most tear-jerking. It stands to this day as a strange yet ultimately satisfying closer to a short yet ultimately satisfying project.

I would argue that brostep aged worse than this EP or any of Skrillex’s projects have. While the sounds may be cultural touchstones synonymous with that time, it’s easy to forget that for a while every time Skrillex would put something out, that release would be the state of EDM for the foreseeable future, sometimes even by other innovators, sometimes even before the song came out. Everyone was rushing to copy him at the time and, for that reason, Moore’s music sounds just as authentically weird today as it did when it came out. While the mainstream has certainly stepped away from the fist-pumping sounds of EDM, genres like deconstructed club, hyperpop and bubblegum bass are starting to show their influences on mainstream culture while booming in the underground. Additionally, so many producers in the underground electronic scene, particularly artists like Iglooghost, Kai Whiston, Gupi, Fraxiom, Umru, to name a select few, were likely inspired by people like Skrillex to start making music, some of them even citing him as an influence. Without projects like this I also fail to see how we could have gotten projects like “1000 gecs” by 100 gecs, a band that not only cited Skrillex and this project in particular as a heavy, direct influence on them but were also recently interviewed by the man himself about the future of music.

While I enjoy the project myself quite a bit, and I don’t mean to get personal in an article of this type, there’s a personal context I can’t quite shake off about this EP. While it came out when I was in 4th grade, I fell in love with it during middle school, which, like many people, was not exactly a happy time for me. I didn’t know who I was or who I was trying to be at the time. I was desperately trying and abysmally failing to be popular, trying to “fit in” at an age when that was virtually impossible (and I am not trying to say this is unique to me, it’s certainly an experience most people share).

My infatuation with EDM became the interesting thing about me at my small private school. With 20 something kids in my grade, me being the dubstep guy was almost like a personality trait. While looking back, it’s obvious that those kids were more often laughing at me about it than finding me interesting, at least it was something to set myself apart from the painfully homogenous crowd I was surrounded by.

For those reasons, I don’t often get nostalgic for that time in my life. Still, somehow this project makes me feel a deep desire to return to that time where the most exciting thing in the world was people making songs on laptops. Even if you never liked the music, or liked it then and don’t now, it’s hard to not see it as such a cultural touchstone of the early 2010s, even if you think it aged like milk.

This summer, a storm knocked my power out for a few days, which was enough time for my phone to die and my portable CD player/walkman (still going strong after having it for 12 years) to come out. After going through the old CDs of my adolescence, I got quite emotional listening to my CD copy of it (thank you Aunt Lucy for the Christmas gift!) during a run.

Every intricate detail in the production felt simultaneously like forever ago and like it all happened yesterday: watching the video for “Bangarang” on a bus, hating the music but loving all the videos, eventually going head over heels for him and the culture surrounding it. I remembered the countless hours I spent looking for tutorials on how to copy his sound design on Garageband, the 7th-grade birthday present of Logic Pro X, the hundreds of dollars of pirated software and times I went to bed with eyes sore from looking at a computer for too long, trying to replicate this sound and share the attention EDM producers at the time were getting online. I remembered spending every moment of free time watching live videos of unreleased songs and remixes from Skrillex and eventually deadmau5 and Kill the Noise and Zomboy, becoming even more obsessed with Daft Punk and trying to rip them off, too. It all felt so long ago yet so vivid and so close.

Maybe that has to do with how much I and the world has changed since then, but the rush of energy I and so many other of his fans at the time got from the music hasn’t quite gone away. Sure, maybe kids aren’t the best people to tell you what’s good and what’s not, but it’s rare that anything, let alone music, can give kids the amount of unshakeable excitement that he did back then. Skrillex had to have been doing something right.