One of dubstep’s pioneers and most prominent artists, Skream, recently sat down with Fact Magazine for an interview, sharing his views on the current state of EDM and what, according to him, will the future of EDM hold.
Talking about the perennial underground vs. commercial divide, he said
“There’s a massive overground/underground fight, where people hate to associate themselves with the overground – when I say overground, I mean the common denominator music. But then you’ve got people like Disclosure who are very much a part of the overground – not massively underground, but still relevant in a sense of playing good music.”
Talking further about the issue, he said
“It was going to happen. I have been involved in EDM, like when I was playing EDC, the big big American festivals. I was a part of it. And, EDM, the whole style of music, I fucking can’t stand it anymore. I appreciate a good pop song, and most of it is pop stuff. But it’s carried itself to be so far away from everyone else, it’s almost like an unbelievable world. You see Calvin Harris earning $46m in a year – when you’re talking about money like that, that automatically segregates it from everything else. Meanwhile, people have been grafting their bollocks off for years, and barely getting paid to do shows. So I think it has become two different worlds. The question you just asked me there – it’s likely people are honing in on being even more bold about their craft, for it not to be associated with this faraway bollocks. EDM is alienating itself. I’m quite interested to see where it’s going to go next, because we’ve seen Ultra Music are now promoting deep house. Actually, I should be really careful, as I’ve got a remix coming out with them! But it has become two totally different worlds.”
He also spoke about the further scope of dance music and his take on EDM.
“I do think EDM’s coming to an end – well, not an end, Vegas will always be there, Vegas isn’t dying! Everyone seems to be embracing deep house – I do hear deep house around a lot more then before. If you think about six/seven years ago, deep house was like Naked Naked music, it was almost jazzy! In America, if you go to a good house party, it’s now just generally good music, nobody really knows what it is. There’s a lot more interest in it, people are interested in good music again, which is good. The sort of umbrella term for it seems to be ‘deep house’, although it’s not really deep house. You get SOHN – he’s doing some amazing stuff, and it all stems off the back of what everyone classes as ‘deep house’.“
Read the full interview here
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