Skrillex might be the one of the biggest superstars in the dance music realm today, and the fact was further cemented when the ‘Recess‘ producer was personally invited by hard rock band Guns N’ Roses to open for them for their Houston show last week at the NRG Stadium.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Skrillex discusses about opening for the legendary band, including how he prepared the set, as well as facing a crowd which included purists who don’t consider electronic music as, well, music.
Talking about the polarizing opinions about his music, he says:
I’ve always been a polarizing artist, so I don’t really pay attention to what anybody says. It’s so strange because I grew up playing rock music and punk music, and I’m a forever-evolving artist. When I first started making electronic music after I left From First to Last, all my band’s fans hated that. ‘Where’s the old Sonny?’ When I started working with Jack Ü, the Skrillex fans were like, ‘What’s that?
On preparing for the opening set, he revealed he spent a week making new remixes and edits:
I wanted to warm up the crowd and entertain them so that by the time Guns N’ Roses came on they were semi-turnt. I put in my big songs and of course remixed them and did mash-ups. I threw in a bunch of old metal songs, as well. That was my preparation: throwing in Iron Maiden, Metallica, Pantera. On ‘Purple Lamborghini,’ I threw the Lemmy a cappella from ‘Ace of Spades’ on the instrumental, so it had a little bit of Rick Ross and a little bit of Lemmy.
Building up the enthusiasm of the crowd was harder than expected, and Sonny fully expected that:
When I stepped onstage, people were sitting down and were like, ‘What the fuck?’ After a few songs, I started throwing in some of the metal remixes and pitched them all to be in the same key as the ones I was mixing them with so it felt like a really smooth set. There were definitely moments when I threw in Queen or threw in the first Metallica sample, and people were like ‘Oh shit.’ It became a big sing-a-long.
Check out some of the videos from his opening set here below.
H/T: Rolling Stone
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