Where's the Drop? Identifying EDM Trends Through Deadmau5
The chapter below will be published in the anthology The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music by Bloomsbury Academic in August 2021.
Joel Zimmerman's musical alias Deadmau5 is among the most recognizable names in all of Electronic Dance Music. Frequently spotted wearing his iconic, enormous mouse head at the world's biggest festivals, Deadmau5's prolific output reaches millions of monthly listeners, with early hit "Ghosts 'n' Stuff" surpassing 100 million streams and album 4x4=12 earning platinum certification. Deadmau5 has been nominated for six Grammy awards and was named "Best Progressive House Artist" and "Most influential, forward-thinking and relevant person" by prominent online electronic music store Beatport as early as 2008. Zimmerman's prominence has led him to teach an electronic music production course for MasterClass, a platform reserved for luminaries in their respective fields, and in 2019, he realized a decade-long goal of scoring a feature film by composing the soundtrack for Jonas Åkerlund's Netflix film Polar.
These milestones make Deadmau5 an exemplar of modern EDM stardom and an excellent case study, but more than that, his career intersects with multiple trends that have come to define the genre as a whole as it grows in its status as a major music force worldwide.
I. Technology
Though the vast category of electronic music encompasses a broad array of musical approaches and styles, at its core are approaches where "sonic transformation is ubiquitous." Electronic music enables the multifarious manipulations of sound's fundamental unit, a vibration expressed as a wave moving through a medium, in the form of various oscillator shapes, in order to realize ever more intricate timbres and arrangements for musical expression. The discovery of novel sounds is for electronic musicians the joyous journey itself, and the ease with which these sounds are created is a direct consequence of technological progress. Mark Brend writes that "Electronic music depends more on its equipment than most other forms of music… The art needs an apparatus… The development of the music cannot be separated from the emergence of new technologies and the invention of new instruments and techniques." DJ Richie Hawtin offered a similar sentiment: "Electronic music is innately tied to the technology used to create it – as the tools evolve, so will the art." Since the early 20th century, the advent of early electronic instruments like the Telharmonium and the Theremin revealed new sonic possibilities, leading to the advent of modular systems – synthesizers that could be constructed through any combination of foundational building block modules – that enabled exploration of complex electronic sound design. However, cost often initially confined these systems to academic contexts. Closed-circuit synthesizers like those initially designed by Robert Moog in the 1960s brought "tool of liberation, a noise-making machine that drew sounds not from the city streets but the depths of the imagination, a means of launching music into outer space." These models introduced more compact designs to recording studios at a somewhat more accessible price tag, and a piano keyboard provided a familiar interface for newcomers (Robert Buchla's models, meanwhile, deliberately rejected familiarity in favor of producing instruments with completely unseen interfaces). The MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) specification provided a bridge between electronic instruments and computers, which meant nuanced performances could be stored and recalled in software, allowing for more complex arrangements. As computers grew more powerful, digital audio workstations (DAWs) centralized the hub of the producer's studio, while Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plugins allowed for practically limitless customizability within the DAW. Greater reliance on software, an increase in computing power, and a decrease in computer prices democratized access for anyone wanting to express themselves through electronic music. The dawn of the bedroom producer meant it was no longer an absolute necessity to own any dedicated hardware instruments, though many musicians, including Deadmau5, have opted for a hybrid software and hardware solution to play to the strengths of both.
Whether writing music in his lavish studio, streaming the latest live visual designs online, or just playing video games, technology is a singular discipline to Deadmau5. By his own admission, Zimmerman grew up "very socially fucking retarded" with a "huge anxiety disorder," retreating to the solace of design programs like CorelDraw and games like Minesweeper as a teenager. This awkwardness would bloom into a lifelong love for computers, manifesting in a recreational passion for video games and facilitating his entire professional career even down to the genesis of his artist name. The story goes that one night Zimmerman noticed the smell of burning wires around his computer. Upon taking it apart, he found a dead mouse inside. After telling his friends what had happened, everyone began calling him the "dead mouse guy." He used this moniker in online message boards, truncating it to the alias he uses today due to their eight-character limit.
With a native background in computers generally, music software came to Zimmerman easily. Today, he uses Ableton, electronic music's most popular DAW, and Serum, a wavetable synthesizer designed by friend and occasional musical collaborator Steve Duda, also features prominently on numerous tracks. But Deadmau5 has also made significant investments in his home studio, expanding his capabilities beyond the average musician's "gearlust." Zimmerman's home studio is "like walking into a spaceship," and includes at least a dozen synthesizers, an extensive modular system occupying an entire wall, an analogue mixing console costing half a million dollars, and a fully calibrated 11.3 Dolby Atmos system requiring nine custom, specifically-positioned speakers. A server room hosting 70 terabytes of networked storage link to five gaming computers, helping Zimmerman design and render his processor-intensive graphics for shows.
Some may see these efforts as excessive, particularly when other A-list producers like Skrillex opt for largely software-based solutions. Deadmau5's preference for analogue systems like modulars and hardware synthesizers points to a persistent trend across electronic music where "digital sound is too perfect, too clean, too cold – [electronic musicians] long instead for the imperfections of the warm, fuzzy, dirty analog sound."
It's difficult to ascertain which of Deadmau5's sounds in any given song are fully analog or digital. Whether an analog signal has been digitally manipulated or a digital sound is sent through analog effects processors, the majority of his songs are likely a marriage of both. While digital sound provides the economical option for many producers, companies creating digital synthesizer emulators continue to tout analog-modelled products as a major selling point for EDM producers. Even Serum boasts two chaos knobs in an effort to mimic the drifting oscillators of early analog synthesizers. Zimmerman continues to preference analog hardware, a trend that persists in EDM contrary to what has happened in the motion picture industry, which has almost completely jettisoned film stocks in favor of digital capture formats.
The powerful graphics cards Deadmau5 uses for creating live visuals also facilitate his recreational gaming, where high visual fidelity and fast frame rates are an advantage for online first-person shooters in particular. Zimmerman loves video games, citing them as "a huge part of my upbringing" and an "absolute" influence on his music, positing that his music "lends itself to video-game-soundtrack-type stuff. We’ve been back and forth, of course, in and out of each other’s industries, kind of playing off each other. We’re just cool buddies, me and video games."
Deadmau5's sentiment indicates the strong ties between the industries, one that only continues to strengthen as EDM and gaming both enjoy larger cultural influence. The earliest gaming systems were outfitted with primitive sound generation devices built into their circuits, which meant "video game tracks were some of the first mass marketed and consumed forms of electronic music." For direct links between electronic music and video games, one need only consider Super Nintendo's Mario Paint game, which included a primitive music making mini-game; the Nanoloop music creation cartridge on Nintendo's Game Boy; and Analogue Pocket, a video game system that includes a built-in sequencer and synthesizer. Outside of musical systems, there is the entirety of the chiptune electronic music subgenre that constrains artists to music made by video games or with the low-fidelity sounds that early systems created. Video games also provide much fodder for sampling, as has been the case with Burial and Joker, just to name two of countless artists who have incorporated games' sounds into their compositions. Electronic musicians are hired to provide music for games, as in the case of Canadian EDM label Monstercat teaming up with Psyonix to provide over 40 tracks for Rocket League and Skrillex and Giorgio Moroder writing music for Mortal Kombat 11 and Tron Run/r, respectively. Efforts extending beyond soundtrack work include EDM star Marshmello broadcasting a live show inside the hugely popular online game Fortnite. Until that time, it was the game's biggest event ever (being outdone in 2020 by rapper Travis Scott), indicating a novel entertainment space and emerging revenue possibility for the two entertainment sectors.
Deadmau5 has also become involved with video games, providing a curated playlist for the racing game Project CARS and working with Secretlab to create an officially licensed gaming chair. Zimmerman has also created his own game in a collaboration with Absolut Vodka. The game itself is simple – players must navigate Deadmau5 from his studio to a show, ultimately being rewarded with backstage access to new music – but it's likely the first example of a track being debuted through a virtual reality (VR) experience. The collaboration was positive for Zimmerman, who called it a "great entry level project in VR to get my feet wet… To build something that can work on that platform is a fucking great way to entice people into VR development." Players will complete what is really more of an elaborate marketing experience in less than ten minutes, but it nonetheless presents another potential direction for the future of music and gaming.
In addition to broadcasting video game sessions on the streaming megasite Twitch, Deadmau5 regularly streams marathon music production or motion graphics sessions through the site, but began broadcasting live bedroom sets via Ustream at least as early as September 2010, nine months before Twitch launched. Zimmerman was not just streaming to increase his popularity, but also sought to demystify his process:
"the nature of electronic music, it's all heavily produced, right?... It's not recorded off the floor or by a bunch of talented musicians, whittling away doing multiple passes kind of thing… I always thought, wouldn't it be cool… to open up the hood on it and show people the process of it to either inspire and encourage other people to do it, because, 'oh, maybe it doesn't look so hard' or 'oh, that's an interesting way of doing things' kind of thing… that was something I was always about… lifting a veil on something that's just been heavily veiled for the longest time… no electronic artist was showcasing or livestreaming their production process. I think I was probably among the first."
These sessions allow rabid fans or aspiring producers to peek behind the scenes, though on at least one occasion, streaming facilitated the completion of Deadmau5's music. While working on "The Veldt," Deadmau5 noticed several chat participants recommending he listen to a vocal demo a fan had recorded over the song. Zimmerman, expecting an amateur performance, was instead awestruck by how well the lyrics complemented the instrumental. He reached out to the vocalist, Chris James, and ultimately worked with him on the official version. Today, many EDM producers have followed Deadmau5's lead, streaming their own production sessions on Twitch to connect with their fans or help other producers develop their skills, an intimate extension of the bedroom producer ethos.
II. Criticism
As of 2019, electronic music ranked as the third most popular music genre (behind pop and rock) and reached an estimated 1.5 billion listeners, according to a study by the International Music Summit. That doesn't mean electronic music is not without its critics. Cultural sociologist Sarah Thornton, author of Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital, frames some of the main criticisms, outlining preferences of "'listening' over dance musics, visibly performing musicians over behind-the-scenes producers, the rhetorically 'live' over the 'recorded' and hence guitars over synthesizers and samplers" as dichotomies that continue to perpetuate established canons excluding dance music. Initially, instruments used to create electronic music "were met often with bewilderment, anxiety, even fear," an anxiety that developed into derision when the first discotheques emerged. These sentiments sometimes provoked physical altercations. The most notorious example was radio DJ Steve Dahl's "Disco Sucks" campaign, culminating in the Disco Demolition Night baseball promotion of 1979 resulting in the detonation of crates of disco records brought by patrons for reduced admission. Seeing as early discotheques emerged as a refuge for African and Latino minorities as well as the LGBTQ community, some scholars have coated the event within racist or homophobic undertones as "a perfect target for white rage." The destruction of cultural artifacts echoes an even darker historical precedent, however: the burning of books deemed subversive in Nazi Germany, a connection made more uncomfortable with Dahl's choice to don military garb around and during the time of Disco Demolition.
As disco's prominence waned, house music would emerge as its "direct descendant," or as house pioneer Frankie Knuckles called it, "disco's revenge," likewise created and fostered largely within the same minority spaces. Techno music, "designed to be a futurist statement," followed as the next major genre development of electronic music, blending synthesizers and drum machines with house rhythms, and would explode into international popularity by the 1980s and 1990s, transforming into the modern form of EDM enjoyed today.
This would surely be cause for recognizing electronic music's impact, but even as late as 1989, the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music defined disco as a "dance fad of the 70s with profound and unfortunate influence on popular music… producers, who already had too much power, used drum machines, synthesizers and other gimmicks at the expense of musical values." Here, the "musical values" suggests the playing of canonically accepted instruments such as guitar, drums, or piano, and the knowledge of music theory that enables it as the chief method for determining musical worth. Speaking of Kraftwerk's robotic performances, Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor explained another issue some listeners found with electronic music: "Kraftwerk made music that could (apparently) be played simply by pressing buttons, music that didn't address any personal, human concerns… At the time, they sounded completely alien." Samplers, drum machines, and computers weren't (and for some, still aren't) considered instruments. Studio work can be replicated exactly with these tools, allowing for the performer to create an illusion of an authentic performance. To outsiders, this may seem deceptive, subject to remarks like "for all you know they could be onstage checking their email."
These days, EDM is more widely accepted as genres cross-pollinate, but it is still not immune from criticism. Rolling Stone Italia's excoriating video "Rocker Vs. DJ," commissioned for the magazine's 10th anniversary and executed by advertising agency BBDO of Milan, points out the worst tropes of electronic music and DJ culture. Sustaining a combative pitch from its onset, the clip calls DJs
"criminals with the license to shoot shit into our eardrums. Low-quality mp3 pushers. Third-class whores that give it away to the first bidder… You feel like superstars, huh? … No audience will ever chant your name. They'll never know your songs by heart because you are anonymity. The day will come when your vocoders explode and your CDs catch fire. In their place, we'll see you return to guitar, bass, and drums, bringing real music back to life… [electronic music] is the anathema to rock and roll."
The slickly-produced video depicts the exaggerated lifestyle of a fictitious EDM DJ, crosscut with shots of pills, orgies, party aftermaths, and performances in empty warehouses.
The piece's central fallacy is in the title itself. "Versus" is a binary that suggests listeners must choose either rock or EDM. However, increasing numbers of listeners opt to enjoy music through an "all you can eat" streaming model, as opposed to purchasing albums limited by a budget. This is indicated by the RIAA's annual Music Revenues Report that shows both an increase in overall streaming revenues (from four billion in 2016 to 8.8 billion in 2019) and an increase in the number of paid music subscriptions (10.5 million in 2015 to 60.4 million in 2019). This model supports a rocker and DJ model; listeners don't have to choose one over the other.
Published in 2013, The Rolling Stone Italia video now seems hopelessly antiquated. It arrived a year after Deadmau5 performed at the Grammy Awards on the same stage as Foo Fighters in 2012, having remixed their track "Rope" in 2011. This performance suggests a more stylistically integrated musical landscape. Foo Fighters, by all respects a traditional rock band, kick off "Rope" in full energy on a small stage, a large concealed box to the side, mimicking the music video for the song. At the end of the first chorus high point, the curtain on the other stage falls, revealing Deadmau5 towering over the band as his mouse head bobs to the music, now incorporating elements from his remix. Midway through the video, another reveal occurs. The cameras pan to the audience, revealing grinning mouse heads among the throng, suggesting the draw is playfully skewed toward the EDM producer. But the performance is devoid of antagonism, instead showcasing a harmony between the two genres, as if it were never any other way.
Yet even Deadmau5 is quick to find faults with EDM. In an interview with the Evening Standard in 2014, Zimmerman said, "Disco had a longer run than EDM has… and that died in a fucking hurry. EDM is way more susceptible… it’ll eventually fuck itself so hard." To Zimmerman, "eventually" was just a year later, in 2016. "It’s fucked. It’s out of the innovators’ hands; it’s not really grassroots anymore." But the most media attention came from his now-infamous Tumblr post from 2012, "we all hit play:"
"its no secret. when it comes to "live" performance of EDM… It’s not about performance art, its not about talent either (really its not) In fact, let me do you and the rest of the EDM world button pushers who fuckin hate me for telling you how it is, a favor and let you all know how it is. I think given about 1 hour of instruction, anyone with minimal knowledge of ableton and music tech in general could DO what im doing at a deadmau5 concert. Just like i think ANY DJ in the WORLD who can match a beat can do what "ANYONE else" (not going to mention any names) is doing on their EDM stages too."
This sentiment echoes Deadmau5's Rolling Stone cover story from around the same time. Writer Josh Eells approached the story as a scenic outsider, pondering the extent of liveness for the typical electronic musician or DJ: "From the crowd, it’s hard to tell exactly what a dance musician is doing onstage. Almost all of them use prerecorded tracks; sometimes it seems like they’re getting paid to wave their arms and occasionally adjust their headphones." In the story, Deadmau5 doubled down on his Tumblr sentiment amid Eells' commentary, a tirade uniting tradition, authenticity, and performance all as sides of the same rock coin:
"If I wanted, I could play a fucking .wav file and just stand there and fist-pump all night, and no one would give a shit," Zimmerman says. In fact, he says, a lot of people do just that. "David Guetta has two iPods and a mixer and he just plays tracks – like, 'Here’s one with Akon, check it out!' Even Skrillex… isn’t doing anything too technical. He has a laptop and a MIDI recorder, and he’s just playing his shit. People are, thank God, smartening up about who does what – but there’s still button-pushers getting paid half a million. And not to say I’m not a button-pusher. I’m just pushing a lot more buttons."
... In a way, Zimmerman is weirdly traditionalist – prizing authenticity and performance and other "rock" values and rejecting anything that smells of pop. He disdains DJs ("It takes two days to learn, as long as you can count to four"), dismisses most dance music as formulaic ("Just 120 bpm with a fucking kick drum on every quarter note")... He’d much rather… get Dave Grohl to remix a track for the next Deadmau5 album – "because fuck dance music, you know?"
The Tumblr post and Rolling Stone feature generated many reactions from music publications and understandably upset many EDM fans and DJs. Sebastian Ingrosso of Swedish House Mafia wrote that Deadmau5 was precisely the kind of producer that pushes "play" during his sets (while aligning his own music to The Beatles). Other artists, notably Bassnectar with "Pushing Buttons or Pushing Boundaries," dismissed Deadmau5's screed with a lengthy explanation of what was involved in his work, detailing the layers of complexity in his performances to educate both critics and fans.
While Deadmau5's vitriol pointed out a truism for some electronic music acts whose lack of liveness presented a detriment to engagement, it's unlikely that these posts led to direct change for many artists; the heritage of live performance provides its own pull. Many performers today ensure they remain active onstage, at the very least tweaking song parameters or sections via controller knobs, sliders, and buttons. Others use a conventional instrument, often a keyboard, to create a spectacle while signaling some level of music theory mastery.
As EDM has evolved, more attention has also been paid to the visual component of the live show. It has become less acceptable, at least for a live as opposed to a DJ set, to simply play tracks through a computer and pantomime performance. Though light shows are now de rigueur for a band with any clout (regardless of genre), many EDM artists go the extra mile by creating custom performance setups. A paragon is EDM trio The Glitch Mob, who have created a complex rig called The Blade constructed from several huge drum triggers and touchscreen samplers – tilted toward the audience as if to dissuade comments that events are not being triggered in real-time – that leaves room for improvising many parts during a live set. In two online documentaries, members of the group detail the mammoth undertaking involved in the rig, with the impetus of bringing "the drama of a live rock band to an electronic show (emphasis mine)." The Glitch Mob stresses their heavy involvement in this non-musical aspect of their show as another dimension to their creativity.
Deadmau5's shows have become more extravagant than simply the wearing of his custom mouse head. Concertgoers will be treated to a custom spectacle called The Cube, now on its third version (though Zimmerman quips that it's closer to its seventh). In its current form, the structure is an enormous cube with mechanical sides that can open to reveal the producer performing inside while various visuals play on the Cube's LED displays.
As with The Glitch Mob, Zimmerman is the creative force for his show visuals. In addition to designing the cube structure itself, he has also created all of the motion graphics that play inside The Cube, which is where his substantial investments in hard drive capacity, premium graphics cards, and a networked render farm at his home studio bear fruit. With such intricate visuals that must fire in time to the music, Deadmau5's shows exhibit his highly technical production processes. He and other performers at his level continue to raise the bar for themselves in an effort to create more impressive show experiences, regardless of whether they're merely "pressing play."
III. Authenticity
Curiously, "selling out," that is, "a prostitution of ideals or a betrayal of principle," which has afflicted jazz, folk, rock, and hip hop musicians since the 1970s and through the 1990s, seems less a force in modern music, and for EDM by extension. Franz Nicolay suggests that by the release of Moby's 1999 electronic music album Play, significant in that all 18 of its tracks were commercially licensed together over 300 times, the term had begun to wane. He writes, "The collapse of the music industry sent artists looking for new licensing revenue and corporate touring partnerships. (Critic Steven Hyden has noted that the year of "Play’s" ascendancy coincided with the launch of Napster)." Napster torpedoed the music industry, and its "self-righteousness dried up along with its giant pools of money." Especially in the 21st Century, successful musicians have needed to shift efforts to monetize their work away from declining physical sales and, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, a disappearance of the traditional live touring economy. Instead, efforts are geared toward digital streaming opportunities on services like Twitch, selling directly to their fans through sites like Bandcamp, and crowdfunding patronage using platforms like Patreon. But while selling out is less of a concern, issues of authenticity take their place.
Authenticity, "defined primarily in opposition to 'faking it,'... is an absolute, a goal that can never be fully attained, a quest," and is in dialogue with the criticisms proffered in the preceding section. Disco may have been labelled as "shallow or insubstantial – fake, in other words. But the genre had deliberately avoided the aesthetics of authenticity. A typical disco record made no attempt to tell us about the performer or about reality." Throughout electronic music's evolution following disco, this sentiment has often been reinforced. Some producers employ masks during performance to heighten spectacle while shielding the artists in a "fetishized anonymity." Historically, masks have been used in ritual contexts, and work by "concealing or modifying those signs of identity which conventionally display the actor… masks achieve their special effect by modifying those limited number of conventionalized signs of identity." In another sense, the use of masks in electronic music provides "a connotation of universality; having no face means you might have any face." Barker and Taylor assert that "authenticity is rarely an issue with music for which the performer intentionally adopts a theatrical approach." In the age of social media, journalist Andrew Matson has argued that life is a big performance "with no web/life verification… We need a demarcation: life over here; performance over there. Masks signify an art zone and elevate performance to something serious."
Michaelangelo Matos takes this a step further, tracing a lineage of concealment through electronic music that extends beyond masks to include usage of artist aliases, pressing blank "white label" records disseminated anonymously to DJs, and the presence of early virtual reality headsets at raves, indicating a larger strategy in use since at least the 1980s. Whatever the methodology, the paradigm of the faceless electronic music producer pushes against the dominant ideology of stardom in which a personality must be recognized to be exalted to superstar status.
Barker and Taylor list two responses for bridging the gap between a performer's sense of self and their public persona: "The first is to glorify the degree to which you are faking it – to theatrically celebrate your ability to perform a role and to take on a persona… that is clearly not meant to reflect the real you… The second approach to this problem is for the performer to try to minimize the gap between person and persona." Deadmau5 employs both strategies. While Deadmau5 began his career performing without a mask or costume, his mouse head is now instantly recognizable and continues the tradition of acts like Daft Punk and later followed by Marshmello, and represents a theatricalization of his performative personality.
Online, Zimmerman makes use of the second approach. Here, the mask is shed and fans see the unfiltered and authentic persona, sometimes prone to ranting on social media or live video streams, engaging in celebrity feuds, and criticizing the scene or himself. At other times, he's the exact opposite: unguarded, vulnerable, and nurturing in his advice to novice producers.
Zimmerman has publicly broadcast his emotional states on the internet for years. In 2015, Zimmerman shut down his Facebook and Twitter accounts, citing depression as the cause. Since high proficiency in music theory isn't essential for creating electronic music, this can manifest as "imposter syndrome," as Deadmau5 alluded to in a CBC interview:
I think I'm more tech than Mozart or whatever the hell, or as a musician. I've never really felt like a musician, you know. I don't know, it's so weird to kind of step outside of myself and see what I am, you know what I mean?"
"What is a musician to you that you're not?"
"To me, someone that could read sheet music, for starters."
"So that eliminates The Beatles, originally."
“Well, I don't know, just someone who studied music, that knows more about the different types of scales and notation and polyrhythms, I don't know any of that stuff, you know."
The interviewer delved further, asking if Zimmerman, at some level, felt like an imposter. The emphatic response came right away:
"Yeah. I won't disagree with that… there are a lot of people who do go out of their way to study music, who go into school and go into programs and get their Master's or Doctorate even in music, and then you got pop artists I guess like me just underdogging the whole thing. It's like, 'well I spent $40-50 grand on college or whatever for what? I see a lot of people who have this insane amount of musical knowledge, all these like practical music-y things, I don't even know what they are, that's how dumb I am."
"Do you have an interest in studying music?"
"No, I don't, really. It would bore me to tears, it would frustrate me."
"How do you know that?"
"It would be a total curveball. I go with what I know. I know what music should sound like in my head and I think that's enough for me."
Here, Zimmerman presents himself as somewhat of an unreliable narrator, as a hardworking EDM pioneer streaming marathon production sessions who nevertheless downplays the success he's managed to build for himself. While any imposter syndrome he may have experienced has nevertheless been minor relative to his output, Deadmau5 has still looked for other ways of aligning himself with brands and authors he deems authentic. In 2016, Zimmerman would share another commonality with Hans Zimmer, a composer he deeply respects: they would both teach their own online class for MasterClass, a portal for industry leaders to provide advice on their field of expertise. Meeting the composer dashed the assumptions Zimmerman had imagined prior:
"I was actually kind of pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago. I had a meeting with Hans Zimmer, and we talked about a bunch of stuff. And I was thinking, 'this guy's going to show up with the coattails… he's doing all these massive film scores that are very music heavy, that have all this orchestration and getting top instrument player people doing it, and I'm thinking 'this is a guy I really pick his brain.' It was actually kind of funny, he's like 'dude I couldn't read a sheet of music to save my life, and I can't score anything. I just do it with Midi and all this stuff,' and I'm thinking 'oh my god I do the exact same thing, that's really funny."
Deadmau5's ability to teach a full class has its bedrock in his years demystifying the creative process through streaming and echoes his online advice to producers in providing for the electronic music community. Along with increasing software availability, online music production classes have grown in popularity despite throngs of YouTube channels presenting similar content for free. MasterClass provides videos of a celebrity in their field divulging their knowledge, though the classes are more of a source of motivation to those considering the field, as opposed to a class providing strict instruction. Placing Zimmerman within an academic context, however, cannot help but provide career legitimacy among his peers.
Yet another path towards authenticity that electronic producers have traversed is becoming involved with scoring soundtracks to films, and more recently, video games. In this context, music serves a purpose outside of its own aesthetic pleasure and instead supports a larger structure. The soundtrack, in eschewing its live components, also sheds any concerns that it is automated. Culturally, we connect the soundtrack composer with the classical arranger, working with a live orchestra to realize his vision. The long list most famously includes artists like Vangelis, Daft Punk, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Tangerine Dream, and Junkie XL, in addition to many others. In 2019, Deadmau5 realized a goal he had expressed at least a decade earlier: to score the soundtrack for a major motion picture. Netflix's Polar, directed by accomplished music video director Jonas Åkerlund, follows a hit man who finds himself the target of a hit. Deadmau5's score pays homage to recent soundtrack efforts like those released by Zimmer and contains several EDM-tinged pieces.
Branching out to already legitimated media formats like films and video games is similar to electronic musicians aligning with the establishment and respect of the classical genre. There is a difference between Tiesto sampling Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" for his track of the same name and a more immersive live performance where producers such as Jeff Mills, Jon Craig, Above & Beyond, and BT have employed a full orchestra to complement or reimagine their electronic arrangements. The latter transforms the album and perhaps even dwarfs it. The decision to use the orchestra, the pinnacle of Western classical composition, as opposed to traditional folk forms, suggests a desire for EDM producers to elevate their music to canonical spaces, despite how antiquated or stuffy they may be for their usual audiences.
Deadmau5 also headed this way, abandoning EDM altogether for the 2018 album "where's the drop?," a collection of symphonic arrangements originating from piano concertos Zimmerman wrote. Consisting of reimaginings of familiar Deadmau5 songs as well as several unreleased tracks, the album directly led Åkerlund to choosing the producer to score his film. As with the producers above, Deadmau5 performed with a full orchestra for the album's two live performances. Zimmerman dressed in a suit and tie, not only the standard uniform for classical performers but also the height of "respectable" men's fashion. But Zimmerman wasn't happy about it, remarking that "The last two times I'm ever wearing a suit is that time and at my funeral." During the performances, the Deadmau5 head sat grinning on a piano bench, its glowing eyes gazing out into the audience, lifeless otherwise.
The title "where's the drop?" indicates the fundamental sonic characteristic of EDM, a "drop, a big 'hit' or 'climax' of loud, highly distorted (often 'wobbly') bass and sub-bass synths," that functions to release the tension that a "soar" creates. These elements separate EDM from other genres as formal aspects that create interest throughout the song. Of course, Deadmau5 is well versed in placing soars and drops in many of his tracks ("Imaginary Friends" features several of varying intensities). The production of "where's the drop?" in effect subverts the expectations of the EDM listener. This is finally Zimmerman's deliberate rejection of the scene's values from fans and producers alike that he has railed against for years, for the first time in musical form. But this sentiment was short-lived. Deadmau5's following release, "here's the drop!," collected various remixes of the orchestral versions, reverting back to comfortable EDM tropes while subjecting the original tracks to a level of aural facsimile.
The elusive pursuit of authenticity is one of many goals for Joel Zimmerman as he continues to create music through Deadmau5. The project has benefitted from the global acceptance of many forms of electronic music, and EDM in particular, as it continues its global expansion. With the ubiquity of DAWs like Ableton, the resurgence of interest in analog synthesizers, and the burgeoning of the bedroom producer, electronic music is ripe to become the folk music of our time. While it's easy for Zimmerman to play the cultural provocateur and decry EDM's death, the more noble pursuit as a bonafide star is to push the music forward, to resist tropes that make the music stale. Ultimately, creating music that is fearlessly authentic will not only quell his complaints; it will also advance new possibilities for the future of the music as a whole.