Electronic dance music doesn’t get enough credit. Using a machine to make a beat, to layer melodies on top of it, to create a crescendo that makes the listener’s heart swell and hands rise up in the air, requires as much talent as strumming a guitar, singing a song, or rapping a verse. E.D.M. is to music what Abstract Expressionism is to art. Critics like to point a finger at it and say, mistakenly, “My four-year-old could do that.”
One of the most original and accomplished E.D.M. artists of recent years was Avicii, the stage name of Tim Bergling, a slight, scruffy Swedish d.j. who died on Friday, at the age of twenty-eight. Born in Stockholm in 1989, Avicii downloaded beat-matching software when he was sixteen. His brother worked at a night club, and when he first went there, the following year, it fuelled his passion to make music for the partying masses. He set up a MySpace page to promote himself and chose the name Avicii, which a friend told him referred to the lowest level of Buddhist hell, because he thought it sounded cool. By eighteen, house-music blogs had discovered him.
In 2014, the year after he released his début album, “True,” which featured up-tempo party jams that unexpectedly mixed folksy twang with thumping bass, Bergling made No. 3 on Forbes’s “Electronic Cash Kings” list. But the spate of touring that ensued—this is how d.j.s make most of their money, spinning at venues from Las Vegas to Dubai—led Avicii to excessive drinking and increasing health problems, including pancreatitis. Bergling had his gallbladder and appendix removed, in 2014. Two years later, he retired from touring, telling the Hollywood Reporter that “it was something I had to do for my health.” This year, he posted a message on his Web site: “We all reach a point in our lives and careers where we understand what matters,” it said, in part. “Last year I quit performing live, and many of you thought that was it. But the end of live never meant the end of Avicii or my music. Instead, I went back to the place where it all made sense—the studio.” As recently as three days ago, he appeared healthy and happy, posing with fans in Muscat, Oman. He was found dead there on Friday, according to a statement from his manager; the cause of death is not yet known.
I never saw Avicii live. My preferred venue for listening to his work has always been my living-room couch. A lot of E.D.M. music videos toy with expectations—Christopher Walken pops and locks in Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice”—but Avicii one-upped them all, turning his party songs into anti-establishment anthems for underdogs. In the video for his 2011 song “Levels,” directed by Petro Papahadjopoulos, an office drone who looks like Kenneth from “30 Rock” feels the beat of the song so thoroughly that he starts grinding against desks in his drab cubicle farm. After getting Tased by a security officer, he wakes up in a hospital with a dewy flower in his mouth. When the perplexed attendants touch it, they, too, start dancing, turning the sterile hallways of the medical establishment into a raucous party. Even while sedated, the drone’s compulsion to have a good time is infectious.
“Wake Me Up,” directed by C. B. Miller and Mark Seliger, is a little more obvious and laden with product placements (a brand of heritage denim, Sony’s Xperia phone), but still more touching than the average club banger. A teen-age girl and her younger sister, seemingly without parents, garner side-eyes from the residents of their small, “Westworld”-type town. The older one jumps on horseback and rides off into the wilderness, which somehow leads her to downtown Los Angeles, where she finds her tribe, which happens to be raging at an Avicii concert. She returns to the small town to retrieve her little sister, telling her to pack her things; they’re going “somewhere we belong.”
My favorite Avicii video, though, is “I Could Be the One,” directed by Peter Huang. Like “Levels,” it stars an office drone, this time an overweight woman in the habit of hitting the snooze button, crossing off days on the calendar with a red marker, and using her office desktop to buy shoes. In the break room, over a microwaveable entrée, she confesses to an especially judgmental female co-worker, “I think I hate my life.” I won’t spoil everything that happens next in the video, which includes a male stripper, sex on a sailboat, and a to-do list that reads “1. Not give a fuck 2. That is all.” I will say that I always stop the video before the very end, when our heroine meets her end too soon.
Sourse: newyorker.com
