Are Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich a bunch of snobs making fun of EDM? You decide! In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, they clearly made the distinction between the two kinds of EDM: the classy sophisticated, ‘haute couture’ one, incarnated by Yorke’s pal Flying Lotus, and the cheap flashy popular one done by David Guetta and Calvin Harris. This is what Yorke and Godrich had to say about it:
GODRICH: Electronic music is really weird right now, because it is bleeding into the mainstream, but, at the same time, it's fashion, you know? You have this sort of avant-garde end of it – the haut couture sort of thing he's talking about, especially in smaller clubs and smaller scenes, like the scene in L.A. around Low End Theory. But what you end up with in the mainstream is horrible – this distillation of the DJ thing.’
YORKE: They wash the surface off and they've cleaned it up and Auto-Tuned it. It's like, "Fuck you!"
GODRICH: I mean, love it or hate it, you've got your David Guettas with massive hits or, like, Calvin Harris – all that kind of shit, which is the Marks & Spencer of this.
YORKE: [Cackling with delight.]
GODRICH: It is! It's the H&M. That's how it works. You have some people being very, very dangerous and experimental, and then it trickles into, you know, making ridiculous hats that eventually get copied by your high-street stores. That's how I see it.’
First of all, the fashion comparison wasn’t the best one because Yorke and Godrich apparently don’t value that much haute couture, I have seen how they dress, and Guetta is probably the one buying expensive outfits! Still, I totally see their point, there is great art and cheap art in every form of art, and the DJ culture doesn’t necessarily belong to the first one. It’s gonna be difficult to criticize them as I agree with what they say, but isn’t it a bit pretentious to say the artsy-underground scene is good, the popular one is all bad and cheap? I may think the same way but I am not shouting it to Rolling Stone magazine! Here is another excerpt of the interview, when Thom Yorke is asked about the DJ culture being a big business and turning him off:
’I mean, it depends on how you look at it [DJ culture]. If I'm brutally honest, 90 percent of that whole culture, I don't get on with. I don't understand it at all, and I find it really bonkers when, you know, like, a promoter in Ibiza is emailing us, saying, "Do you want to go?" And I'm like, ‘No!’
So don’t expect to see Thom at Ibiza any time soon, on the other hand, if you want a good Thom sighting, just hang out at Low End Theory in Los Angeles, where the classy stuff is and FlyLo reigns.