Deadmau5 Replies to Arcade Fire’s Anti-EDM Jab: ‘What’s Your Problem?’

Deadmau5. Photo: EMI Music

During Arcade Fire’s Coachella’s headlining set on the fest’s first weekend, frontman Win Butler made a remark that has rankled Deadmau5. “Shout out to all the bands still playing actual instruments at this festival,” he said. Now the DJ has fired back at Butler with a series of tweets.

“Shit to remember: A computer is a tool, not an instrument,” he wrote. “Arcade Fire needs to settle down. Some dudes devote their lives to instruments, others to electronic composition by CPU, dafuqs yer problem?”

He also offered up an example to show the difference between rock and electronic music. “I don’t expect to see Daft Punk pull a Steve Vai onstage,” he wrote. “I expect to listen to some decent music, ”˜n’ see cool robots. No problem. If I wanna watch real artists perform, I’d pick the opera before wasting a fucking minute of my life with Arcade Fire. #doyouevenscorebro?”

Deadmau5’s stream-of-consciousness rant then slowly transitioned from him proclaiming that he’d rather watch EDM musicians “fake it” to a show of support for opera musicians. “But seriously, I’m just sayin’ . . . you should get out to the opera if you ever get a chance, the orchestra pit is a cesspool of pure skill.” He signed off by saying he needs more SidStation in his life, referring to a synthesizer sound module. “I think I’ll hop on that,” he wrote.

In recent years, a number of rock musicians have been speaking out in defense of their genre. Earlier this year, Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner used his acceptance speech at the BRIT Awards as a forum for supporting rock. “Rock & roll, it seems like it’s fading away sometimes, but it will never die,” he said. “And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

In 2012, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl used his Grammy acceptance speech for Best Rock album to speak out seemingly against electronic music. “To me, this award means a lot, because it shows the human element of music is what’s important,” he said. “Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do. . . . It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about sounding absolutely correct, it’s not about what goes on in a computer.” That same night, Foo Fighters performed on the award show with Deadmau5, David Guetta and Lil Wayne for a tribute to electronic music.

Grohl later released a statement to show support for electronic music. “I love ALL kinds of music. From Kyuss to Kraftwerk, Pinetop Perkins to Prodigy, Dead Kennedys to Deadmau5…..I love music. Electronic or acoustic, it doesn’t matter to me. The simple act of creating music is a beautiful gift that ALL human beings are blessed with. And the diversity of one musician’s personality to the next is what makes music so exciting and…..human.”