Skrillex Talks EDM on The Howard Stern Show
Two titans of industry came together on the airwaves, as EDM superstar Skrillex appeared Monday morning on The Howard Stern Show on SiriusXM Radio. The 42-minute interview spanned a wide-variety of subjects, from his early years in music, to how he feels about the scene and other performers. While not the first time that EDM has been talked about by the “King Of All Media”, this is the first time that Howard Stern has ever had a guest on to interview who is from that world (unless you count Executive Producer Gary Dell'Abate’s son, Lucas, who has been on the show, and is an up-and-coming EDM producer/DJ).
Highlights from the Skrillex interview:
His thoughts on people who don’t get EDM: “There hasn’t been a genre or platform in music for a long time that’s been so criticized. I think it’s because it’s new, and people don’t understand it. It makes people really look old when they criticize it.”
On whether he considers Paris Hilton a DJ: “If people wanna go out and pay to see her [so be it]. I don’t think she makes a million dollars a night. I think that’s a rumor.”
His relationship with Deadmau5: “The thing about Joel [Zimmerman] is he’s kinda in his own lane. His attitude is very specific. He brought me up. He talks shit about everybody. He posted about me when I was first releasing music, and helped a lot. He released one of my first EP’s on his label. I saw him last weekend in Vegas, and he’s like ‘Yo, dude!’. He’ll talk crap about everyone, but you can’t take him that seriously, and you can’t take it personally.”
How he came up with his name: “Skrillex has been my nickname since... remember T-Mobile Sidekicks, the first flip phone? So back then, it was all about AIM, AOL Instant Messenger. So that was my nickname since the Sidekick, since I was 14. So my friends, we’d call each other as screen names, as like a nickname. It doesn’t mean anything. A lot of my closest friends don’t call me Sonny.”