Have We Finally Had Enough Of Deadmau5?

At this point, Joel Zimmerman, known to the world under his DJ alias Deadmau5, has become more infamous for his logo than his music. While Deadmau5, along with titans of the dance music world such as Skrillex, Avicii, and Daft Punk, has often been one of the most characteristic images in the EDM scene (even if you still refer to him as "that guy with the mouse head"), but he is quickly becoming outdated as he has failed to release quality music in the past couple of years, instead resorting to bashing other prominent artists in the genre.

The most recent debacle surrounding the trash-talking DJ started at the EDMbiz conference in Las Vegas this June, around the same time as contemporary Dutch producer Afrojack made the fairly logical statement: "If you make good music, you succeed; if you don’t, you won’t." Deadmau5 immediately turned to his big mouth tendencies, using Afrojack's statement as a base to claim that all dance music has begun to sound the same to him as creativity has become a lost art in the EDM world.

Of course that's a good point, especially given some of the recurring patterns in the Beatport Top 100 charts, but the only thing Deadmau5 plans on doing to save electronic music from clichés is complaining and acting as a useless troll. His latest gag is a Soundcloud post mockingly entitled "DROP DA BOMB" that uses a bunch of stereotypical house music effects and instruments to show off the "less creative" and repetitive nature of the craft. While the 40 second clip probably took a relatively short time for Deadmau5 to create, it's frankly embarrassing that he would prefer to spend his hours pranking his listeners than producing the "creative" music that he wants to see in the genre.

The last Deadmau5 official release came last September in the form of the studio record Album Title Goes Here, but the reviews weren't exactly positive and none of the tracks received the same kind of acclaim and universal endearment as past anthems like "Ghost N Stuff" and "Strobe." Those works were surely innovative and groundbreaking at the time, but Deadmau5 hasn't delivered material of that same caliber since, making it cringe-worthy that this same guy still has so many complaints against his peers. 

Zimmerman often posts demos and samples of his upcoming works on his highly publicized Soundcloud page, but in almost every single case these pieces are never properly completed and left in their primal states. Instead of using his time to finish these pieces, Deadmau5 has indulged himself playing Minecraft, publicly getting engaged and then publicly breaking up, posting countless photos of his cat on his Instagram and trying to pick fights with other well-established artists. These acts could certainly be excused ... if Deadmau5 were actually making music to support his shenanigans.

Instead, as the Miami New Times expertly posted, artists like Disclosure, Classixx and even Skrillex have been showing the rest of EDM how to properly fashion cutting-edge electronica that still appeals to the mass. This is a prime example of what Deadmau5 should be doing, instead of just shutting everyone else down for their respective outputs through Twitter and Soundcloud. The worst part is that Deadmau5 is never self-deprecating in his comments or acknowledges his failure to save the day for EDM.

Maybe it's time we stop worshipping Deadmau5 as one of the dance music idols and instead give him a reality check: complaining about the state of music at the moment isn't going to change anything about it.