It took a Harmony Korine movie for me to come around. Soundtracking lurid vignettes of beachfront hedonism in a squealing serotonin rush of perfect artifice, it was clear that “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” expressed something true about its time, a feeling almost beyond words. In the same way, Spring Breakers functioned like a pop prism, a shimmering refraction of the early 2010s zeitgeist. During the press run for his fifth feature in spring 2013, Korine spoke of wanting the film to feel more like a piece of electronic music in its looping rhythms, or like a video game in its trance-like momentum. The story existed within “the culture of surfaces, an almost post-articulate culture,” he attempted to explain. “I wanted the tone to be pushed into a hyper-candy-textural, hyper-stylized reality.” But you get just what he means when you hear “Scary Monsters,” which sounds simultaneously violent and naive, dreamy but psycho in an all-American way. The way Skrillex designs them, synths take the shape of almost-words, straining to express desires they barely understand.
Is this the part where I confess that I was brought to tears by FUCK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3, surprise-released, as per custom, on April Fool’s last week? I believe it happened somewhere around “THINGS I PROMISED,” when a DJ tag from someone who isn’t but sounds a lot like Shadoe Haze, narrator of the iconic Trap-a-holics drops, bellowed “FUCK SKRILLEX, THIS IS SONNY MOORE!!” For 57 seconds, sticky-sweet EDM chords evoke a fireworks display with your best friends on a summer night. Then it’s all swept away in a squall of whirring machinery, grotesque basslines, increasingly unhinged DJ drops: “I HAVE SKRILLEX TRAPPED IN MY BASEMENT!! PLAY THIS AT FULL VOLUME OR I’LL PUT HIM IN THE HOLE!!” Its 34 tracks in 46 chaotic minutes pass the way that life does—just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, boom, on to the next one. It’s fast and loud and poignant and exuberantly stupid, a victory lap and a midlife crisis all at once.
There’s something just so free about gratuitous DJ drops: You’ve toiled over your art, now it’s time to let some random guy scream non sequiturs on it. Even reproduced, the tangy bark of the now 50-something-year-old Shadoe Haze is madeleine-like for a 30-something like Skrillex or I, whose formative years were soundtracked by demented utterings over Lil Wayne mixtapes: “EVIL EMPIRE GANGSTERS—THEY’LL EAT YOUR LUNCH AND WRINKLE YOUR SCHOOL CLOTHES!!” The idea brings me back to the women of Spring Breakers—ex-teenybopper starlets plus Korine’s wife Rachel, all solidly millennial. Their characters hang Lil Wayne posters in their kitchens and amuse themselves with Kimbo Slice videos on laptops in the dark. (To those who weren’t of college age during the early YouTube days, I can’t explain the omnipresence of the jacked-up Miami street brawler, beating guys’ faces off in grainy videos boys stayed showing you at parties.) They’re low-stakes daydreamers, the parameters of their wildest fantasies set by music videos and lo-res indecency online. Before they rob their local Chicken Shack, they hype themselves like so: “Just fucking pretend like it’s a video game. Act like you’re in a movie or something. Let’s just get this fucking money and go on spring break, y’all.”
