OF MICE
AND MEN That Rusko vs Deadmau5 beef in full
“My beef with Deadmau5 hasn’t gone further,” says Rusko, “but it hasn’t gone away either. People have tried to reconcile us, people have said ‘He’s playing on the other stage over there, you guys should just really sit down and squash this beef on the head’. I’m like, ‘Don’t bring that cunt near me’. It’s still very much on. We haven’t really been in the same room since it happened, until we are put in the same room by accident or whatever, who knows? He might be chilled out, it’s still on for me. You piss me off, you piss me off for life, until it’s sorted. And I haven’t sorted it yet, if you know what I mean. So If I meet him when I’m 50, I’m still going to be as pissed off, and I’m still going to sort it out. Once I hate someone, I hate ‘em forever. “He did definitely shop me to security, yeah — what a dick! The funny thing was, we were in Colorado, which is a legal state. I was outside, with a medical marijuana license in my fucking wallet. So when they came in I wasn’t doing anything illegal, it was completely legal what I was doing. He just didn’t like the smell, it was too much for him. ‘Oh, the back-stage of a gig smells a bit like weed — boo-fucking-hoo’. Have you never been to the back-stage of a gig before? They all smell like weed! “I shouldn’t have got as cross as I did about it, but I’m still as cross — it’s just how I roll. Unfortunately lots of people heard about it, and I’m sure now if we were playing a festival together that a promoter would have enough common sense not to put our dressing rooms next to each other. Or if they did, neither of us would make it to the stage.”
fucking joke ever. I hope my album proves ‘em wrong.” He starts telling DJ Mag how he blanked Jonathan Davis from nu-metal band Korn when he was hanging with Skrillex on a rave ship trip. Davis rather foolishly claimed that Korn invented dubstep in 1994, which didn’t really amuse Rusko or much of the UK dubstep fraternity. “It annoys me when people say things like that,” Rusko says. “Now we have it so easy, dubstep’s great and we’re the luckiest guys in the world that kids are going crazy for it, but it wasn’t always like that. For a dick like that to come along and say ‘Yeah, we invented dubstep cos we like slow bass-heavy music’… so what? Reggae’s been slow and bass-heavy since the ’60s, fuck off! Just because you make slow and bass- heavy music doesn’t mean you invented dubstep, we should be giving credit to King Tubby, not bloody Korn and Limp- bollock-Bizkit!” “I love that Korn album, can’t you tell? It’s my favourite,” he sneers with Johnny Rotten-like sarcasm.
HEAVY METAL Rusko now thinks it’s great that noisy brostep has moved far away from the origins of dubstep. “It’s gone so far that way, so far into the heavy metal crowd,” he says, contrasting the moshing and pushing that goes on during a Skrillex set with the smiling and hands-in-the-air vibes at one of his shows. “It’s a different thing. The separation has become so much that those people don’t come to my shows anymore. They used to: there was a time about a year or more ago when those people would come to my shows, and get pissed off. ‘Why didn’t you melt my fucking face tonight? I want my face melted off with bass’. Now those people just don’t come to my gigs, cos they know that’s not what I’m gonna do.” He’s proud to be one of the few dubstep DJs who doesn’t have a moshpit at his gigs. “I come solely to make people happy, I don’t want angry music, I don’t want people to fucking hurt each other,” he says. “I know it’s them displaying their enjoyment of it, and I’d love the mosh- pit if I was onstage with my guitar and a drummer and a bass player, but I’m not playing that, I’m playing pianos and vocals and I wanna see people smiling with their hands in the air. I make rave music and not rock music, and that’s the difference. “Eighty percent of the DJs touring America playing dubstep right now are playing rock. And I’m playing rave, and that’s the difference,” he states. “I don’t play big Skrillex tunes, although other DJs from the old main four — the four horsemen of UK dubstep — do play Skrillex songs when they come to
America. I’ve seen all three of them play in America and chuck a Skrillex song into their sets. I don’t. “Because they don’t understand the crowd, they feel like they have to play that, to get the reaction that they used to get in the UK,” he continues. “But if you’re coming to Rusko, you’re coming to wave your hands around, bounce and smile. You’re not going to get hurt, you’re not gonna mosh, and you’re not gonna get your face melted off with a distorted disgusting bass. You’re gonna have fun and you’re gonna sing along.” Crowds also like him because he’s just like one of them, he thinks. “I always make sure that everyone’s been getting fucked before I get on the stage, I get a little show of hands for who’s been taking pills, who’s been doing MDMA, who’s been smoking weed,” he states. “I let them know what I’ve been doing too. Always on the level.” He also thinks that with all the mosh stuff, dubstep has lost a lot of its groove. “With this complexity that is throughout electro and dubstep, the complex music that has 10 bass sounds in one go, it’s very impressive as a producer to listen to, but the more complex noises you add, the less of a groove you’re going to have,” he thinks. “The whole reason dubstep has the word ‘dub’ in front of it is cos it’s all about dancing to the groove of the bass. If the bass goes [starts making disjointed cut-up sounds], that’s not a groove, that’s just loads of random noises together. That’s why I think the ‘dub’ is in front of dubstep — the groove comes from the bass. It’s all about the groove. If the bass is all over the place and complex, it’s not grooving, it’s not rolling.”
BURNING HARD For his second album ‘Songs’, Rusko locked himself away in a studio for seven weeks with minimal contact from the outside world. “I figured if I was going to make the album as varied as I wanted it to be, I had to do it with one vision and with one
mindset,” he says. “If I wanted to do tracks that sounded like straight-up reggae or progressive trance and songs that sounded like straight-up r&b, I figured if I did it all in the same headspace, it would sound like it was one, even though it was a whole variety of different styles.” The album ‘Songs’ has 11 different vocalists, but he’s only actually met one of them in person — Rod Azlan, regular dubstep MC. He didn’t collaborate with anyone during the sessions; the vocals were all sent over the internet, “…and 10 months of ideas came out in one, it was like I had musical diarrhoea,” he says. “I shat everything all over my computer, it was crazy.” Beginning with a great quote from his No.1 inspiration the Iration Steppas (“the foundation of where my music comes from”) about pushing sonic boundaries forwards, the album soon hurtles into the cartoon breakbeat hardcore piano- happy rush of ‘Somebody To Love’. The subsequent dozen tracks take in full- fresh garage (‘Pressure’, ‘Whistle Crew’), dubstep skankers (‘Be Free’, ‘Skanker’), rootsy reggae (‘Love No More’, ‘Mek More Green’), rushy pop-step trancers (‘Thunder’, ‘Opium’, ‘Asda Car Park’), old skool rave-step (‘Roll The Beats’ feat MC Emerson Allen from hardcore legends Ratpack) to a sexy Rihanna-style r&b thang. It hangs together superbly, despite the wildly different styles, and is destined to be one of the dance albums of the summer. “I ended up writing an album with choruses and bridges and middle eights,” Rusko tells DJ Mag, pointing out that he did this rather than moving into the pop world for collaborations. “I ended up structuring an electronic album in a song way, with verses and choruses, in the same way as a band would.”
“EIGHTY PERCENT OF THE DJS TOURING AMERICA PLAYING DUBSTEP RIGHT NOW ARE PLAYING ROCK. AND I’M PLAYING
RAVE, AND THAT’S THE DIFFERENCE.” RUSKO
026
www.djmag.com
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