Deadmau5 online article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/may/28/deadmau5-paul-morley

Paul Morley
2010

We're now talking about the DJ as a sort of manipulative entertainment technician with a special appreciation of the leisure needs of a spoilt, hooked-up and mobile audience. The 21st century DJ is a cheerleader, party planner, obsessive music lover, practical joker, self-branding organisation, content provider and techno-smart missionary who knows exactly how to give people the fun, escape and extravagance they crave in uncertain times.

Today, the DJ has understood how the old-fashioned music business, as a self-perpetuating system of distribution, procurement and promotion, has been quickly undermined by social media, and people's desire to form communities and be safely, ecstatically, together even as the new technology threatens to separate them.

The Canadian Joel Zimmerman, masked, branded and packaged asdeadmau5, has called one of his albums For Lack Of A Better Name, not least because what he does currently falls into the dance world – it gets tagged as prog house or electro house

But deadmau5 himself, because of how he operates as business, brand, imprint, conceptual artist, online communicator and delusional charlatan, and because of the dazzling electronic mouse head he wears, hiding away even as his presence is illuminated, is a warning sign of the future, and the emergence of a new kind of performer.

Mostly it's about creating an unreproducible spectacular physical presence that can be the equal of the time-freeing marvels that now endlessly spiral inside a screen in front of us.

Nothing new at all, then, except as a brand, even if he's just a descendant of Mickey Mouse – he's brand new in terms of how he communicated his message, exploiting ways to always be on sale, always available. Disney should pretend this is All New Mickey. Live, in the strange real world, not his favourite place, deadmau5 works on stage amid a light show that makes Las Vegas seem steam-powered. He seems to be positioned behind a monumental set of twin decks, the non-musical instruments that the enterprising likes of Pete Tong have transformed into international empires, and inside his absurd lit-up mouse head, inside the logo of his art and business, inside his very own anonymous fantasy, he's directing events. It's the personality DJ turned into sermonising sensationalist, the decks turned into hi-tech pulpit, the performer mutating into pure illusion, a new commercial art form emerging from the smoking ruins of pop history and the evolving integration of machinery and personality.