The Mad Decent Block Party and the Point of No Returnt

Photo by Leigh Barton

On Saturday, I schlepped on down to Coney Island to check out the Mad Decent Block Party, held at the Brooklyn Cyclones baseball stadium. At this point in its evolution, MDBP is to dance music proper as the Vans Warped Tour is to hardcore and punk: roving festivals that offer a facile imitation of the real thing, just for kids. That’s not a criticism of MDBP at all—it’s a fun time for anyone, and as good an entry point as any for young people to jump into the complex universe of dance music.

One thing that struck me about the Block Party was the tension between the festivalgoers and security. Any time you get a large group of people together to party, there are going to be issues—with drugs, with rowdy people confined to close quarters, with drunk people making poor decisions. That the event was billed as a “rave” only served to further stress out event staff. The line to enter the festival looped around the stadium down to the Coney Island boardwalk, full of enthusiastic kids decked out in 2014’s version of rave gear: ironic graphic t-shirts, snapback hats, headbands, and sneakers. Word had traveled around that security was making entrants remove their shoes, presumably to find stashed contraband, which led to a lot of kids taking way too many drugs way too quickly.

Once inside, the two parties were even further at odds. After the festival’s presale had ended, ticketholders had been separated, somewhat arbitrarily, into two distinct groups: those who had access to the floor near the stage, and those who were assigned bowl seats in the stadium. A few days before the fest, I’d checked the Block Party’s event page on Facebook and found several angry posts predicting that the floor/bowl iron curtain would be smashed by the will of the ravers, and, sure enough, every thirty or so minutes a wave of kids would bum-rush the Block Party’s main area en masse. There was little security could do to combat this, other than tackle a few errant runners and testily await the next onslaught of rabid teens, thirsty for proximity to filthy bass. At one point, I saw security asking a handcuffed raver why he’d decided to try to run onto the field. His response? “Molly is a hell of a drug.” In addition to being hilarious, this is proof that teens will respond to pretty much anything sarcastically, even if it might get them arrested.

It’s easy to see why kids would love Mad Decent Block Party. In the past few years, between the Harlem Shake meme, their proximity to DJ Snake's “Turn Down for What,” RiFF RAFF, and Diplo’s forays into becoming the go-to producer for rap stars looking to weirden up their sound, Mad Decent has done to hip-hop what they were once accused of doing to Baile Funk—rendering it devoid of context and presenting it as exotic and novel to those who don’t know any better.

This sense of unfocused enthusiasm for hip-hop culture, in recent years, has come to define the brand of Mad Decent as a staff, record label, and as a motherfucking crew—though they might wantonly sling hip-hop signifiers at their audience, they’re a dance label through and through, and they apply these hip-hop signifiers to EDM. Their aesthetic is best described in a single word: turnt. If you search “mad decent turnt” on Twitter, you get countless results. It’s a term that, much like the word “trap,” has essentially lost basically all of its connotations. You can get turnt in an airplane, on a boat, on top of a house, at a party, pretty much anywhere where people can logically breathe. What is involved in the process of getting turnt? Pretty much anything, it seems. You can get turnt by popping a molly; you can get turnt by twerking; you can get turnt by jumping around. The main component to getting turnt, it seems, is being in the proximity of bass-heavy dance music, preferably released by Mad Decent.

Image via Instagram user @devdevinnn

By far the most turnt set I witnessed was put on by Dillon Francis, who committed acts of arch turntery by having images of emojis, pizza, cats, pizzas that were cats, the word “fuck,” and his own face flash behind him as he ran through a set of generically banging dance tracks. I’m not so certain Francis’s stage show could survive without his almost cynically internet-heavy aesthetic; the imagery smacked of the same cynical appeal to youth culture as a tweet from Denny’s Diner declaring, “TURN DOWN FOR LUNCH.” Four years ago, cats and pizza symbolized the weed-fueled haze of chill indie rock. Then, they got hijacked by Odd Future. Now, they represent… what exactly? The internet? Dillon Francis himself? Don’t think about it too much, that’s not a very turnt thing to do.

During Francis’ set, he was joined by Diplo, label boss of Mad Decent, whose reputation as a talented producer/hipster lothario fuelled by an endless supply of detached irony has served as reliable fodder for my dumb jokes on Twitter. Because I am a troll, I decided to create an imaginary scenario in which Diplo and I got in a fight because I made fun of him on the internet. I have embedded my tweets below:

omg i see diplo

— lord drewsick (@drewmillard) August 9, 2014

oh fuck diplo recognizes me from twitter

— lord drewsick (@drewmillard) August 9, 2014

he just left the side of the stage and he's coming down towards me

— lord drewsick (@drewmillard) August 9, 2014

diplo just came up to me and confronted me about me talking shit about him on the internet

— lord drewsick (@drewmillard) August 9, 2014

i'm being all "yo cool it diplo" but he's all "what the fuck man what's your deal"

— lord drewsick (@drewmillard) August 9, 2014

just got punched by diplo

— lord drewsick (@drewmillard) August 9, 2014

just punched diplo back

— lord drewsick (@drewmillard) August 9, 2014

diplo and i just got separated by security

— lord drewsick (@drewmillard) August 9, 2014

diplo's having me kicked out of mad decent block party my first rave was so fun y'all

— lord drewsick (@drewmillard) August 9, 2014

A pretty ridiculous concept—livetweeting your own fight with one of the biggest names in EDM—but within five minutes of firing off my tweets, some of my fellow trolls had tweeted that they’d seen Diplo and I trade punches, which led to tweets reacting to my fake fight, speculating upon the nonexistent Noisey/Mad Decent beef that I’d accidentally created. Soon enough, I was receiving concerned texts from friends—including one from a fellow Noisey editor—asking if I was OK. On the internet, often, perception begets reality.

This is especially true when discussing Mad Decent. In the past few years, the label has become a powerhouse in the American electronic music circuit, through savvy internet marketing and little else. They scored a proper Number One hit with Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” in part by fanning the flames of the song’s memefication, encouraging fans to upload 30-second clips of them reacting to the song’s then-inescapable drop to YouTube. The 30 second part was key, here, because that’s the amount of time it takes for a song to register as “played” on YouTube, and therefore eligible to be collected upon. The plays were racking up, but not purely out of enthusiasm for the tune. The label’s savvy exploitation of the rules of YouTube directly led to Billboard altering the way it monitors charts, which in turn made “Harlem Shake” shoot to Number One on the Hot 100. Somewhat indirectly, this served as a template for tracks that start viral dance crazes on Vine and then cross over to become legitimate hits, including Young Thug’s “Stoner,” Sage the Gemini’s “Gas Pedal,” and, most recently, RiFF RAFF’s “Tip Tow Wing In My Jawwdinz.” RiFF’s record label? Mad Decent.

Internet success such as Mad Decent’s has also created a patently false metric by which success is measured: that of social reach. Take DJ Snake, another MDBP performer, whose video for the Lil Jon-anchored “Turn Down for What” is currently hovering around 100 million YouTube views. In all likelihood, many of Snake’s 188,000 Twitter fans, 720,000 Facebook fans, and 220,000 SoundCloud came as a direct result of the runaway success of “Turn Down for What.” Because of his one hit, he’s created something of a built-in audience for himself: he can upload a song to his Soundcloud, post about it on his Twitter and Facebook, and expect a consistently high interaction with his work. His fans may one day no longer actively seek out his music, but if his popularity wanes, it’s unlikely that his social following will reflect this. On paper, DJ Snake will never be less popular than he is now. The internet turns fame into a perpetual motion machine. Being an artist has always been something like owning a small business; social media has allowed the artist to cut out the middleman.

Mad Decent Block Party is when you take these ideas, about representation, appropriation, cultivating your own fanbase in a vacuum—ideas that live solely on the internet—and thrust them back into real life. You end up with a post-apocalyptic disaster area that resembles something like a dance party, full of rabid kids who have no idea what they’re doing, who perceive concepts like “turnt,” “trap,” “rave,” that one ubiquitous airhorn sample, or even internet pizza cat farts as effectively the same thing. In the hands of Mad Decent, these symbols are stripped of context and reassembled into a Technicolor shitstorm of memetic self-reference, where each distinct symbol can be swapped out for another with no change in the overall message. Mad Decent is redefining a whole vocabulary for young rave fans, even if they have no idea they’re doing it—if you present something to someone who has no context for what you’re talking about, then you give those terms meaning, even if you’re not actively offering one. This isn’t something new, or evil, just something to be aware of. It might even be worth turning down for.

Drew Millard is the Features Editor of Noisey and the number-one thot (a thot is a Diplo superfan). He's on Twitter - @drewmillard

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