Photo via glehx on InstagramAs far as summer music festivals go, Governors Ball is decidedly on the less prestigious end of the spectrum—it lacks the “destination” cachet of Bonnaroo or Coachella, its lineup pales in terms of diversity and scope to, say, Lollapallooza’s, and it lacks the built-in audience, character, and hyper-specificity of festivals such as Pitchfork or Camp Bisco. Festivalgoers only have the choice of seeing two often-similar acts at a time while drinking $14 drinks and waiting in seemingly endless lines for food truck food that they could get on any given Saturday in Williamsburg. What Governors Ball does have going for it, however, is that it is definitely in New York, food truck food is delicious as shit, and motherfucking Skrillex played there.As much as he is anything else—ex-Warped Tour band frontman, haircut progenitor, dropper of filthy bass—Skrillex is a litmus test, letting you know which side of the generation gap you fall on. This was excessively evident last night at Governor’s Ball, when Skrill was given the same timeslot as Jack White, who is settling comfortably into his inevitable role as curmudgeonly guitar rock elder statesman. While White ran through the sort of perfunctory, career-spanning set you could comfortably jam with your parents to, Skrillex was a field over, ripping a hole in the space-time continuum through the power of dick-quiveringly thorough bass, casually issuing noises heretofore unheard by human ears.DJing from atop a spaceship that resembled what, if I had to guess, an actual spaceship would look like, Skrillex delivered a life-changingly powerful set, replete with winkingly goofy visuals (Flappy Bird, 8-bit, and the battle droids from Star Wars: Episode One all got screen time), lasers, and this one incredible move where Skrill would jump, flat-footed, like five feet into the air onto his DJ decks. At one point, he played the music from the iconic opening scene in The Lion King, only to remix it into a jarring trap breakdown.The format of his set followed the time-honored principle of tension and release: play a passage of a pretty song, be it classic house, trance, Daft Punk-esque groove, whatever; then stop it dead in its tracks with a punishing drop, the sort that sends tingles down your spine, pushing your body into a total freakout. The wall of sound that Skrillex projects offers the same sense of overwhelming ecstasy as a harsh noise show, where your body can’t possibly fathom what the fuck is going on, so it assumes that it’s being stimulated in all of the best ways. Occasionally he would take to the microphone, egging the crowd on—not that they needed any egging. The type of dancing that people do to dubstep at festivals is a wholly unique beast. Think controlled convulsions, maybe or maybe not set in time to the music.Is this music I would play for an old person to convince him my generation hasn’t gone completely fucking insane? No. And that’s what’s so perfect about Skrillex—he’s the closest thing we have to the Sex Pistols. He makes an unholy racket that seems designed to annoy the old and enrapture the young. His music has no message other than “get the fuck up and dance,” because what part of our generation has anything resembling cogent politics? In that way, his music is almost #based in its simplicity—he’s our generation’s way of saying, “Fuck it—we exist, and we are not old.”Drew Millard has turned into a sentient laser. He's on Twitter - @drewmillard--Want more Governors Ball? Check these out?What Do New York's Prospective Governors Think of Governors Ball?That Was It: On Seeing the Strokes for the First Time
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