Zafire
04-01-2013, 04:27 PM
For those who have not read the article....
GQ (http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim-bergling-profile-gq-april-2013)
Tim Bergling is anxious. He is staring straight ahead, so quiet that everyone with him has gone silent, too, out of respect or maybe a little fear. It was a crazy thing to do, in retrospect, two shows in two different cities, Anaheim and Las Vegas, with only an hour and a half between them. Even with the police escort and the private plane. Now he is twenty-one minutes late, and twenty-one minutes matters when it's the biggest party night of the year, New Year's Eve, in the biggest party city in the world, Vegas, and you're the star of the show, scheduled to go on at midnight, which was—Tim reaches into the pocket of his jeans, barely held up by a Gucci belt, and pulls out his phone to check the time—twenty-two minutes ago. "@Avicii better get to XS soon!!" some douchebag is saying on Twitter. "People paid money for this!" The doors slide open, and Tim steps forward, purposeful as a heart surgeon headed to perform a triple bypass. His girlfriend, his booking agent, his tour manager, a club promoter, a guy with a video camera, and a reporter surge after him.
"Security!" the promoter shouts, and hulking figures fall into step beside us.
"Dog!" An assistant sweeps in to take the Pomeranian from the girlfriend's arms.
"Okay, go!" and this unwieldy centipede begins its shuffle through the Encore resort, into a restaurant, where bejeweled women and heavyset men look up curiously from their Dover sole, out the back door, past a pool, up some stairs, and behind a velvet rope where Tim alone steps onto a raised platform facing out into the gaping maw of XS nightclub.
He pauses a minute, taking in the expectant faces, flushed and a little drunk, chanting, "A-vi-cii! A-vi-cii! A-vi-cii!"
Then the light falls on him, and he lifts a skinny arm and flicks a switch, flooding the room with a melody that washes over the crowd like a balm before turning into a beat that has them going, his words, "completely apeshit," and then, and only then, does he relax.
"Happy New Year!" shouts Felix Alfonso, his bodyman, popping open the first of many bottles of Dom Pérignon. When Tim twists around from the jiggy little dance he's doing behind the decks to accept a glass, he is smiling like the happiest guy in the world.
Which he should be, he knows. Most people would be overjoyed to have Tim Bergling's life. To have, 250-plus nights a year, audiences of thousands chanting your name. To have the leggy blond girlfriend, the limitless champagne and the piles of money, and famous musicians begging for the production magic he brought to "Levels," his inescapable 2011 electronic dance music hit in which Etta James has a good feeling, over and over, for three and a half minutes. To have the girls hyperventilating, "I want to fuck him so bad," whenever he appears, which one blonde is telling her friend right now at high-decibel volume, although Tim can't hear her, he's too immersed in cuing up the next track that is going to keep people going completely apeshit.
"I am reasonably happy, I am," he'd said in his Swedish accent a few days earlier. He rifles a hand through his scraggly blond hair, sincerity in his icy blue eyes. Because he is only 23, subsisting on a diet of Red Bull, nicotine, and airport food, and spending most of his time bathed in the pixelated glow of a computer screen has not diminished, just kind of softened, the perpetually rumpled good looks that prompted Ralph Lauren to cast him in an ad campaign. There is a Tumblr devoted to his nose.
"I love DJing, I do," he stresses. "I love everything that comes with it; it's fun and it's kind of glamorous." And yet. There's always that moment, right before he goes onstage, when he wonders what the fuck he is even doing up there, if he deserves any of this, and if this is the time it all comes crashing down. "It's just like when it's right in the moment and you have that stupid bright light on you," he says, searching for the words to say it. "It feels so awkward."
Four days before New Year's, I arrive in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, to find him pacing around a tented greenroom at Mamita's Beach Club, smoking like a chimney and knocking back Red Bulls. The champagne is chilling. The waves are lapping gently at the shore. But Tim's attention is entirely focused on the sounds coming from the stage, where a warm-up DJ is playing a song called "Epic" by Dutch DJs Sandro Silva and Quintino. "I can't believe he's playing this," he mutters.
"This is really frustrating," he says, grinding out his cigarette and lighting a new one. "Is he gonna play 'Don't You Worry Child' next?"
Felix gives him a warning look and nods in my direction. Vin Diesel bald, with discernible muscle groups, Felix has all the indicia of scariness until he opens his mouth. ("I carry his drugs in my butt," he later jokes when asked to describe his duties.)
"I'm sorry, I sound grumpy," Tim says apologetically. "It's just that it's embarrassing to do the same things."
It's a strange problem for a musician, which is what Tim considers himself to be. While he likes to play mostly his own songs, he still includes tracks by others to keep up the requisite energy level, and "Epic" is one of them. In fact, it's the third song the opening DJ has played from Tim's usual rotation, and each time it happens, Tim cracks open another Red Bull and gets a little more jittery.
The Rolling Stones never had to suffer this type of indignity. "We should make a list of songs that we tell festival organizers not to let other DJs play," Bergling's tour manager, a no-nonsense Irishwoman named Ciara Davey, says decisively, as if writing a note to self. Tim nods, though he doesn't seem any less tense. His British lighting guy, Simon Barrington, comes in, carrying a box of equipment and smiling, blithely unaware of the budding crisis.
Read More http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim-bergling-profile-gq-april-2013#ixzz2PFWVkz00
His response :
Avicii (http://www.facebook.com/avicii/posts/10151406809626799)
GQ, my thoughts on the article. I would normally not even care but this article really got to me, how it could even be published with so little truth and misquotations.
So this interview was made over the course of 4-5 days where a freelance reporter followed me and my crew around on tour up until new years eve. Reporter Jessica Pressler BEGINS by describing my fans as "douchebags" - not as a quote - but as an (her) obvious impression in the introduction to the text. The preamble to that describes people attending to my shows as drug addicts!
She goes on to describe how I plan my sets only to contradict herself saying I go over my planned time cause I'm having so much fun with my crowd. Anyone reading this article should know it's very subjectively twisted by someone who has a) no experience of this scene or insight to a DJs profession at all and b) has no interest in really understanding it either. How on earth the fact that I complain when an opening DJ plays some of the peak time tracks I usually play somewhere in my set becomes the conclusion that I only touch volume faders is beyond me and even though I could beat mix in my sleep doesn't allude any kind of respect which I find deeply insulting. I would never lay down a pre-programmed set and performed to a pre-mixed CD, I would never cheat my fans like that. Period. For the record, the only planning I do is check transitions so that I don't have to pre-program anything and still make sure I bring it to my fans. A lot of work and thinking goes into my DJing. I want the entire night to progress seamlessly and when I have to adapt the energy on the fly for the crowd on any given night, I can do so with harmonic mixes that I've practiced over and over again. I am far from the only DJ that does this and it's something I take pride in being able to do. Truth is that at bigger festivals or solo shows I know what people want to hear and my set is a compromise between what I want to play for them and what people come and expect to hear me play for them. At a smaller club show I can wing it completely.
Some people are known for certain things, some DJs like A-trak, Steve Angello and Laidback Luke are excellent technical DJs, something I will never be, and have a whole different approach to their performances.
I mean everything even down to the tracks I play she got wrong in this article. I wouldn't adress this and bring more attention to it if I really didn't feel that this article was truly unfair and incorrect. She draws up this disgusting picture of the electronic music crowd being constantly high, ugly, uneducated, dumb and "douchy", while I feel they are caring, loving, positive and the complete opposite of what she says. Sure people do drugs and party but that is nothing exclusive to this music genre. It looks like the journalist wanted the GQ readers to buy into that stigma.
We agreed to let GQ into our camp to actually portray a serious side of this music to the masses who might not now and might not understand. We hoped they could unveil and communicate the reason for there being so much love within, and how such a great community has risen organically for, this music genre. The problem was that a journalist that knows nothing of electronic music was sent to be on the road with me for a couple of days and then tried piecing together what it's all about. She failed miserably
Thoughts?
EDIT: There is another 5 pages of the GQ thing to read.
GQ (http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim-bergling-profile-gq-april-2013)
Tim Bergling is anxious. He is staring straight ahead, so quiet that everyone with him has gone silent, too, out of respect or maybe a little fear. It was a crazy thing to do, in retrospect, two shows in two different cities, Anaheim and Las Vegas, with only an hour and a half between them. Even with the police escort and the private plane. Now he is twenty-one minutes late, and twenty-one minutes matters when it's the biggest party night of the year, New Year's Eve, in the biggest party city in the world, Vegas, and you're the star of the show, scheduled to go on at midnight, which was—Tim reaches into the pocket of his jeans, barely held up by a Gucci belt, and pulls out his phone to check the time—twenty-two minutes ago. "@Avicii better get to XS soon!!" some douchebag is saying on Twitter. "People paid money for this!" The doors slide open, and Tim steps forward, purposeful as a heart surgeon headed to perform a triple bypass. His girlfriend, his booking agent, his tour manager, a club promoter, a guy with a video camera, and a reporter surge after him.
"Security!" the promoter shouts, and hulking figures fall into step beside us.
"Dog!" An assistant sweeps in to take the Pomeranian from the girlfriend's arms.
"Okay, go!" and this unwieldy centipede begins its shuffle through the Encore resort, into a restaurant, where bejeweled women and heavyset men look up curiously from their Dover sole, out the back door, past a pool, up some stairs, and behind a velvet rope where Tim alone steps onto a raised platform facing out into the gaping maw of XS nightclub.
He pauses a minute, taking in the expectant faces, flushed and a little drunk, chanting, "A-vi-cii! A-vi-cii! A-vi-cii!"
Then the light falls on him, and he lifts a skinny arm and flicks a switch, flooding the room with a melody that washes over the crowd like a balm before turning into a beat that has them going, his words, "completely apeshit," and then, and only then, does he relax.
"Happy New Year!" shouts Felix Alfonso, his bodyman, popping open the first of many bottles of Dom Pérignon. When Tim twists around from the jiggy little dance he's doing behind the decks to accept a glass, he is smiling like the happiest guy in the world.
Which he should be, he knows. Most people would be overjoyed to have Tim Bergling's life. To have, 250-plus nights a year, audiences of thousands chanting your name. To have the leggy blond girlfriend, the limitless champagne and the piles of money, and famous musicians begging for the production magic he brought to "Levels," his inescapable 2011 electronic dance music hit in which Etta James has a good feeling, over and over, for three and a half minutes. To have the girls hyperventilating, "I want to fuck him so bad," whenever he appears, which one blonde is telling her friend right now at high-decibel volume, although Tim can't hear her, he's too immersed in cuing up the next track that is going to keep people going completely apeshit.
"I am reasonably happy, I am," he'd said in his Swedish accent a few days earlier. He rifles a hand through his scraggly blond hair, sincerity in his icy blue eyes. Because he is only 23, subsisting on a diet of Red Bull, nicotine, and airport food, and spending most of his time bathed in the pixelated glow of a computer screen has not diminished, just kind of softened, the perpetually rumpled good looks that prompted Ralph Lauren to cast him in an ad campaign. There is a Tumblr devoted to his nose.
"I love DJing, I do," he stresses. "I love everything that comes with it; it's fun and it's kind of glamorous." And yet. There's always that moment, right before he goes onstage, when he wonders what the fuck he is even doing up there, if he deserves any of this, and if this is the time it all comes crashing down. "It's just like when it's right in the moment and you have that stupid bright light on you," he says, searching for the words to say it. "It feels so awkward."
Four days before New Year's, I arrive in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, to find him pacing around a tented greenroom at Mamita's Beach Club, smoking like a chimney and knocking back Red Bulls. The champagne is chilling. The waves are lapping gently at the shore. But Tim's attention is entirely focused on the sounds coming from the stage, where a warm-up DJ is playing a song called "Epic" by Dutch DJs Sandro Silva and Quintino. "I can't believe he's playing this," he mutters.
"This is really frustrating," he says, grinding out his cigarette and lighting a new one. "Is he gonna play 'Don't You Worry Child' next?"
Felix gives him a warning look and nods in my direction. Vin Diesel bald, with discernible muscle groups, Felix has all the indicia of scariness until he opens his mouth. ("I carry his drugs in my butt," he later jokes when asked to describe his duties.)
"I'm sorry, I sound grumpy," Tim says apologetically. "It's just that it's embarrassing to do the same things."
It's a strange problem for a musician, which is what Tim considers himself to be. While he likes to play mostly his own songs, he still includes tracks by others to keep up the requisite energy level, and "Epic" is one of them. In fact, it's the third song the opening DJ has played from Tim's usual rotation, and each time it happens, Tim cracks open another Red Bull and gets a little more jittery.
The Rolling Stones never had to suffer this type of indignity. "We should make a list of songs that we tell festival organizers not to let other DJs play," Bergling's tour manager, a no-nonsense Irishwoman named Ciara Davey, says decisively, as if writing a note to self. Tim nods, though he doesn't seem any less tense. His British lighting guy, Simon Barrington, comes in, carrying a box of equipment and smiling, blithely unaware of the budding crisis.
Read More http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim-bergling-profile-gq-april-2013#ixzz2PFWVkz00
His response :
Avicii (http://www.facebook.com/avicii/posts/10151406809626799)
GQ, my thoughts on the article. I would normally not even care but this article really got to me, how it could even be published with so little truth and misquotations.
So this interview was made over the course of 4-5 days where a freelance reporter followed me and my crew around on tour up until new years eve. Reporter Jessica Pressler BEGINS by describing my fans as "douchebags" - not as a quote - but as an (her) obvious impression in the introduction to the text. The preamble to that describes people attending to my shows as drug addicts!
She goes on to describe how I plan my sets only to contradict herself saying I go over my planned time cause I'm having so much fun with my crowd. Anyone reading this article should know it's very subjectively twisted by someone who has a) no experience of this scene or insight to a DJs profession at all and b) has no interest in really understanding it either. How on earth the fact that I complain when an opening DJ plays some of the peak time tracks I usually play somewhere in my set becomes the conclusion that I only touch volume faders is beyond me and even though I could beat mix in my sleep doesn't allude any kind of respect which I find deeply insulting. I would never lay down a pre-programmed set and performed to a pre-mixed CD, I would never cheat my fans like that. Period. For the record, the only planning I do is check transitions so that I don't have to pre-program anything and still make sure I bring it to my fans. A lot of work and thinking goes into my DJing. I want the entire night to progress seamlessly and when I have to adapt the energy on the fly for the crowd on any given night, I can do so with harmonic mixes that I've practiced over and over again. I am far from the only DJ that does this and it's something I take pride in being able to do. Truth is that at bigger festivals or solo shows I know what people want to hear and my set is a compromise between what I want to play for them and what people come and expect to hear me play for them. At a smaller club show I can wing it completely.
Some people are known for certain things, some DJs like A-trak, Steve Angello and Laidback Luke are excellent technical DJs, something I will never be, and have a whole different approach to their performances.
I mean everything even down to the tracks I play she got wrong in this article. I wouldn't adress this and bring more attention to it if I really didn't feel that this article was truly unfair and incorrect. She draws up this disgusting picture of the electronic music crowd being constantly high, ugly, uneducated, dumb and "douchy", while I feel they are caring, loving, positive and the complete opposite of what she says. Sure people do drugs and party but that is nothing exclusive to this music genre. It looks like the journalist wanted the GQ readers to buy into that stigma.
We agreed to let GQ into our camp to actually portray a serious side of this music to the masses who might not now and might not understand. We hoped they could unveil and communicate the reason for there being so much love within, and how such a great community has risen organically for, this music genre. The problem was that a journalist that knows nothing of electronic music was sent to be on the road with me for a couple of days and then tried piecing together what it's all about. She failed miserably
Thoughts?
EDIT: There is another 5 pages of the GQ thing to read.