WEST HOLLYWOOD (USA TODAY) — Meet Deadmau5. Real name: Joel Zimmerman, electronic dance music producer, composer, trailblazer, showman and entrepreneur.
He's EDM's big cheese. House music's cool cat. Just don't call him a DJ.
"There's a time and place for a DJ," he says. "And that's a bar mitzvah. Or a children's party. How do I say this safely? I just have a problem with a guy out there playing everyone else's music but his own, creating a marketplace for himself in a market he had nothing to do with."
If Deadmau5 sounds catty, it's only because he spent half his 31 years mastering computers and forging original soundscapes in progressive house and other subgenres only to be upstaged and outpaid by a digital jukebox. The image of DJs syncing beats, pushing buttons and waltzing off with fat checks has contributed to EDM's rep as an inauthentic genre, he says.
"That's the consensus of the Steve Vai types, and I can see where that anger stems from," Zimmerman says. "I sit in the studio all day and make this music, so why is this...
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