RIP Avicii, an EDM superstar who helped break rave culture in America – Tampa Bay Times

Here’s all you need to know about this decade’s explosion of electronic dance music in America.
In September of 2011, Swedish DJ Avicii played a late-night show at a nightclub on Ulmerton Road in Clearwater.
By June of the following year, he was headlining the biggest arena in Tampa.
For all the DJs who rode sprawling neon stages and inescapable No. 1 hits to superstardom this decade – your Zedds, your Chainsmokers, your Skrillexes, your Calvin Harrises – the case can be made that Avicii paved the way for them all, especially on American pop radio.
The DJ and producer born Tim Bergling was found dead Friday at a hotel in Oman, his publicist announced in a statement. No cause of death was immediately given. He was 28.
In the years to come, we may drop a pin in this moment as the day EDM finally died. After a lightning-quick rise in the early 2010s, when DJs became godheads on the pop charts and the festival circuit, it’s long been shuffling back to some sort of natural mean. There are fewer than five DJs on this week’s Billboard Hot 100, a chart Avicii hasn’t sniffed as an artist in four years.
But when he first broke, he broke in a big way. He was 22, a wunderkind, when in early 2011 he dropped Levels, a euphoric blast of progressive house incorporating an impassioned Etta James sample. It was a song that sounded made for an Adidas commercial, a montage of speedbags and stadium steps and ellpiticals.
Levels became a workout-playlist staple and major commercial hit. Actually, it became two major commercial hits – within months, Flo Rida had co-opted it into his own hit, Good Feeling, which peaked at No. 3.
“My A&R, we were sitting in the recording studio, and he played the Avicii record for me, and I was like, ‘Oh my god,'” Flo Rida told the Times in 2012. “My whole team, the Atlantic (Records) staff, decided it would be a great hook.”
Levels opened the floodgates; soon the festival circuit was awash in DJ-led pop singles by the likes of David Guetta and Deadmau5. In 2012 Avicii became the first DJ to headline what is now Amalie Arena in Tampa, a feat since matched only by the Chainsmokers.
And he wasn’t done. A couple of years later, he made the unlikely pivot to country – well, an EDM-country hybrid, anyway. And the weird mix paid off with an even bigger hit, Wake Me Up, featuring soul singer Aloe Blacc.
By this time everyone wanted a piece. Avicii remixed Daft Punk and Enrique Iglesias, produced Madonna and Coldplay (including the hits A Sky Full of Stars and Hymn For the Weekend). He was young and model-handsome and earning six-figure paychecks for appearances. In 2014, with EDM culture a multi-billion dollar industry, Forbes named him the world’s third highest-paid DJ, with receipts of $28 million.
But there were signs things weren’t right. A revealing 2013 profile in GQ  detailed a disorientingly lush and lavish lifestyle that left him with a sense of anxiety and ennui. And he wasn’t even 24.
“I love everything that comes with it; it’s fun and it’s kind of glamorous,” he told the magazine.”It’s just like when it’s right in the moment and you have that stupid bright light on you. It feels so awkward.”
Nobody expects the king of parties to crash down from his LED-lit throne, not even in the rave world, where drug abuse has run rampant. It’s usually been the fans who suffer most, not the jet-setting, obscenely paid DJs who bring these parties to luminescent life.
Avicii’s fellow DJs mourned him on Twitter – he was “an incredibly talented musician” with “such a beautiful heart,” Guetta wrote; “a beautiful soul, passionate and extremely talented with so much more to do,” added Harris.
Even so, he’d played as big a role as anyone in the growth of a lifestyle and culture. He was one of the brightest lights of the party, one who for too short at a time gave America a real good feeling. A feeling that we’d never, never, never, never had before.
— Jay Cridlin
Editor, Education
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