EDM Artists’ Beef With Madonna Is Far From Over

Becky Bain | March 30, 2012 10:43 am

Madonna and deadmau5 have put their day-long feud to bed, but other electronic artists are coming out of the fold to chastise the pop star for her seemingly drug-related comments at Ultra Music Festival. Electronic DJ-producer Paul van Dyk has called Madonna’s “molly” reference “the biggest mistake of her career.”

“I don’t think she was thinking much,” van Dyk told Billboard. “The only thing she was probably thinking was, ‘I need to connect with a young crowd,’ and she made the biggest mistake of her career.”

“Madonna was so stupid to actually call out drug abuse in front of a crowd of 18-year-olds,” he continued. “This is not what our music is about. It’s really counterproductive.”

Madonna, for the record, has said her comment “Has anyone seen Molly?” was not to promote drug use, but her friend Cedric Gervais’ film and song “Have You Seen Molly?”

“I don’t support drug use and I never have,” tweeted the singer in her mea culpa to deadmau5. (Nevermind the fact that Gervais’ song is clearly winking to drugs in its title, and that Madge herself includes the lyrics “Pulse through my body, igniting my mind / It’s like MDMA / and that’s okay,” in her MDNA song “I’m Addicted”.)

Probably fueling his anger against Madonna is that van Dyk appears to have a vendetta against pop stars who have appropriated the EDM genre and infused it into the Top 40.

“I think we have a problem with calling it a new movement or a breakthrough in America,” he said. “We had massive festivals in the mid-’90s; I remember playing big shows, like Electric Daisy in L.A. in 2008, which drew something like 65,000 people. This was before the pop artists started to sound danceable, so in a way it’s not really something that needed a breakthrough. I think what people are referring to these days is a popped-down version of what our music actually is. I hope those pop stars all go back where they came from and do their normal pop music again.”

What do you think of Paul van Dyk’s criticisms regarding Madonna’s molly shout-out? Should he just accept the explanation she gave to deadmau5? How many other DJs are going to come out of the woodwork to slam Madonna’s throwaway comment? Sound off below.

[Via Billboard]