The New York Times published a fun interactive video and story earlier Tuesday, explaining how Jack Ü’s “Where Are Ü Now” came to be. Interspersed with clips of the song, as well as clips of unreleased rough demos of the song, the video portion features interviews with all of the artists involved — Justin Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo — letting everyone give their own mini oral history of what happened behind the scenes. “It’s expensive, you know what I mean?” Bieber says of the hit. “It’s like the sounds that are used are not cheap. They’re very expensive-sounding sounds.” Most of the interviews shed light on the creative process and, piece by piece, essentially re-create the song in front of your very eyes (and ears); there are also some cool fun facts presented: The flutelike sound in the song is actually Bieber’s voice, just heavily distorted. “You can almost destroy a sound so many times, it loses quality,” Skrillex notes. “People always try to avoid digital distortion, but we always like using it.”
Fun, right?
Wrong! Deadmau5, who is not scared of haters, appeared to hate it, especially the part where everyone is talking about how expensive the hit sounds — kind of understandable, considering the quotes are ridiculous. There was lots of shade, though:
He even did a brief Instagram parody, writing, “Yeah. It’s expensive allright. This fucking remix cost me 60k”:
Diplo, who is not scared of Twitter beef, didn’t look very happy about it:
Bieber and Skrillex haven’t responded via social media yet, either because they understand — more than anybody — that you can’t please everybody, or because they are familiar with the darkness of Deadmau5’s sometimes-very-constructive-and-insightful-and-other-times-very-depressing-and-troll-y Twitter feed. You can read the full Times story here and watch the video here.
