The Legend of Avicii

by Jeb Boniakowski

A couple months ago I met up with a childhood friend for a drink. He was working as an assistant to a famous music producer, and one day the producer was doing some work with another Famous Artist whose name I’ve removed to make life harder for anyone who wants to make an investigative podcast about this rumor. Being one of the four assistants employed by the producer, he had a lot of time to chat with his opposite in the Famous Artist’s camp.

Famous Artist’s assistant had previously been Avicii’s assistant. As he told it, Avicii rang in 2014 by playing a midnight ball-drop set in Tokyo, then zipping to the airport with a police escort like a head-of-state’s motorcade, hopping on a private jet filled with cocaine and Dom Perignon, then flying to Paris to play another midnight set. After the Paris set, more police lights, different siren tones, more private jet, more cocaine, more champagne, and then he landed in New York, where his motorcade rushed him into a third club so that he could play a third midnight New Year’s Eve set. Third time handing his champagne glass to a waiting assistant. Third time splashing some cold water on his face in a marble club bathroom. Third time climbing, alone, the stairs up to the DJ booth.

This is my favorite story ever.

A lot of people I’ve told this story to say, “Ehhh, I don’t think that’s actually possible…is the time change on an ordinary private jet travelling at a velocity of six hundred…” or “but would the police really escort a DJ?” Shut up! We could all probably figure that out with Google but I don’t care. That’s not the point. This is a DJ story.

Let me share with you another Avicii story, this one from GQ:

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 [Avicii’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.)
 …

“We should make a list of songs that we tell festival organizers not to let other DJs play,” [Avicii]’s tour manager, a no-nonsense Irishwoman named Ciara Davey, says decisively, as if writing a note to self. [Avicii] nods, though he doesn’t seem any less tense.

Look, I’m not a “disco sucks” guy. I love dance music. I love disco. I think Mick Jagger should probably be in that monster book that Dungeons & Dragons people use, but this is amazing. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a show! The modern EDM DJ is essentially the master of the Personal Brand.

Let’s say you walk into a Las Vegas nightclub and “Don’t You Worry Child” is playing. How would you know if Avicii was playing or a mere warm-up DJ? Or some guy’s iPod? There’s no crate-digging or curatorial skill at work here. “Don’t You Worry Child” entered the charts at #1 all over the world. This stupid song again? Inescapable in the great Cascade of content that inundates the world. But if you know that Avicii is the guy playing it — if you see his captain-of-the-enemy-team-in-a-sports-movie head bouncing over the glowing trading turret of the DJ booth — now I can feel our fun “Levels” rising!

A couple weeks ago the New York Times ran a story with the headline, “The Year of the Never-Ending Party” accompanied by a delightful 68-picture slide show. It’s about “the recent surge in entertainments.”

“That was just Monday. Any person of moderate social enterprise had the choice of at least five separate balls or galas every night for the rest of that week.”

I would like to think of myself as a socially enterprising bachelor and yet I wasn’t invited to a single ball or gala in all of 2014! Were you? Did I say something rude to the wrong Astor at the last Saratoga track season? Did I play a particular #1 single off Spotify just before a $250k-a-night DJ showed up?

“It’s more over-the-top,” [Interview columnist Bob] Colacello said of the recent surge of entertainments, five or more a night and in almost all five boroughs. “It’s uptown, downtown, Brooklyn,” he added, and even in the Bronx, if you count last week’s gala at the New York Botanical Garden. “It reminds me a bit of the ’80s, with big gowns, big jewelry, big money spent in restaurants,” he said. Now, as then, the Champagne rivers are flowing, and they are vintage French and not some California sparkling. The caviar mounded again in iced silver buckets is also imported. And, as Mr. Colacello said, “Now there are white truffles shaved over everything.”

Is there literally anything worse than being handed a flute of something bubbly cold and golden, taking a sip, and realizing it’s some California sparkling horse piss when you were expecting vintage French?

Even though they might not realize it, it is for these people that Continuous New Year’s Avicii exists. I sometimes wonder if this is how gods are made: First, a possibly-real person moves beyond folk hero to the in-between realm inhabited by people like Jack Frost, John Barleycorn or Big Oil, and then people forget where the story came from and improve it over the years and next thing you know you have a Santa Claus or a Baal who used his magical powers to keep free water-powered cars off the road and cursed Los Angeles to never have a real subway.

Avicii has all of the tools to be god of Those of Moderate Social Enterprise. The peak ritualized experience of New Year’s Eve is, of course, The Drop, and so New Year’s Eve is the ultimate feast day for EDM and its DJs. Avicii’s mission is to bring The Drop to the people. He has a fanciful mode of travel in his private jet and his motorcade. And he has the magical artifacts: bottomless bags of cocaine and Dom Perignon, his Mjöllnir and Gungnir. And, in a year when our collective dreams turned from Endless Summer to Permanent Midnight, he’s up there, one of the stars, streaming across the sky.

Photo by Steve Hall

Never Better, a collection of essays from writers we love, is The Awl’s goodbye to 2014.