Photo by Yael Malka for BuzzFeed
Eight college-aged women are twerking furiously to EDM music in a brightly lit tent, dressed in scraps of nylon and spandex and holding numbered placards above their heads. They flip their hair and smile brightly amid the catcalls and boos that fly at them in equal measure. As far as beauty pageants go, this one, known as the “Most Ratchet Pageant,” will not be confused for Miss America anytime soon.
One contestant in ripped fishnets drops to the floor in a split and bounces; another shimmies to center stage, winks, and whips off her bedazzled bra to reveal glitter pasties. The grinning rapper Waka Flocka Flame, one of the contest’s judges, rushes over and dumps bottles of water down their backsides. The audience of nearly a thousand howls.
At the edge of the stage, a slight smile stretched across his face, is Borgore — the controversial dubstep DJ, producer, and aspiring president of Israel who is the star of this daylong rave at Governors Island in New York City. He wanders among the women, his ‘BG’ brand hat pulled low on his forehead, barking encouragement at the contestants as they gaze at him adoringly through thick eyelashes and reach out to stroke his arms and chest. After introducing the talent round of the competition (“You can twerk, dance on an imaginary pole, sing!” he suggests in a thick, Israeli accent), he hoots his approval for the twerkers (the lewder, the better), high-fives Waka, and occasionally ambles over to kiss a delighted dancer on her cheek.
Spectacles like this, and his lyrics that boast about the degradation of women, are why Borgore (real name: Asaf Borger) continues to draw contempt from his peers in the EDM community. Fellow DJs have called him a misogynist and blamed him for tarnishing the reputation of dubstep music. He regularly denies that he disrespects women — a point he makes forcefully during our time together at Governors Island — though his lyrics have intensified with time.
They vary from priapic bluster:
“Girl, when we in bed, act like a ho/Ho, when we in bed, act like a ho/Girl, take example from these bitches/In bed, act like a ho but first, do the dishes!” (“Act Like a Ho,” 2010)
To graphic dehumanization:
“Oh my god, it’s a whale/Wait, that’s your sister/Just take her to the glory hole/You wouldn’t have to kiss her/Nah, sea mammals are not on my fuck list/Man, it’s a glory hole, fuck if she’s obese” (“Glory Hole” 2011)
Photo by Yael Malka for BuzzFeed
Borgore has earned constant ire for such lyrics since he first emerged as a producer of bone-rattling, rap-heavy dubstep — a hybrid he calls “gorestep” — seven years ago. First, the criticisms were contained to the dubstep underground, where he got his start releasing mixes and EPs while living in his native Israel. (One, a 2010 set of EPs called Borgore Ruined Dubstep, was an early rebuttal to critics.) But the complaints began to snowball in earnest in the summer of 2012, when he released the most well-known collaboration of his career: “Decisions,” a singsong, lackadaisical track that found him bragging about his virility and chanting “bitches love cake” with none other than Miley Cyrus on backing vocals.
“I didn’t think she was gonna go for it,” Borgore explains to me before the show in the narrow, dimly lit concrete room that serves as his private lounge. “I talk about getting drunk and porn stars, fucking five chicks — and that’s what she wanted. I was super happy about it.” The widely circulated video features Borgore and Cyrus flinging cake at each other, him with heavy-lidded hauteur and her with the wide-eyed zeal that would characterize her controversial “ratchet” reinvention.
With that track, Borgore was established as a swaggering new presence in the fast-ascendant American EDM scene. He amassed thousands more followers on Twitter (238,000 to date, many of whom retweet his incendiary rhetoric and flood his feed with revealing pictures and the hashtag #bootyforborgore), and performed at high-profile dance festivals including Ultra Music Festival and Electric Daisy Carnival — occasionally from within an LED van that reads “Cream Machine” and “Stops for Whores.” He released a collaboration with Waka Flocka Flame (“Wild Out”), and Steve Aoki enlisted him for his 2013 Aokify America stadium tour.
Borgore’s “gorestep” is his personal derivation of “brostep,” a generally more assaultive splinter scene of dubstep that’s arisen in the past few years and emphasizes distortion and bass drops while siphoning some of the heaviness of rock music. But Borgore is an outsider, says DJ and journalist Philip Sherburne. “His lyrical focus gives him more room to be more explicitly sexist or misogynist,” says Sherburne, who has written about electronic music for Pitchfork, SPIN, and Resident Advisor. He adds, “Though I can’t think of anybody that is quite as extreme or as explicit as Borgore.”
“Borgore is certainly a misogynist," adds Kathryn Frazier, who owns Biz3 Publicity (which represents Daft Punk, Skrillex, and Bassnectar) and co-runs Skrillex's OWSLA label. "He's like the Eazy-E of EDM — the dim reality is that he'd probably take that as a compliment. I think most EDM music is not inherently sexist, but someone like Borgore stands out like an overreacting teenager dying for attention. Anyone remotely evolved rolls their eyes at his desperate antics.”
Not all of Borgore’s DJ peers have appreciated his prominence; in 2012, dubstep producer Bassnectar called out Borgore in a long string of tweets, which began, “What is *UP* with jackass DJs thinking its cool to degrade women??? And what is UP with the girls who so weakly respond to those jackass DJs…im all about Peace Love Unity & Respect, so calling people out isn’t something I want to do, but I just can’t believe this guy @borgore” [sic]. In 2013, the DJ-producer BT tweeted to his fans, “I'd like to fight @Borgore in a cage match for charity. If I win, you'll do 300 hours community service at an abused women's center.” Borgore responded to both swiftly, calling Bassnectar a “hypocrite” for promoting drugs and declining BT’s offer with condescension. Bassnectar resolved the exchange with some placating words but BT has since fired further shots about Borgore’s lyrics and alleged crack smoking. Borgore denies he has ever done drugs. (BT declined to be interviewed for this story and Bassnectar was unavailable.)
Several other prominent DJs told BuzzFeed that they are repelled by Borgore’s lyrical content. “What a wanker. He’s an embarrassment,” says Nicole Moudaber, a London- and Ibiza-based house and techno DJ who will headline a stage of the Electric Zoo festival in New York in August. “It has been done years ago with urban music and it’s so dated, that whole way of attracting attention by putting other people down. I’ve got zero respect for people like this in general, not just Borgore.”
Photo by Yael Malka for BuzzFeed
When I meet up with Borgore at Governors Island in July, it is a few hours before the Most Ratchet Pageant and his headlining DJ set; red Solo cups dot the floor of his lounge, relics of his earlier game of beer pong with a gaggle of young female fans (many of whom left with his signature scrawled across their cleavage). Sitting on a dirt-scuffed couch, he flatly denies that his music and antics are disrespectful to women.
“It’s the complete opposite — I fucking love women,” he says nonchalantly. “Half of my Twitter is me laughing about Jews, and I’m Jewish. It’s a joke. Life sucks. When people are degrading women, it’s stupid, so I’m laughing about it.”
It’s his stock response to a familiar accusation — but, as many times as he repeats this, it never fully addresses how inflammatory his lyrics can be. And as much as this caricatured extremism is his brand, it is also a narrative that he is now attempting to regulate: After a particularly critical concert review ran on RollingStone.com in May (reviewing his show at the Electric Daisy Carnival, reporter Julianne Escobedo Shepherd called out Borgore’s “over-the-top, sometimes violent misogyny” and his “dedication to denigrating women”), he and his publicist asked to meet me for breakfast in Manhattan, during which Borgore insisted over eggs and hummus that he is misunderstood and that he loves and admires women. I was surprised by his vehemence.
He remains on the offensive against potential criticism. “I’m the only artist in EDM that goes and says crazy things, so it’s kind of easy to pick on me,” he says at Governors Island with a level stare. “I don’t mind; I’ll be the scapegoat, I guess. I’m still here … If I don’t cause any reaction, there’s no point of what I’m doing.”
Some DJs dismiss him for that logic. “To a certain extent, there’s not that much respect for him in the industry because [his lyrics] are kind of a gimmick, and gimmicks lack musical integrity,” says the dubstep DJ-producer Rusko, whom Borgore has remixed. “Though I don’t think he’s meant to be taken seriously.”
Photo by Yael Malka for BuzzFeed
When I first met Borgore, he locked eyes with me and said, “The thing I love most is cummin' on your face, suck it bitch.” I was interviewing him at the 2012 Coachella festival for a video segment for Rolling Stone , and he was quoting a line that was from his recent song “Love,” which I had not yet heard. I stared at him, mouth agape, as he leaned back in his chair with a self-congratulatory grin. He spoke in what seemed to be deliberate, structured quotes and was satisfied that his first weekend’s stage show, which included scantily clad pole dancers, had annoyed Coachella’s organizers. He did not seem to remember this encounter over our subsequent damage-control breakfast.
Backstage at Governors Island, he is markedly more restrained; he greets me with a handshake and listens intently. He apologetically shoves his buzzing iPhone into a black Louis Vuitton backpack (after he shows me the BuzzFeed app on the front screen) and, overall, he is more polite and self-deprecating than his lyrics would suggest. Then again, that’s not the highest bar to cross; I ask him about the criticism he’s garnered for the hook of his new track, “Hate,” and quote it back to him: “So I fuck her like I hate her.”
“The song is 100% about this chick that I enjoy spending my time with right now, and she likes rough sex. And by rough sex I don’t mean whips and burning her and shit like that, just a little bit of pulling the hair,” he replies calmly. “It’s passionate, and hate is the closest thing to love. You know what I mean?”
I point out that this could be misinterpreted because her consent to be treated roughly isn’t in the song. He seems genuinely surprised. “The story is fully there,” he says, and chants more lyrics: "‘I can’t describe love, but I can feel it / My heart’s protected, but she can steal it / I can’t describe love, but I can feel it / My heart is broken, but she can heal it.’ The story is definitely there.”
I quote another much-protested line: “In bed, act like a ho / But first do the dishes.”
“That’s a joke. That’s a joke. In my house, my dad does the dishes,” he responds, a bit exasperatedly.
And about that Rolling Stone review that prompted Borgore and his publicity team to approach me? Borgore’s face flushes slightly at the reminder; he appears genuinely stricken by the accusations.
“I don’t hate women whatsoever. It’s a misinterpretation. But honestly, when someone has an opinion, it’s really hard to change his opinion,” he says brusquely. “If this chick thinks that I’m misogynistic, it doesn’t matter even if I start a political party and the five first picks will be chicks, she’ll still think I’m misogynistic.”
Misinterpretations seem to be happening an awful lot to a guy who’s so self-aware, so conspicuously a brand, that he’s currently wearing his own merch line’s T-shirt and hat. In fact, from his “Cream Machine” to #bootyforborgore, all his promotional efforts embrace a sexualization of women, the same trademark of his career that he deflects as unintentional during our conversation. It’s a disconnect in his strategy that he does not appear to have considered enough to warrant explanation; instead, he returns to his first stance of satire.
“Maybe I’m doing my job wrong, but the way I see it, I don’t think that Seth MacFarlane, the guy from Family Guy, is racist. I don’t think that Sacha Baron Cohen is racist,” he insists. “It’s just taking the piss.”
Photo by Yael Malka for BuzzFeed
Asaf Borger was raised in Tel Aviv, Israel, in a happy and close-knit family; his mother imported and exported cosmetics, his father worked at IBM, and his sister shared his interest in music. However, outside their door, in the thick of the Israel–Palestine conflict, violence was a constant presence. “I had buses blown up around my house, people with Kalashnikov AK-47s shooting in restaurants. It wasn’t that scary to me; I’m a child, this is what’s around me,” he says, toying distractedly with the gold chain around his neck. “When you grow up in Compton, you know how to deal with Compton. When you grow up in Israel, you know how to deal with Israel.”
A musical prodigy, Borger studied jazz composition and performance at the prestigious Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts. His primary instrument was the saxophone, but it was only chosen under duress; his teachers initially encouraged him to concentrate on ballet dancing, but he staunchly rejected the prospect as unmasculine.
At age 18, after graduation, he enrolled in Israel’s national army for three years (a mandatory stint for all citizens). He was stationed as a fitness trainer in heavy combat areas, which did not prove the most productive of roles. “There were not a lot of times I could actually train [the soldiers],” he recalls. “I would have one or two trainings a day, and the rest of the day I’m just sitting there, getting shot at in the bunker, fucking doing nothing.”
Music offered a respite; he had recently signed on as the drummer of his friends’ metal band Shabira, and he practiced fills and rolls for hours against army furniture. But before an album was recorded, the group began unraveling as the members followed individual interests; the singer left to focus on his religious beliefs and Borger, enamored with the U.K. electronic scene, had started remixing Britney Spears and Rusko tracks. He began producing his own rap- and heavy rock-infused dance tracks — a process that could be done alone on a computer from any location, even the front lines — and punched out his first tracks in 2007–2008. By the end of his army service, Shabira had folded, and Borgore began touring his turbulent new dance mixes.
Photo by Yael Malka for BuzzFeed
No comments:
Post a Comment