Major Lazer Induce Hysteria With Hypercharged Squeak-Buzz at Austin City Limits

If there’s ever a market for teenage white girls losing their shit on an armageddon level of hysteria, look no further than a Major Lazer show. To hell with Molly Culture – the girls (and a few guys) at their Austin City Limits set on Saturday were clear-eyed and buck wild with maniacal enthusiasm as the sounds of ten simultaneous video game cop car chases were combined with that of the world’s largest zipper opening and closing at breakneck speed for a full hour -with a little dancehall thrown in.

In the thick of it all, I wrestled my phone out to tweet, “Thank god I didn’t do drugs for this,” and I’m even more grateful in hindsight than in the moment. Whose idea of a good time is it to dive down a psychedelic rabbit hole when an army of Transformers robots are using fax machines to masturbate through massive, blaring sound systems? Definitely not mine.

While DJ Falcon can press play and sip a Heinekin for an hour while waving to the hysterically excited masses and doing literally nothing else, Major Lazer run around the stage, give out free candy and dance with the crowd, dance with the dancers, dance with each other, dance by themselves. And while Diplo may be running back to the tables to drop the needle here and there rather than hitting a space-bar, it sure as hell aint a DJ Shadow production.

No, dude. I don’t want your candy.

To be fair, let’s filter the experience through a Diplo quote, as related to HuffPost last year: “You go see a dance stage at a fucking dance festival and I’m bored out of my fucking mind. That’s not going to last very much longer, because kids see that it’s the same shit every single time.”

We’ve seen Major Lazer a handful of times in the past two years, and each performance was perfectly interchangeable with the last – save for the assortment of twerking girls. Here’s hoping he’s right on the latter point, ’cause it’s hard to want to keep talking to a girl after you see her dancing like she’s got a gun to her head, to the sound of a drone missile strike with bass bounce.