Wednesday (March 22) marks the 10-year anniversary of one in every of EDM’s milestone moments: the Extremely Music Pageant efficiency the place Avicii was booed whereas debuting his then-new single “Wake Me Up.”
2013 was a heady time for dance music within the U.S., marking the peak of the EDM explosion, the inflow of cash and followers to the scene and Avicii as its largest star — a place he’d earned after releasing a litany of genre-defining hits, together with his 2011 breakout monitor “Ranges.”
However on March 22, 2013, issues went sideways for Avicii, if solely momentarily.
It was on this present day that the artist born Tim Bergling used his mainstage set at Miami’s Extremely Music Pageant to debut a brand new monitor. A gaggle of musicians assembled onstage and proceeded to play a bluegrass tune that had little resemblance to the maximalist EDM the assembled crowd was anticipating.
As a substitute, they obtained banjo, two guitars and vocalist Aloe Blacc singing about carrying the load of the world. In keeping with these within the crowd that evening, the efficiency “didn’t pop.”
“After we carried out at Extremely, it was simply awkward,” Blacc advised Spin in 2019. “I don’t suppose even the sound folks knew what they had been doing. All people else on the pageant had air cannons and pyro and half-naked women dancing onstage. Then right here comes Tim with drums, banjo, fiddle, guitar and three singers.”
However regardless of the viewers actually not getting it, the world quickly would. That new monitor, “Wake Me Up,” quickly exploded, in the end changing into probably the most profitable tune within the Avicii catalog. It was the Swedish producer’s solely high 10 hit on the Billboard Scorching 100, reaching No. 4 in October 2013. It spent 26 weeks at No. 1 on Scorching Dance/Digital Songs in 2013-14 and spent 10 weeks at No. 1 Dance/Combine Present Airplay. Within the final decade it’s been streamed greater than 2.97 billion occasions globally, in response to Luminate.
However this Extremely 2013 efficiency — which additionally included a equally frosty reception for the opposite new country-leaning Avicii monitor “Hey Brother” — contained way more than its most well-known second. Almost 10 minutes of recent footage launched by the Avicii property on Wednesday captures this present’s renditions of “Hooked on You” and “Expensive Boy,” which (like “Wake Me Up” and “Hey Brother”) are additionally from Avicii’s 2013 album True. That LP was launched six months after the 2013 Extremely present.
This footage of “Hooked on You” options visitor vocalist Audra Mae, who’s the great-great niece of Judy Garland, taking the stage. The tune is adopted by “Expensive Boy,” which finds the late producer — who would die 5 years after this present — manning the decks whereas carrying his signature backward baseball hat because the lights flash in entrance of him and the gang goes as wild as they ultimately would for “Wake Me Up.” Watch the efficiency under.
