Beware the Internet hype machine. That’s probably the best advice to give to young artists, those recipients of a deafening wave that inevitably leads to a (temporarily) crippling crash. Joker saw the tsunami hit hard circa 2009, when his purple variant of dubstep, became the ballyhooed mutation. If you’re keeping track, it was right around the time when “UK Funky,” and “post-dubstep” got ushered into the collective consciousness (meaning anyone who can tell you the difference between Beatport and Boomkat).
There are two primary problems with being the flavor of the month. The first is that you’re inherently tied to a sound and time period in people’s lives that they subconsciously taint with nostalgia. You can no longer be new or current. Perception will always imprison you in whenever you were considered “hot.” The second is that there is no room for error on the Internet. Release one marginal album — as Joker did on 2011’s Pavlovian-awaited The Vision — and you suddenly lose the affection of the hype beasts. And it’s that much harder to rebuild your reputation when you’re no longer the precocious vanguard of a new sound. But what if you double down and further refine and expand your original uh, visions. What if you are far from washed up at 23 years old? That’s the absurdity of the Internet. Joker dropped a series of classic singles and then was seemingly left for dead before he was old enough to drink in America.
As tempting as it is to ascribe the “return to form” cliche onto his new single, “Midnight,” that’s false. This just happens to show a little more range, a little more ease in switching lanes. The vocals came from a snip of J. Lo’s “Waiting for Tonight” and anyone surprised by that is forgetting that Burial made Ray J sound like a soulful grim reaper. On Joker’s new single, he finds a way to combine the big-room ambition of his album with the underground slap and brain-electrocution synths that you felt the first time you heard “Digidesign,” “Tron,” or “Do It” on the booming system. Joker isn’t back, he’s just closer to fulfilling his potential. Young artists deserve room to explore the contours of their sound without needing to worry about killing their career. And this song is a way of resetting the clock.
