I am uncontainably excited for We Are Your Friends, the movie that Max “Catfish” Joseph temporarily left Catfish to film, leading to Nev’s demise. I am excited because based on the first trailer, the world of the shitty male EDM DJ is a strange plane with which Max is clearly intimately familiar, and I trust him to treat the subject with the respect, reverence, and knowledge it deserves.
Also, this is a film that comprehends the nuances between 125 BPMs and 127 BPMs, and how the shift between just two rhythmic notches has the ability to transform a party. For electronic music fans, the fact that there is even a mention of BPMs—beats per minute—in the trailer is a small triumph.
In it, Zac Efron portrays “Cole Carter” (the DJiest name ever), just a kid with a dream, a laptop, and one song—all you need to make it in this cold world. As a DJ, he has the capacity to attract very attractive women such as Sophie, portrayed by model/actor Emily Ratajkowski, who you might recognize from the “Blurred Lines” video or, if you are a Nickelodeon devotee, two episodes of iCarly. Also because he is a DJ, he has a crew of similarly minded friends-turnt-party promoters, obviously. They pass out real-life, physical fliers on campus because showing them creating Facebook event pages would be more realistic but make for very boring cinema.
This movie looks like the greatest movie of the summer.
I do not live in Los Angeles but I firmly believe that if you do, chances are likely that you know at least one crappy EDM bro DJ. The funny thing about We Are Your Friends’ storyline is that, while its moral seems to be that real money can be made in the tech industry with perhaps only a modicum of talent and vision, the same can be done in the world of EDM, particularly if you are a man. Your capacity to make wild income increases exponentially if you are moderately attractive, not American, and/or have a questionable hairdo. (You must always be a man.) Last year David Guetta became the world’s second-highest paid DJ ($30 mil in 12 months, according to Forbes), by doing shit like this:
So the question is never why would you but goddamn, man, why wouldn’t you.
We Are Your Friends, which Catfish Max wrote with Meaghan Oppenheimer, takes its name from the Justice vs. Simian song of the same name, and which remains a crowd-exploder in big-drop DJ sets. Related: Electric Daisy Carnival New York is this weekend and I’m excited to levels mimicking religious ecstasy. We Are Your Friends is released August 28.
