In 2011, I was a high school junior mindlessly browsing web forums during psych class, when one of my friends messaged me a strange YouTube link. “Check this out later,” she said, as we both ignored our lecturer. “It’s crazy different.” The bell rang, the other students filed out, and I popped my headphones in. What ensued sounded terrible: screeching synths, swollen bass gurgles, and a maniacal sample of someone screaming, “Yes, oh my God,” which I’d later learn was lifted from a viral video of a girl beating her personal best competitive cup-stacking time. But when the noise subsided, there was another voice, scratchy but soft-spoken, over twinkling MIDI piano chords. “You don’t need to hide, my friend/For I am just like you,” it assured me. That was the first time I heard Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.” I’d have it on repeat for months.

Listening to Skrillex’s first big record now, it feels like a microcosm of his career as an electronic producer and former frontman of a post-hardcore band: Both are bombastic tours de force with moments of genuine beauty interspersed. His style of dubstep was initially framed as an aggro counterpart to the subby club music of the South London scene—numerous dullards across the internet would crudely compare it to “two Transformers going at it”—but teenagers in middle America didn’t know anything about UK pioneers like Skream or Benga, so they had nothing to compare it to. Skrillex ended up bringing a new breed of aggressive electronic music to teeming masses that may not have been exposed to it otherwise. His rise—and the rise of “brostep”—came about just as new breeds of euphoric house music were beginning to make waves in the States. These various styles all quickly coalesced under a broader umbrella term: EDM.

As EDM began to spread across America, the time-honored tradition of adults sneering at young people’s music resurfaced like clockwork. Dance-music purists mostly held their noses while older generations raised on guitar music wrote it off as wub-wub nonsense for ecstasy-addled kids. But for an entire generation of young millennials, EDM was the first music that felt like it belonged solely to them—to us. Fueled by subbass (and, yeah, sometimes substances), it was a pure break from the harsh realities of life. The rock bands handed down to me by my older cousins suddenly felt like relics from a bygone era, even if they held parallels in their dynamic principles. Where Nirvana nicked the quiet-loud-quiet dynamic of the Pixies, the late Avicii took after progressive house forerunners like Eric Prydz, perfecting the build-up and drop. Tastes change, but teenage rage is forever.

“It’s funny because, to me, EDM isn’t a dirty word at all,” Skrillex says now. “I call everything EDM, even techno. That’s just the terminology: electronic dance music. It’s not a genre—it’s a platform, a means. I was making all these different types of music, but ‘EDM’ was the music that was blowing up at the time I was making it.”

Besides, what really qualifies a piece of music as EDM? Sixteen bars of excruciating white noise build-up before a drop? Constituencies of wooks and kandi kids? A lack of adherence to the stricter codifications of more underground dance genres? Perhaps EDM could be defined the same way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart characterized his litmus test for whether something should be considered pornography: “I know it when I see it.” The problem is, by the end of its meteoric rise this decade, EDM became a moving target of regional styles co-opted into mainstream pop trends—very little of which could match the oft-outlandish experimentation fueling the original material, or the visceral shock of early crossover hits like “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.”