Branding is a big thing in electronic dance music, since you need to find some way to differentiate your beats and drops from the next guy’s beats and drops, but we’re talking about the kind of branding where you have a big fake head that lights up or changes color in time with whatever you’re laying down on your EDM machine, not the kind of branding where corporations step in and try to turn your art into business. Sadly, that’s exactly what happened this weekend at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami, when a DJ in a big, electronic Colonel Sanders mask took the stage and put on a brief, KFC-themed set (complete with sampled audio from KFC ads and a big “herbs and spices” drop).
As reported by Billboard, some members of the EDM community weren’t too thrilled with this big commercial, with Marshmello (the famous DJ with a big helmet that looks like marshmallow, not a cartoon mouse or a French robot) reportedly saying that the Colonel Sanders set was “lame” and that there are “a lot of other artists that actually deserve to be on that stage instead.” Chicago duo Louis The Child also noted that it “would be nice” if Ultra had used that time to show off what EDM is really about and “not make it seem like a joke.” (Both Marshmello and Louis The Child’s KFC tweets have since been deleted, so maybe they’ve come around on the delicious power of the Colonel’s special chicken.)
This would’ve all been a lot funnier if the KFC DJ set had actually been good, which it was not (so it’s perfectly understandable that some people are annoyed by this), but some other EDM people have picked up the slack with fun reactions to the Colonel’s set:
