Against better judgment and prevailing popular wisdom, and in spite of the fact that he’s massively wealthy and could very well spend his time doing literally anything else other than worry about what a few Instagram haters think, Calvin Harris has read the comments. On Wednesday, the DJ and producer who wrote the omnipresent “We Found Love” for Rihanna and is in possession of multiple platinum plaques of his own, responded to criticism of his Ultra Music Festival appearance.
Within the comments of a largely positive post about the festival, one commenter gave his opinion: “Honestly thought this set was extremely underwhelming, gave it until 9:20 til I called it quits and went to svdden death.” Another commenter apparently added their own thoughts to the fracas but it’s no longer online.
Harris would not stand for such impudence.
In a response that showed equal contempt for the commenters, capital letters, and conventional punctuation, Harris wrote: “you expect me to play none of my songs? 3 songs since 2014 hmm how deep is your love – billion streams, this is what u came for – billion streams, my way – billion streams, slide – billion streams, feels – billion streams, one kiss – billion streams, and the other 5 half a bil and before 2014 another 20 and not cheesy shit proper fucking songs with real artists and you’d rather I play Fein trap edits today.. ”
Let’s consider this partial ellipsis a moment where he took a pause for a deep breath. All that math is tiresome, even if he was just adding billion upon billion.
Next, Harris shifted gears and instead of justifying himself in quantifiable terms, he switched to quality, again as an e e cummings strand of mostly lower-case pontificating: “spent months making new versions of everything for this and you wonder why I never play edm festivals.. at least people I saw irl had a great time and I can be happy with that but fuck at this point whatever I do is gonna piss you off.”
In another post, Harris targeted the second commenter and wrote, “did you even read what I said?” but that person’s reply appears to be gone.
Waving a white flag, the commenter begged Harris’ forgiveness: “my apologies. I sent a DM hopefully it reaches you and you get a chance read it. I’m one person and I can only imagine how many others complain. Your music is great ignore my arrogance.”
Consider the commenter finally whelmed.
Billboard reports that Harris’ Ultra appearances was his first at the festival in more than a decade. He’ll be playing more festivals this year — and probably reading the comments.