Avicii's music inspired snobbishness - yet he was the sound of collective euphoria | Elle Hunt

With culture ever more atomised, the Swedish DJ created songs that brought a generation together. Now his shy fans are sharing their Avicii momentsI did not know Tim Bergling, the 28-year-old Swede who died on 20 April. But I knew Avicii well. His bouncy, blatant electronic dance music - how you imagine strobe lights might sound - was the soundtrack to my first few years at university. In 2011, whether you were drinking cheap wine out of a mug in someone's room, or amid a heaving mass of strangers at the same grimy nightclub you went to every week, or eating pizza outside afterwards, it was only a matter of time before you heard his breakout hit Levels. Often, you would hear it more than once, as DJs, buoyed by the joyous reaction its opening bars elicited, tried their luck to see if the same trick would work twice. It usually did.There was such appetite for Levels that, when the rapper Flo Rida sampled it on Good Feeling just a month after its release, his take also topped the charts. The song was ubiquitous in the way only a smash-hit single can be, the kind that makes a specific time and place feel written into the music. Many of Avicii's songs were like that: Wake Me Up, You Make Me, Hey Brother, Addicted to You, X You, I Could Be the One. Continue reading...