Dance
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In his two seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies, catcher Garrett Stubbs has played in just 87 of a possible 324 games — par for the course when you’re backing up J.T. Realmuto, commonly referred to by Phillies fans as the “BCIB” (Best Catcher in Baseball). But despite his limited time on the field, Stubbs has become one of the most beloved and recognizable Phils for his role as the team’s preeminent Clubhouse Guy — as well as their anointed post-game DJ.
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With the Phils’ locker room turning into Philadelphia’s hottest club over their five playoff series victories across 2022-23, Stubbs has also become one of the city’s most influential aux-cord wielders with his celebratory selections, collected in his publicly available “Phils Win” Spotify playlist (nearly 30,000 likes). The most famous of the bunch, Tiësto’s remix of Calum Scott’s cover of Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” caught so much local heat after it became the Phils’ unlikely postseason anthem in 2022, which propelled the song back onto the Billboard charts, making the Digital Song Sales top 10 last October.
Below, Stubbs talks with Billboard about how he became The Guy for soundtracking the team’s champagne-soaked celebrations, as well as why his club loves a good dance remix, and whether they’ll ever be able to get away from “Dancing on My Own.”
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How did you become the sort of official team DJ/Spotify playlist curator here?
Somebody’s gotta do it, and I’d say because my role on the team as far as playing time goes is limited, I just became the guy who came into the locker room after the games to turn on the music. As guys started to like certain songs, I just started to accumulate the ones that everyone liked and put them into a playlist. And then slowly but surely, there ended up being 1, 2, 20, 50, 100 songs on the playlist.
Over the past couple years, who else on the team have been your supporting curators?
Schwarbs [Kyle Schwarber] is a big one. He’s certainly a guy that brings good vibes to the locker room. [Nick] Castellanos is another one. He’s got very eclectic taste in music — he’s a huge J. Cole fan and likes to play anything from rap all the way to ODESZA. And he is a big fan of those two — if you walk into the locker room and either one of those two is playing, he definitely got ahold of the sticks.
Do you need a sort of quorum of team approval to put a song on the playlist? Are there any times that you try to sneak one on that you like — or do you need to have, like, a couple co-signs before you put one on the official team playlist?
No, I put random songs on there all the time. [Laughs.] So I generally will just like a song and put it on there, and then it’ll play in the locker room at certain times of the day, or after the game, and when the song comes on, I’ll just around the locker room and see what vibe I’m getting from everybody. And if it’s good, it stays, and if it’s not good, it gets taken off quickly.
Do you remember any times you got a particularly bad response to a song you were excited about?
Not so much a bad response — I mean, sometimes guys get over songs. Like we have Waka Flocka [Flame] on there — Schwarbs is a big Waka Flocka fan, so he will put Waka Flocka on there. And at times, if we get too much Waka, it gets worn out quickly. But there are other songs on there that come and go as post-game music. But the top four songs are always [Shouse’s] “Love Tonight,” [Calum Scott’s cover of] “Dancing on My Own,” [Trey Lewis’] “D–ked Down in Dallas” and then [Alabama’s] “Dixieland Delight.”
But we make trades during the year, right? And we try to make guys feel comfortable as soon as they get over. And that’s how “Dixieland Delight” got on there. We got D-Rob [David Robertson] traded over from the Cubs, and he was an Alabama guy, so we quickly put on “Dixieland Delight.” And it ended up sticking in 2023! But it’s just a good way of getting guys connected — especially, like, Latin players who there’s a language barrier with. So we have Latin songs on there as well, for people to enjoy.
Brandon Marsh #16 and Bryson Stott #5 place a cup on the head of Garrett Stubbs #21 of the Philadelphia Phillies as Stubs gives a post game interview after a win in a game against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field on May 13, 2023 in Denver, Colorado.
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Do you add to it in the offseason?
No, I’ll listen to new music all the time. Unfortunately I feel like there hasn’t been a ton of great music coming out. I don’t know how you feel about that, but…
Well, you’re working for a very specific purpose — maybe people like the new Lana Del Rey album, but I’m sure that’s not gonna make it onto the post-game playlist.
No doubt. Yeah. I’ve been listening to — there’s a lot of good country music that comes out, but like you said, it’s not necessarily the vibe after a win to listen to friggin’ Chris Stapleton or like, a slow Morgan Wallen song or something. But we had big Dua Lipa love in 2022, starting with Kyle Gibson. And so the “Cold Heart” song got put on there. And that’s kind of the vibe we like to go with.
Do songs ever get nixed for being bad luck? Like if you hear a song before a big loss, or it’s the first song that gets played after a big loss, are you ever like, “All right, that song’s no longer part of the vibe, we gotta get it out of here?”
Well, so last year, we tried to get rid of “Dancing on My Own.” Which didn’t go very well at the beginning of the season. And so we ended up putting that back on. But we went through a number of different songs. I know that Juicy J was at one point getting played. I put on “Erryday” by Juicy J after wins. That quickly got axed. There was another J. Cole song that got played after wins — that was just a little too slow. And like, you’re looking around the league, there’s probably songs that get played that are in multiple locker rooms. So we try to keep it independent to ours. I’m sure at one point “All I Do Is Win” was just like the song that everyone played.
We try to stay away from the superstition part. Like, playing “Dancing on My Own” after wins isn’t a superstition for us — it’s just a good vibe. Everyone seems to be having a smile on their face. But also the connection that we got to have with the fans during that was pretty cool.
So I’m sure you’ve talked about it a million times by now, but when did you know that “Dancing on My Own” was connecting in that way?
Well, the funny thing is that all the music that got played in the locker room, not that it wasn’t supposed to get out of the locker room, but that was certainly not the intent at first. We basically were just playing certain songs, I started curating a playlist honestly just to make it easy to play the songs after the game — we could just click play on the playlist and then it would run through all the songs. At no point did I think the entire city was going to find my Spotify! And then realize that there was a “Phils Win” playlist. And then next thing I know, there was 1,000 people liking it, 5,000, 10,000, I think it’s up to like 20 or 25,000 now…
You’re almost up to 30 now.
OK, yeah. So that wasn’t the intent out the gate. But I think it’s a cool way for fans to kinda get a taste of what goes on in the locker room. I think fans enjoy seeing that side of our team. I think they also see that outside of the music, just how we interact with each other on the field. And we have a very unique, fun way of connecting with the people of Philly.
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That song specifically, though — when did you know that that was going to be the song that people most associated with you guys?
I don’t think we ever thought that people were going to associate themselves with it outside the locker room. I think we just kinda felt like it was a good vibe when we were listening to it inside the locker room. And then, very quickly, people found out that that was our song inside the locker room, and then they started connecting with it. That kind of just happened organically, which — I think that’s how the best things in life happen, right? You don’t really intend for them to be a certain way, but just over time, people just get drawn to a certain thing.
In general, just the vibe, the feeling that you get when you hear the song, is upbeat — Tiësto did a great job remixing it because obviously the original is a little slower. So I think the remix gives a good vibe, and all of a sudden you kinda get your head bobbin’, and it gives you good feelings inside, with the association of the winning part of it, along with just the sound that you get from listening to the song, is always positive.
I did notice, skimming the top of the playlist — and I’ve heard it in the locker room too — there’s a lot of dance remixes of non-dance songs. That seems to kind of be a sweet spot for you guys.
Yeah, I personally love bringing a little bit of house vibe to an old song. Seeing some of these new artists grabbing really great classics, and then remixing them with a little more modern house sounds that you weren’t necessarily able to make when they were making those songs, I really enjoy it.
So with 30,000 people following this playlist, do you ever hear it outside the locker room?
Well, after we would win we would go over to Xfinity Live, and immediately the DJ would start playing every single song from the playlist. We would celebrate in the locker room, and then afterwards we would go to Xfinity and celebrate again, and they would bring out those same songs. It was always fun watching the reaction of the fans to certain songs. My favorite song on the playlist [laughs] to have fun with is “D–ked Down in Dallas.”
I mean “Dancing on My Own” is obviously an incredible song, and associated with the whole city. But “D–ked Down in Dallas” is just such a fun song for all of us to have fun to, and whenever we’d go to Xfinity and watch everyone else sing along with it, it was hilarious to us.
Have you thought about what the next in line song would be if “Dancing on My Own” wasn’t working anymore?
I mean, we’ve thought about it plenty, right? We tried to get rid of it this last year. And I don’t even wanna use the words “get rid of,” but we tried to move on from it and find something new and fresh. And we ended up reverting back to it. I think the fans have certain feelings about bringing it back in 2024, which I totally understand — when you don’t win the World Series, a lot of fans feel like it’s not a success. And us players feel the same way, too. But there has been a lot of success — not just with the song, but with the team for the past few years — so we do have a lot of really good memories, and I hope that eventually we just do find a new song that gives us a good vibe and a new good energy that people can connect with.
An elder statesman of NBA stars with rapping side hustles, Hall of Fame center Shaquille O’Neal landed his first hit, “What’s Up Doc? (Can We Rock),” on MTV in 1993, and it peaked at No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100. He has four other Hot 100 songs to his name and four Billboard 200 […]
LAS VEGAS — It turns out Kaskade found out he was DJing at the Super Bowl not too long before the rest of us did.
In fact, his first time seeing the elevated DJ platform in the stands behind the end zone where he would spin throughout the game on Sunday (Feb. 11) was that day, minutes before he performed a pre-game concert that soundtracked the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs warming up on the field.
“This will be my first moment. We’ll experience it together,” Kaskade (real name: Ryan Raddon) told Billboard with a smile as we shadowed him all day Sunday throughout Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium for his gig as the Super Bowl’s first in-game DJ — a job that was only formally announced by the NFL on Thursday after Tiësto had to back out due to a “personal family emergency” earlier that day. Kaskade’s primary team had arrived days earlier in Vegas while the DJ played a long-scheduled gig at Montreal’s Igloofest on Friday night to make sure that everything was ready for him, and after wrapping his first set on Sunday, he was happy to report of the previously mysterious DJ booth: “It all works. I’m like, ‘OK, it’s plugged in, there’s power, we’re good.’”
Kaskade said the trickiest part about the last-minute gig was weaving some pump-up song requests from the two Super Bowl teams into his setlist for their pre-game warm-ups, including a pair of Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s by Drake (“God’s Plan” and “Jimmy Cooks” with 21 Savage) and DJ Snake’s “Turn Down for What” featuring Lil Jon, who would be one of Usher’s surprise halftime show guests later that day. The most time-consuming part of incorporating the new songs? Making sure all the lyrics were safe for the Super Bowl’s family audience, Kaskade says.
The players clearly appreciated the tailored playlist, with the Chiefs’ Isiah Pacheco performing an impromptu end-zone dance to “God’s Plan” during warm-ups. (“Some of them were feeling it,” Kaskade laughed afterward.)
Along with the pre-game special requests, Kaskade also worked in some more esoteric choices, like Odd Mob and OMNOM’s “Losing Control.” And when it came time for his two DJ moments during the game — one between the first and second quarters and one between the third and fourth — Kaskade stuck to what he knows best: playing the vibey “Escape,” his 2023 Kx5 song with longtime collaborator deadmau5 (“Hi. I just played Escape to 100 million people,” Kaskade posted to X after), as well as his party-starter “Fun,” a 2019 team-up with Brohug and Mr. Tape featuring Madge. He also got a chance to enjoy a bit of the nail-biter game (which the Chiefs won in overtime), taking a seat right in front of his platform alongside his wife and daughters and the rest of his team during breaks.
For a closer look at a day in the life of a Super Bowl DJ, follow along with Billboard as we embed with Team Kaskade at the big game.
‘Can We Do This?’
This week in dance music: Skrillex, Flowdan, Fred again.. and Kylie Minogue all won dance Grammys, demonstrating the efficacy of the awards’ new pop dance category, Elements 2024 released a phase one lineup lead by Illenium, Slander, Liquid Stranger, Sophie Ellis-Bextor enlisted Pnau for a remix of her viral hit “Murder On The Danceflloor,” we shared exclusive Countdown 2024 sets and Tiësto dropped out of his Super Bowl in-game DJ gig this weekend and was swiftly replaced by Kaskade.
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And also, these were the best new dance tracks of the week.
Anyma, “Pictures Of You”
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Matteo Milleri, who is one half of Tale of Us and also makes music as Anyma, today drops “Pictures Of You,” a three-minute slice of music that very much falls in the dark, machinistic but also somehow very emotive realm that Tale Of Us has carved out and which Anyma’s work expands upon. The track is out via Tale Of Us’ Afterlife Records and comes ahead of Anyma plays at Ultra Music Festival in Miami next month and at Coachella in April.
Shygirl, Club Shy
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Cool, pulsing, sophisticated and often ecstatic, Shygirl’s new Club Shy EP is of course literally music for the club, but the title also has a figurative quality, with the English artist packing this metaphorical venue with collaborators including Boys Noize (who delivers on the previously released “tell me”), along with Empress Of, SG Lewis, Kingdom, Cosha and Lola Zouaï. Each artists brings their own respective flavor, but the six-track project is ultimately lead by Shygirl’s strobe-lit vision. The project is out via Because Music.
Above & Beyond feat. Zoe Johnson, “Crazy Love”
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Two years after debuting the song in front of 20,000 fans at a show in Los Angeles, Above & Beyond’s “Crazy Love” gets an official release via Anjunabeats. The song is everything there is to love about Above & Beyond compressed into four minutes, with the trio building the same type of soaring trance production that have made them favorites for nearly 25 years years and infusing it with the same depth of a emotion that’s allowed the the guys to officially title their their radio show and live sets “group therapy.” The not-so-secret weapon on “Crazy Love” is Zoë Johnston, a longtime collaborator who’s voice brings the song to another level of tearjerk impact.
Louis the Child feat. Memba, “I’m Not Giving Up”
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The gentlemen of Louis The Child dip their toes into the pop punk revival with emo-evoking vocals that juxtapose against a thick synth build and breakdown that, the pair say, “feels very signature to us, it’s big and hits you like a ton of bricks.” A collab with New York City-based duo Memba — who LTC calls “some of the most talented producers we’ve ever worked with” — “I’m Not Giving Up” is out on Interscope Records.
DJ Minx, “Taking It Back”
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Detroit icon DJ Minx returns to Diplo’s Higher Ground label with “Taking It Back,” a sonic and lyrical crash course on the back in the day dance underground. With deadpan delivery, Minx declares that “we’re taking it back to the old school” before going on about “techno and house under one roof, underground raves, ground rules, acid house, bold moves, no cell phones, we were just cool” over a tough, stuttering synth line. Minx will play Detroit’s Movement festival in May and other summer stops in Portugal and the U.K.
As Sophie Ellis-Bextor‘s 2001 disco pop classic “Murder on the Dancefloor” continues its rise up the charts — sitting at No. 57 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 4 on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs — on the power of its Saltburn synch, the track is getting extra momentum Friday (Feb. 9) via a remix by […]
Kaskade will replace Tiësto as the Super Bowl’s first ever in-game DJ, with the latter producer dropping out of the gig earlier Thursday (Feb. 8), citing a “personal family emergency.” Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Hours after Tiësto dropped out, Kaskade — real name: Ryan Raddon — […]
This past New Year’s Eve (Dec. 30-31) hordes of dance fans descended on the NOS Events Center in San Bernardino, Calif., for two days of traditional year-end partying. Highlights from the Insomniac Events-produced festival included Porter Robinson playing as the clocked ticked to 2024, a DJ set from British legends Nero, a space bass frenzy […]
Pennsylvania’s Elements Festival will be back for 2024 with a lineup of more than 100 dance acts including future bass star Illenium, a redux set from Kaskade, psychedelic bass powerhouse Liquid Stranger, the ever vibey Bob Moses, house fav BLOND:ISH, along with Slander, Barclay Crenshaw, Wreckno and many more. See the complete phase one lineup below.
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The camping festival happens August 9-11 in Long Pond, Pennsylvania, roughly two hours from both Philadelphia and New York City. Tickets are on sale now.
The music will take place across four stages (each named after, naturally, an element), with the festival also offering art cars, theme camps, interactive performances, large-scale art installations and a wellness lineup featuring yoga, aromatherapy, dance, comedy, sound baths and workshops.
The independently operated Elements was founded by Brett Herman and Timothy Monkiewicz, with the first edition taking place in Brooklyn in 2013 before moving to another rural Pennsylvania location and ultimately landing in Long Pond.
“The genesis of Elements has always been to constantly evolve, becoming more grand, more weird, and more wild each year,” Herman says in a statement. “Fans can expect a number of revamped accommodation offerings and more opportunities to participate and become immersed in the experience.”
Elements Music & Arts Festival 2024: Phase One Lineup
5am TrioAhadadreamAusteriaAzzeccaBarclay CrenshawBlanke: ÆON MODEBLOND:ISHBob MosesBoogie TBoogie T.RioCanablissChris Lake b2b ClooneeCloZeeCool CustomerDimensionDisco LinesDr. FreschEli FolaExcisionIlleniumINZOIt’s murphJustin MartinKaskade (Redux)Lee ReynoldsLespecialLightcodeLiquid StrangerLSDREAMMarbsMarvel YearsMatrodaMikey LionOf The TreesPorkyRome in SilverSakaSlanderSlander Presents: Before DawnSpace WizardSub FocusSullivan King b2b KayzoSunSquabiTape BThe FlooziesTownship RebellionTroyBoiTVBOOVNSSA b2b NalaWalker & RoyceWrecknoZingara
After years of of the dance community firing off hot takes on how the Grammys’ dance/electronic fields didn’t quite get the nominees — and occasionally the winners — right, the realm has been uniquely quiet since the close of the ceremony on Sunday.
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This general calm (minus a few predictable naysayers) suggests a mutual agreement that the 2024 Grammys finally, more or less, nailed dance/electronic music.
This success is largely due to the best pop dance recording award, newly introduced in 2024 to honor dance music that crosses over with pop, while also freeing up space in the dance/electronic recording category for more traditional thump-thump, womp-womp, boot-and-cats dance/electronic music.(Albeit more traditional dance/electronic music that’s still, most often, very commercially popular.)
You couldn’t have come up with two more apt figureheads for these factions than Kylie Minogue and Skrillex, with the former winning the pop dance Grammy for her culture-penetrating “Padam Padam” and the latter winning for his widely beloved bass bomb “Rumble,” a collaboration with U.K. grime MC Flowdan and Fred again.., who both also received awards for the win.
It is, of course, difficult to say what the nominee field would have looked like this year if pop dance hadn’t been introduced, but it’s almost certain it wouldn’t have represented the both sonic ends of the dance/electronic world thoroughly. (Racial and gender representation is a different matter: Flowdan was the only person of color nominated in the fields and Romy was the only female producer, encapsulating the dance category’s persistent issue with nominating mostly straight, white men. This issue was particularly acute in 2024, given the big four categories were dominated by women, including three winning queer women.)
Without the extra space provided to dance with the new category, it’s possible the dance/electronic recording category’s most left-of-center nominee, Aphex Twin’s “Blackbox Life Record 21F”, wouldn’t have made the cut. Or maybe only one David Guetta song instead of two would have been nominated.
It’s also possible that “Padam Padam” might have beat “Rumble,” the victory of which is particularly important given the spotlight it puts on grime, a sonic and cultural phenomenon in the U.K. but not yet a commercial force in the U.S. “I think you can put a bit more respect on the [grime] name,” Flowdan told Cracked Magazine following his win, “because in certain areas I feel that the music or the genre or the culture’s kind of downplayed as if it’s not something that’s really influential.”
What’s almost certain, though, is that like in so many years past, without pop dance, the nominee field would have likely ended up being just kind of odd, with dance-oriented pop stars like Minogue potentially up against an avant-garde electronic artist like Aphex Twin. This issue was vividly demonstrated last year, when Beyoncé was up against Bonobo, Kaytranada, Diplo, Rufus du Sol and ODESZA when her “Break My Soul” was nominated for (and won) best dance/electronic recording.
In the category’s early years, the nominee field commonly included artists like Minogue (who won the award in 2004), as well as fellow dance-leaning pop greats Madonna, Cher, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. It started more frequently rewarding electronic-world producers like The Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk in the late ’00s. A few years after that, the category was taken over by a new strain of pop-leaning dance music, EDM, for an era when mainstage bangers by artists like The Chainsmokers competed against more underground acts like Riton — exacerbating the issue that ultimately resulted in the addition of the new category.
Competition between such different artists may have been technically fair, but it never totally made sense. But this year, the pop dance category eradicated the strange-bedfellows phenomenon that’s plagued the dance/electronic recording category since it was introduced to the awards in 1998.
The pop dance category not only made a formal space for producers like Guetta, whose work generally has major crossover with pop, but, by awarding Minogue in particular, pulled off the neat trick of returning an artist like her — one whose work is so often inspired by and at home in the club world — to the dance field where she rightly belongs. Minogue is as much of a dance act as Skrillex, and this year, finally, they didn’t have to fight for space or recognition.
U2 had a busy Sunday night (Feb. 4). In addition to giving most of the world the first extended glimpse at the eye-popping visuals from their ongoing residency series at Las Vegas’ Sphere during a remote performance on the 66th annual Grammy Awards, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers also dropped a dancefloor-ready remix […]