I feel personally victimized by the Chainsmokers. It all started a few weeks ago, when Billboard published an extensive profile on the EDM duo, whose Halsey collaboration “Closer” is still the #1 song in the country for the eighth straight week. The piece is a foray into the wild, wonderful life of two wannabe megastars, and while it would be easy to say that the writer made them look like jackasses, it’s more accurate to say that the Chainsmokers made the Chainsmokers look like jackasses. The piece is littered with wince-worthy quotes (“Even before success, pussy was number one”), Entourage comparisons, and references to their (supposedly) massive dicks. Donald Trump would call it “locker room talk,” I would call it “appalling and practically unreadable.”

Unfortunately, no one close to Alex Pall or Andrew Taggart told them to cool it on the interviews for awhile, so we got a new one today courtesy of Rolling Stone. It’s not as bad as the aforementioned Billboard piece, but it’s still amusing and very on-brand. Here are some choice excerpts:

• “Not only have they beaten Calvin Harris’ record for the most Number Ones notched on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic songs chart, they also hung out with Harris ‘and basically brain-raped him,’ as Pall puts it, ‘asking him all these questions.'”
• “To that end, they cultivate unabashedly good-timey personas and don’t mind if you call them ‘bros.’ ‘Honestly, we’re two white guys that like to be friendly, we make stupid jokes and like funny movies, and we like to party — but so does everybody,’ says Taggart.”
• “Previous anxiety about their bare-bones production has dissipated, and Pall, feeling good, has just the dick joke for the moment: ‘I guess it’s true,’ he says. ‘Size doesn’t matter!'”
• “Pall spent his early childhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where his dad was a fine-art dealer. ‘We had Picassos and Lichtensteins on our walls,’ Pall recalls. In middle school, he was classmates with Alex Soros, son of billionaire philanthropist George. Later, he attended a private school ‘for fuck-ups’ in Westchester, where he enjoyed fuck-uppish pursuits like ‘smoking weed and eating shrooms with friends.'”
• “[Taggart] uses tech-world buzzwords like ‘disrupt’ and ‘iterate’ frequently, asking how Rolling Stone’s ‘reach’ compares to that of the Chainsmokers, wondering aloud about the return-on-investment for participating in this article. He loves to cook, bragging, ‘I can make any vegetable — Brussels sprouts, asparagus — taste dank.'”
• “[Taggart] just bought an ultramodern five-bedroom West Hollywood home for $3.3 million, but hastens to point out that it came with a ‘two-year warranty in case anything needs to be fixed.'”
• “They envy acts with fully realized aesthetics: Twenty One Pilots, Stromae, Die Antwoord. At the steakhouse, a label rep asks what they think about Lady Gaga’s single ‘Perfect Illusion.’ ‘It sucks,’ Pall says. Taggart, more diplomatic, says, ‘She’s a great artist — like, Jeff Koons made a sculpture of her…'”
• “‘We met in order to work together, but we’ve gotten close,’ Pall says. ‘We’ve fought like, one time, in Mexico, about I don’t remember what. We’d just been at a strip club and we beat each other up in the back of a cab. We have a photo we took of ourselves all bloody afterward! It was just a moment of tequila-driven madness.'”
• “‘We can do so much more than just DJ,’ Taggart says. ‘We look at Beyoncé and we’re like, ‘I want to build a live show that’s talked about and respected as much as hers, or Kanye’s.’ We want to add performance elements.'”

Cool. As it turns out, the Chainsmokers are currently working on a track with Chris Martin (which we already knew), and Bono, who has long been thirsty for another pop hit, seems interested in collaborating sometime in the near future. Rihanna, brilliant woman that she is, apparently rejected the duo’s demo for the eventual Daya collab “Don’t Let Me Down,” but that’s OK with Taggart and Pall, who are more interested in working with younger artists who “have this hunger” and are “willing to work really hard.”

I’m just hungry for more parodical entitled white frat-bro quotes. Here’s to never reading the colloquialism “brain-raped” (?!?!) in a major magazine ever again!