[Laughter] before dead mouse was nominated for several Grammy Awards before dead Mouse's iconic helmet developed a cult following having his fans tattoo it all over their body also an extensive merch Line fan art and collectible [Music] [Applause] [Music] figures before dead mouse Rock world stages and iconic events like LA paloa and it was reported that he earns no less than $100,000 per gig before his very active social media presence on Facebook and Twitter would get over 9 million supporters before dead mouse would date smoke shows like October 2009 Playmate Lindsay Evans and tattoo goddess cat Von D Joel Zimmerman grew up in Niagara Falls and early on showed an interest in electronics and mechanical things he spent his youth dismantling machines and putting them back together and became obsessed with video games but when his parents divorced in his he took to raving as a form of expression a habit that didn't go over well with his parents Joel always seemed to be ahead of the curve advocating for computers in music production long before anyone else had considered it he was a whiz kid on the computer and would spend his time in chat rooms back when the internet was in its infancy when a dead mouse caused his computer to crash that story evolved into his online username After High School he moved to Toronto and befriended a fellow programmer and the two made a joke track that jabbed at how formulaic house music was but they hadn't counted on was it becoming a massive hit what's going on guys my name is Michael mccredden documenting the rise to fame of dead mouse here for you on before they are famous now you guys requested this video a long time back I'm thankful I can finally get it done for you I just been really really busy I hope you guys enjoy this video oh yeah and as always let us know in the comments down below who to document next H my shoe just made like a squeaky noise kind of like a mouse [Music] I mean the record that Justin Bieber's on that has his name on it that he hired other people to do is fire what I'm mad about is that none of it this little [ __ ] Joel Thomas Zimmerman was born on January 5th 1981 in nagara Falls he is of German Swiss and English descent his mother Nancy is a talented visual artist and his father Rod an auto worker for GM he has an older sister Jennifer and a younger brother Chris Three Blind Mice see how they R they probably love that growing up right by the time Joel could walk he had a love for mechanical things he liked experiments that had an immediate measurable effect like putting a fork in an electrical outlet or running a magnet over the TV to distort the image yeah he was quite the handful his maternal grandmother Katherine Johnson helped nurture Joel's interest in gadgets a clever resourceful woman who raised seven kids on a budget she would go to Goodwill and she would scoop up TVs and toasters and bring them to her grandson so he could dismantle and reassemble them then one Christmas Joel received a set of precision tools now the Kookie kid had all the resources he needed to pick everything apart his grandmother was also responsible for introducing him to video games when Joel was 5 years old she bought him an Atari system and he was hooked his mom would leave for work in the morning she'd come back at night and he'd still be there now they did live in Niagara Falls so it's better than him like hanging out in a barrel and going over the falls you know what I mean now Joel found a new obsession when his mother brought her business computer home one day and he was able to mess around with it he coded the workings occasionally deleting his mother's business files in his quest to master deal West one day he told his mother that he'd communicate with a stranger on the other side of the world his mom was convinced it was a joke but no Joel had worked his way into a bulletin board service and rudimentary web chats probably found some other weird stuff on the internet because even back in the day the internet was still weird when Joel was a teen two significant things happened his parents they divorced and he started going to raise decided to dye his hair bright yellow and molded it into a bunch of spikes kind of like Bert Simpson he wore some ridiculously baggy pants a Pokémon backpack a metal chain and he had a necklace around his neck that was made up of these plastic balls well let's just say his father was not impressed but his mother being an artist herself she wanted to nurture her child's creativity and didn't mind as much okay maybe she was a little upset when he came back from the Raves but that was probably due to the drugs she was okay with the way he looked that was self- expression in her eyes it looks like an old um operator style switch board monophonic plug when Joel was 15 he started making chip Tunes musical compositions made using the chips from Old Computers in his later teens he became involved with a dance music radio show in Niagara Falls called the party Revolution it was a lowbudget affair run by the local dance music record shops electrified records his job was to be the technical whiz kid in other words he was the only one there who knew how to use a computer he honed his composing skills while working there and while his colleagues were interested in traditional DJ techniques Joel was learning the latest digital tools and equipment that would allow him sampling sequencing and looping it was a sound that was way ahead of its time and soon his chip tune started attracting the attention of those out in Los Angeles in 1999 Sim of Joel's compositions wound up on Methods of Mayhem the rap tinged album by mly crew and drummer Tommy Lee he really liked this young kid Joel became good friends with Tommy Lee and soon as passion outgrew the small town he called home by the way nager Falls is such a blast I got my first BJ there true story after graduating from West Lane Secondary School in nager Falls he made the move to Toronto and at first scrapped together rent money by producing tracks for play records a Toronto house music label and through programming and web development well he uh decided to register his own business what was he going to call it he decided to go with dead mouse and for you kids out there who were calling him dead mouse 5 get it together so where did he get the name from well one day Joel was chatting with a friend on his computer when it abruptly shut off it smelled like burnt wire and when he started to dismantle his computer he found inside a dead mouse Joel then became known as the guy online dead mouse guy I found a mouse a dead one in a computer and then I named myself dad Mouse on on an internet chat room he tried originally to spell it out the way you typically would but it was too long so then he decided to swap out the final few letters instead he would go with a number five in the early 2000s when he tried to convince local recording studios that they needed to embrace computers no one was interested they had an old school approach and to them integrating computers with music production was like rocket science no one knew how to do it all them Canadians they're always behind on the times truthfully it's like I couldn't get a job in TV but Joel he was persistent eventually he managed to convince a small studio in Toronto to let him install new technology and he helped record numerous local bands having this [ __ ] like skull [ __ ] into my head it's like wow you know what I wonder how they're making this techno music yeah in the mid 2000s he was offered a job working with the Belgian company behind Fruity Loops yeah you know that audio software that's all the rage at the same time he was building the tools to create dance music and Joel composed his own tracks he was working with Steve duta another programmer from LA and the two made a track under the name bsod which stands for a blue screen of death it's a computer jargon for Windows you know that error message yeah they thought it was hilarious this is the hook it's catchy you like it this is the hook they took a house beat and added a digitized voice explaining what was happening it was a jab at how formulaic house music was and they thought it was hilarious what they hadn't anticipated was that this track would become number one on the online record store beat ports chart they decided to write more bsod material hoping to make some extra cash now at the time dead mouse he was only earning 1,000 bucks a month and ran a loan well that cost $ 800 so money was pretty tight they made a whole bsod album and remixed Hurt by Christina Aguilera but the money ran out and Duda well he had to return to La if I'm not saying duda's name right I'm going to be in a whole lot of [ __ ] one of the first thing Joel wrote after Duda left was faxing Berlin he released this under the moniker dead mouse yeah he was using that name from his oneman web developing business from a few years back he sent the track to British DJ Chris Lake who passed it to pong who played it on his radio one show the subsequent exposure turned it into one of the biggest records of 2007 the clever Fusion of trans cords and house beats spawned a series of imitators and propelled the creation of the dubstep sub genre wait for the drop I'm sorry the [Music] drop dead Mouse's first full length album 2005's get scrapped was smarter than your average dance music album every song had jokes inside it nerdy musical references one track is called waking up from the American dream another Board of Canada and that's a nod to Edinburgh based electronic Duo Boards of Canada the sly humor and intelligent pop culture reference well it was a hit soon after tracks such as not exactly Sex Lies and audio tape and the reward is cheesed followed and dead mouse was scheduled to perform his first paid gig but he wanted to do something that every everyone would know well this guy's a little different part of dead Mouse's logo way back in the day had been a grinning Mouse with oversized ears he decided to turn it into a mask he contacted a firm in Toronto who made props for film and they agreed to build him something special the first time he wore was at a club in Halifax Nova Scotia and the audience were stunned and a little confused I mean who the hell was this guy but when the helmet's lights came on and started blinking to the beat well the place went absolutely nuts it was a stroke of Genius and one that transformed him from a musical Outsider to mainstream icon he said dude if you ever perform live you have got to wear something like this he soon developed a legion of loyal fans that proved their loyalty when dead mouse was nominated in DJ Magazine's online poll of the world's top DJs so many of his followers rushed to vote for him that the site couldn't handle the traffic and crashed yeah once again a mouse caused some unexpected technical errors regulation as for the rest of the story well you know the story because this is before they're famous my name is Michael mccredden and I do a whole lot of celebrity bios I haven't done a DJ before or maybe I have if I have let's have one of the editors put it next to my head right now uh but there's something for everyone on this channel we do rappers we do singers we do actors we do comedians we do athletes and of course we do them important stars and the YouTubers those are my favorite anyway guys browse around hit subscribe and I'll see you guys in another [Music] video h