As far as pop culture goes, 2014 was the year of the selfie. In the beginning of the year, there was the great Oscars selfie, a photo that literally broke Twitter for a few seconds. The word existed before, but after that, suddenly news stations and outlets were attempting to cram it into every headline (similar to "twerk" in 2013) and everybody – even the unhippest of parents – was getting on board with the word. 

A part of that selfie insanity was the radio-friendly, irony-drenched EDM hit "#Selfie" from the New York duo The Chainsmokers. The song launched the group into the spotlight, but now The Chainsmokers – comprised of Alex Pall and Andrew Taggart – are looking to show they’re not just about hashtags and tongue-in-cheek mocking millennial trends.

That journey now brings the guys to The Rave on Friday, Dec. 12. Before the show, OnMilwaukee.com got a chance to chat with Pall about "#Selfie," defying the group’s hit and essentially dedicating their latest hit to Yeezy himself, Kanye West. 

OnMilwaukee.com: How did you guys meet up?

Alex Pall: We met just over two and a half years ago in New York. A guy that was interning at the management company we used to be with was working with Drew on stuff and was working with me on stuff, so he knew about our situation and thought we would make a good team. He introduced us, and that’s how it started.

OMC: What did you two see in each other’s music that you thought would really work well together?

AP: Well, at first you have to make sure it’s somebody that you like in general. So we just hung out, and we like the same music for the most part, and we were both ambitious. It was like, "Hey, let’s give this a shot. No harm, no foul." And it worked out. 

OMC: You guys blew up earlier this year with "#Selfie." What were the origins of that?

AP: It was a joke that we just had between us that we thought was funny. We made a song to promote a night that we were playing in Florida in a club. We sent it out to a couple of blogs that we knew would post it to create awareness about our show down there. The song ended getting really popular.

OMC: Did you guys ever run into fans that didn’t really get the irony of the song?

AP: Yeah, I would say like half the world probably. (laughs) 

OMC: Do you feel bad or get tired of having to explain it?

AP: We’ve been pretty clear on our channels about what it is. I still think it catches a lot of people off guard, and they don’t realize that it’s a joke. But that’s just how it is. There are songs I listen to that I didn’t know … like, I didn’t know Foster The People’s "Pumped Up Kicks" was about Columbine.

OMC: The year is coming to a close, and I’m sure a lot of year end stuff is going to about how 2014 was the year of the selfie, with the selfie at the Oscars and your song and the act of a selfie itself blowing up. What do you think it is about selfies that blew up this year?

AP: I think we’re a very vain culture. We love looking at ourselves, and we love putting ourselves out there for people to make judgments. It’s like a diary or scrapbook. There’s so many reasons why the selfie is a cool thing. Also, you don’t want to always ask people to take photos for you, but you always want people to see what you’re doing.

OMC: Were you worried about getting reputation as a gimmick group after "#Selfie"?

AP: Yeah, when we put that song out, we didn’t think it was going to go platinum and sell 10 million copies. We weren’t really concerned at the time. We weren’t worried that our initial core group of fans that we had built up over the years would think this was a new direction we were going in. We were very clear to them that this wasn’t.

But as the song got bigger and bigger, certainly we weren’t like worried about it, but we wanted to address the fact that we knew, in our hearts, that we weren’t going to make another "#Selfie" or a song called "Tinder." We were just excited to show all these new fans that we don’t really give a damn about selfies or anything like that.

OMC: A song about Tinder could be very interesting …

AP: We’ll leave it to somebody else, yeah. (laughs)

OMC: One of your most recent songs is "Kanye." Where did that idea come from?

AP: It was something we heard from these girls called sirenXX, who we had been working with before on a couple of things. At first, we just thought it was catchy, but the more we thought about it, we kind of connected with the song and thought it was a great way to move forward past "#Selfie" and into new territory.

It is such a beautiful song, musically and with the message. And obviously, Kanye is such a polarizing figure. He just does whatever he wants, and he doesn’t care what anybody thinks; he doesn’t worry about that. He just does his own thing, and that’s kind of how we felt coming out of the whole "#Selfie" craziness. We just wanted to do what we were into, and "Kanye" was the perfect message for that.

OMC: It’s an interesting contrast to "#Selfie" because it sounds so sincere and genuine about its message as compared to "#Selfie," which was bathed in irony.

AP: For us, we always stop the music and say "Kanye" is not about Kanye West; it’s about not giving a f*ck and doing your own thing. I think that message resonates with a lot of people in general, whether you like Kanye or not. It’s like a metaphor.

Obviously, we don’t plan to constantly make pop culture references and stuff throughout all of our future music. That’s not our intention. But we saw this as a great opportunity because a lot of people were like, "What’s next? What are you going to do? Are you going to be a one-hit wonder?" While "Kanye" obviously didn’t sell 10 million copies yet, for us – we’re never happy with anything we do – it did realize a lot of expectations that people were questioning about us.

OMC: Did you reach out to Kanye at all, or did you hear anything from him?

AP: When we were making the song, we wanted to run it by him or at least his team because we actually are really big Kanye West fans. We heard back from them that they were cool with it, and that we were cool to move forward it. I mean, we were probably going to do it either way, but we wanted his blessing.

OMC: What for you is the most challenging part of working as an EDM artist nowadays?

AP: I think it’s just not paying attention to all of the riff raff and bullsh*t that constantly exists, between the blogs and artists hating on each other and different genres hating on each other.

But I don’t think we consider ourselves EDM artists by any means. Yes, we started out by making dance music, though our dance music was a lot more indie based. But the stuff we’re working on now and moving forward, there’s definitely a lot of fun, upbeat dance tracks, but a lot of stuff is not in that area at all. In our last two remixes, they’ve been really down tempo.

We’re evolving as artists, and dance music was a great avenue and area for us to show our skills. We love DJing, and the performance aspect is still fun, but even with that, we’re exploring new alleys to up the ante with that. We want to challenge ourselves; we’re not trying to sit back and collect the money and do whatever shows are offered to us. We really want to keep setting the bar high for ourselves and surprising people.