‘Wake Me Up’: Google Doodle Remembers Swedish Pop Superstar Tim Bergling 'Avicii'
It’s Tim Bergling’s 32nd birthday. The superstar DJ-producer known by stage name Avicii died by suicide at the age of 28, but not before creating music that forever altered the trajectory of Pop genre
New Delhi: It has been three years since Tim Bergling died, at the age of 28, but the music created and left by the Swedish Pop icon best known by his stage name Avicii has kept him alive in millions of hearts.
It’s his 32nd birthday today, and Google Doodle has dedicated a video set to “Wake Me Up”, one of his most iconic tracks, to celebrate the “superstar DJ, producer, songwriter, and humanitarian”.
Avicii’s music is “widely considered to have forever altered the trajectory of the Pop genre,” the Google Doodle page says as it seeks to honour his legacy “as one of the first artists to elevate electronic music to mainstream global success”.
On his birthday, the ‘Avicii Memory Board’ on his website avicii.com also has messages pouring in from all over the world.
“Happiest Birthday legend.!! You help me overcome my mental illnesses and you music make me smile at my lowest time” — reads one of the messages.
Aviicii’s Life And Music
Avicii was born as Tim Bergling on this day in 1989 in Stockholm, Sweden. His was a family of creatives, and he had been exposed to multi-genre musical experiences since childhood.
By the age of 16, he had started to mix tunes, before taking up writing electronic music. His dance anthem, ‘Levels’, under the name “Avicii” came in 2011 and started climbing the Pop charts, one of the first electronic music tracks to do so.
In 2012, he was joined by superstar Madonna to close the Miami Ultra Music Festival. The duo broke the live stream viewer record the festival had held until then.
The same year, humanitarian Bergling’s ‘House for Hunger’ American tour donated the proceeds to fight food insecurity worldwide.
Bergling also emerged as one of the first DJs and producers to draw the attention that only vocalists and instrumentalists usually got.
During his brief career spanning just around a decade, he bagged several awards, including the Swedish Grammis Awards for Best Innovator in 2012 and Best Artist in 2014, and also the World Music Award for Best Electronic Dance Artist in 2014.
He was nominated for several Grammys in the US and won the American Music Award for Electronic Dance Music Artists in 2013, the Billboard Music Award for Top Dance/Electronic Song in 2014, and the MTV Music Award for Best Dance Music Video in 2018.
Bergling was only in his twenties but had struggled with mental health for years before he died by suicide in 2018.
Earlier this year, Sweden announced that Stockholm’s Ericsson Globe Arena would be named after him and called Avicii Arena. The event venue is now a hub for the exchange of ideas centered around mental health issues.
The Tim Bergling Foundation, founded by the Bergling family, is working to remove the stigma attached to suicide, promoting awareness on mental health, especially among the youth across the world. It also aids in work towards climate change, global hunger, and preservation of wildlife and endangered species — areas where Tim had a passion.
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