From DJ Culture To DJ Meme
The DJ industry has devolved into a shit show of influencer and grifter DJs who are being subsidized by janky promoters, blood-sucking booking agents, and party people who are content with a DJ’s set so long as he/she plays the song they requested. This week I’ve been accused of being a “hater” for saying the latter and “angry” because “DJs” like Grimes are the ones getting booked at the stages of Coachella and not me.
If I’m angry, it’s not in a sinful way. If I’m angry it’s in a virtuous way. One thing I am guilty of is being disappointed in my DJ contemporaries. Pay special attention to which of your favorite DJs have remained quiet concerning the recent Grimes debacle at Coachella this past weekend. Mahatma Gandhi says, “Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”
If a DJ you idolize hasn’t said shit about last weekend’s Grimes fiasco at Coachella it’s because they’ve sold out the art form they built their names off to brand sponsorship and “relationships” with promoters and festival organizers. The DJ industry in 2024 is truly 🤮.
At times this week, it has felt as though I am the only DJ of my contemporaries who feels concerned about how normalized mediocrity is in the digital age of DJing, and the idol worship by fanboys of DJs who couldn’t carry a mix longer than 20 seconds by ear is disheartening. In premodernism, we DJs educated the masses, and the masses celebrated creativity. Postmodern, DJs’ silence indirectly rewards inauthenticity and the “party people” treat DJs with pedestrian talent like gods. The irony is that in 2004, when DJ programs like Final Scratch and Serato first arrived, technology harnessed enormous potential to augment and elevate human imagination. But in 20 years the opposite has happened. Laptops and DJ apps have diluted the art of DJing, and for extra measure, social media has transformed DJing from culture to meme.
The state of DJing will continue to worsen because DJing itself has become too fashionable. Post-Covid Lockdown DJs value aesthetic over authenticity. PCL DJs prioritize what their social media feed looks like over how their DJ sets sound like. Forget 10,000 hours of practice. The only number PCL DJs obsess over are followers. likes and dollar signs. With all this said, I’m writing this blog as a reminder that glaciers may look very pretty from afar, but it’s only when you get up close that you realize how much damage they can cause.
To my Brolic Army students and the rest of the aspiring DJs reading this blog, going viral is not a cultural prerequisite for sharing your creativity. DJ for no other reason than you want to experience the part of you that is Creation itself. The money and the fame will follow if it’s truly meant to.
To the DJ fanboys and fangirls. Please stop romanticizing creativity. By all means, respect someone for their talents. Be inspired by their gifts but no one deserves to be put on a pedestal because they mastered a “Flare” scratch.
Proficiency in DJing should not be shrouded in mystery. No DJ should be seen as an enigma or genius because at the end of the day, what separates the DJ greats from the rest is practice.
AFTERTHOUGHT…
I just want to clarify something for my Grimes advocates but moreover, to my students who’ve been keeping up with Grimes’ miscarriage of DJing. Human perception of time in terms of beats per minute is extremely malleable. Since the human brain focuses best on one thing at a time, factors such as focus, pressure, etc., will radically alter your perception of tempo as you’re DJing. Unless you’re counting beats in your head while simultaneously running a stopwatch till it hits 60 secs, it is impossible to mentally calculate a song’s speed while simultaneously DJing, which by the way was Grimes’ biggest mistake and whoever “taught” her how to “DJ” failed her tremendously. But I digress. Because of the level of multitasking involved with mixing, it’s important to use headphones as they allow us to sonically crack the puzzle of beats per minute instantaneously. DJing takes a very high level of aggregation because you’re listening to the music playing out of the venue house speakers, monitoring the song playing in your headphones, and making the necessary adjustments on your Turntable/CDJ/Controller’s pitch control until both songs lock together in speed. We call this mixing by ear and it’s the most fundamental skill a DJ can have. I wish Grimes luck this upcoming weekend because if she doesn’t learn how to accomplish a mix left to her own devices by the time she steps back up on the Coachella stage, she risks experiencing the same catastrophe. Always remember, DJing is an intuitive art form, not computer science and machines lack intuition.
Shout out to Zach Atom for this short and sweet explanation of the infamy at Coachella this past weekend.