I Have Never Gotten Laid

I have never gotten laid as a result of DJing, not even by my wife. Clearly I am doing something wrong. I keep hearing how DJs get laid all the time. Avicii probably died from getting laid too much. Probably because I play dork music.

If you’re a DJ, women are not your friend. They are a menace. Dudes are always fine with whatever music you’re playing. They’ll hold up their drink, give you a big smile and a thumbs up, and leave you alone. But you’ll have a constant stream of annoying girls in and out of the DJ booth, trying to get you to play Taylor Swift or Nicki Minaj, even when it should be painfully obvious that you’re not playing anything remotely close to Taylor Swift or Nicki Minaj. Some of them get really unpleasant.

Let’s examine this for a moment. You walk into a space, and you don’t like the music. You can A., just roll with it like a normal human being, or B., make a nuisance of yourself. For whatever reason, some people choose B. I have only done this once in my life. A fancy steakhouse in Myrtle Beach was playing M.I.A. I was like, guys, are you really sure this is the right vibe? Play some Sinatra. The waitress said, “The music is a source of constant disagreement here.” I could tell. The steakhouse went out of business a year later.

True story: I was playing a party here in Myrtle Beach and I had barely played the first kick when this woman in hippie hair and mom jeans sprinted up to the booth and asked me to play “songs with instructions.”  You know, like the Electric Slide. Holy fuck, that was a long night.

There are two different types of DJs: mobile DJs, and club DJs. Mobile DJs are what you might see at a wedding or class reunion—they show up with their sound system in a van, unload it, and start jukeboxing. They are happy to take requests, and will play whatever you want. That’s their job. Their job is to take requests and keep people happy. I should point out that the bride is always unhappy, for reasons I explained before.

I think being a mobile DJ would be the worst job in the world—you really have no artistic influence; they might as well just hook up an iPod to the sound system and let people pick tracks. I know a few mobile DJs, though, and they really like their job. They have all kinds of stories.

Now, within club DJs, there are two types: Top 40/hip-hop DJs, and underground house and techno DJs. If you go to a club with a Top 40/hip-hop DJ, there is some likelihood that they will take requests, but it is best to leave them alone and let them do their job. It’s a club, after all, and the point of the club is to have the DJ set the vibe, not you, because you’re an asshole, and the DJ is not. The DJ has a plan, he knows what he’s going to play, and if you start making requests, you’re interfering with it. But yes, if you are so inspired, a Top 40 DJ may be able to honor a request, if security doesn’t hip-check you out of the booth.

Not so with the underground house and techno DJs. They’re musicians, they’re artists, and they spend all their time curating or producing music, and they have a very specific idea of how the music should flow throughout the night. Do not make requests of underground house and techno DJs. Particularly if it’s Top 40. And even if it’s not Top 40, there’s a very high chance that the track you are requesting is not even within the genre that the DJ is playing. The genres in dance music are very nuanced—you might be requesting a tech house track while the DJ is playing progressive. It may not seem like a big difference to you, but trust me, it is a huge difference. Shut your piehole and enjoy the music. If you don’t like the music, why don’t you buy some decks and a mixer and spend 10,000 hours DJing and get a gig somewhere and play whatever music you want.

There is no other job out there in which people are constantly second-guessing what you’re doing. You wouldn’t tell a plumber how to plumb. You wouldn’t tell a roofer how to roof. And I think I have identified the source of the conflict. You see, DJing looks easy. It does. Push some buttons, turn some knobs, and music comes out. But ski jumping looks very hard. You’re going 80 miles per hour down a giant ramp, and flying 100 meters through the air. DJing is a lot harder than it looks, and ski jumping, I imagine, is easier than it looks. Nobody tells ski jumpers how to jump. But people tell DJs how to DJ all the time.

The reality is that if you come up to the booth to request a track, there is a 99.99% chance that I don’t have the song you’re looking for. I generally show up to a gig with about 3,000 tracks (they’re uncompressed files, and take up a lot of space), and they’re mostly progressive house, and none of them are Nicki Minaj. So if somebody asks for Nicki Minaj, and I say I don’t have it, you would think that would be the end of the discussion—but then they get pissed, and it turns into a big argument. Some DJs handle this by just saying “yes” anytime someone requests a song…and then not playing it, hoping that they’ll go off and have a few drinks and forget about it. Oftentimes they do. And if they come back, they just push them off again by saying that they’ll play it soon. Avoids the argument. I know a guy in New York named DJ Huggy Bear, a giant body pillow of a man, who hangs up a sign outside the booth: “I Take Hugs, Not Requests.”  He won’t take requests, but he’ll give you a hug. I once hugged Huggy Bear, and that dude does give some amazing hugs.

Anyway, requests aren’t even really the worst part of the job. When you’re DJing in a club, you never know what you’re going to get in terms of equipment. I have something called a “tech rider,” which lists all the gear I am going to need, which I send to the club in advance, then I get to the club and the booth is a fucking shitstorm. I’m fussy about equipment. I don’t like playing on old gear and I want everything to work. DJing on old, shitty equipment can be a high-wire act. I’ve done it before, and done it successfully, but it’s not a lot of fun. I want to spend my time enjoying the music and the crowd, rather than fighting with gear. I get anxiety about this stuff, and I end up bringing my own equipment (extra USBs, extra ethernet cables) in case they don’t have what I need. I would like to say that if I were Tiesto, this probably wouldn’t be an issue, but I imagine even he deals with stuff like this from time to time.

This all probably makes it sound like I dislike DJing. Au contraire—it’s my favorite thing in the world. I would drag my bare balls through a half mile of broken glass just to sniff the tire tracks of the dump truck that would take me to my next gig. It’s a huge adrenaline rush. I’ve probably had 50-100 gigs over the years, and I remember all of them, and I really remember the good ones. In fact, if I were to make a list of my Top 5 memories of all time, I would say that 2-3 of them are gigs I’ve had. Such an incredible feeling. But DJing is widely misunderstood, and there’s a lot that goes into it outside of the time spent behind the decks at the party. It’s thousands of hours of curation, and thousands of hours of practice. Try it sometime. Take a lesson. Try to match beats. And matching beats is hard, but is also the most trivial aspect of DJing. Once you learn how to do it, it’s like riding a bike. The rest is all about having a deep, nuanced understanding of the music, which you develop over years and decades of being immersed in the scene.

So if you come to a Stochastic party, just relax and let me take you on a musical journey. It’s about trust. Trust the guy with 13-plus years of experience. You’re in good hands. And going forward, anyone who makes a request gets the bodyslam.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music Recommendation: The Vincenzo remix of On and Amp by Mutant Clan. One of my favorite house tracks of all time, off the Bedrock label. I used to love Bedrock. This is great shit. And a great opening track.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Feel free to forward to as many people as you like.