No Respect

I’ve seen some Rodney Dangerfield clips over the last few years on social media, and man, is that guy underappreciated. One of the most underrated comic geniuses of all time.

DJs get no respect. I think DJing is one of those things that looks easy but is actually very hard, while I think ski jumping is one of those things that looks hard but is actually very easy. Dollars to donuts there is a ski jumper on this list that is going to vulture in on the comments and ackshually me, but yeah, apart from mustering up the courage to go off bigger and bigger jumps, the rest of it amounts to turning yourself into a flying squirrel.

DJing, in fact, is very hard. Come over to my house sometime, and join me in my music studio, and we will see how well you do matching beats. Even before you match beats, you have to understand musical phrasing. And then, you have two tracks playing at different speeds, and you have to pitch it up or down to match the speed, then spin the jogdial to get the beats in line, otherwise it sounds like shoes in a dryer. It is a bit like when you were six years old and learned how to ride a bicycle, although you probably learned how to ride a bicycle in a few weeks. It took me two solid years before I was truly proficient at beatmatching. And like riding a bicycle, once you learn how to do it, you never forget. Of course, these days, we have the sync button, which will match beats for you, but you can’t rely on it, because sometimes Rekordbox analyzes the track incorrectly, or some other shit goes wrong, and you have to improvise in the middle of a performance. But my point is that the whole thing looks very easy. Press some buttons, turn some knobs, music comes out. How hard can it be?

The reality is that beatmatching is only 10% of it, or less. Just like a guitar player who has to practice until their fingers bleed, a lot of the work that goes into a DJ performance happens in the days leading up to the performance, downloading and curating music. DJs are arbiters of taste, and the best DJs frequently have the best taste. This requires hours, days, and weeks of listening to music. I probably listen to music 8-10 hours a day. I listen to music while I am working, and right now, as I am tapping out this essay on my couch, I am listening to music on my new Bowers & Wilkins headphones. It’s not passive listening, it’s active listening. When I am listening to music, I am test-driving tracks, thinking, this song would be great for a peak time set, or this song would be good for an opening set, or this would be a great closing track, or I shouldn’t have downloaded this at all, it sucks. And apart from knowing what the music sounds like, you have to know a little bit about the producer, and you also have to know the label, and what kind of music they put out. For example, right now I am listening to a track from D-SHIFT, which is the progressive alias of one-half of the techno duo Drunken Kong. D. Singh and his wife DJ Kyoko live in Japan and tour around and play gigs with their toddler in tow. Kyoko used to be a model. It’s on the Tronic label, which is run by long-timer Christian Smith, who released 138bpm techno for years, but is now transitioning Tronic into a progressive label. I don’t like the track very much, but I know there will be good things coming out of Tronic.

I know all this. I know all this because I have been butt-deep in the music scene for nearly twenty years. I could give you the background on practically any track or producer. All of this takes work, naturally, but it is a different sort of work than practicing guitar until your fingers bleed. And if you are watching someone play guitar, you have a real appreciation for all the work that went into it, all the hours and hours of practice, but if you are watching a DJ, it all looks very easy, turning knobs and flapping your arms around like a signalman. So people generally think DJs are assholes. Not that there aren’t assholes out there, because the barriers to DJing get lower all the time (sync button), but if you go to a legitimate nightclub, there is a good chance that everyone performing really knows what they were doing. One personal opinion: old, gray-haired DJs are better. It takes years, decades even, to refine your taste, and build up a big library of music. Go see someone like John Digweed and report back.

So I am a little tired of the DJ disrespect. And I’m not saying I’m Danny Tenaglia or anything. I don’t have 50,000 vinyl records. It’s not my full-time job. But I put more work into it than most, and I will add one thing—I do it for a love of the music. DJing looks like fun, up in the booth in front of a big crowd, everyone going nuts with their hands in the air—it really is a great feeling to move a room. But even if I never performed again, I would still be downloading and listening to music every week. I’ve been doing it for two decades.

In case you are the uninitiated, we should draw a distinction between wedding/mobile DJs and club DJs. I am a club DJ—I curate electronic music and perform in clubs. If you come to me with a request, you will come back with a bloody stump. When I play, I show up with a USB and a pair of headphones. Wedding DJs have to haul their shit all over creation, spending hours setting up and breaking down, and then play the same 25 songs over and over again at every wedding, taking dumb requests, and dealing with bridezillas. Hard pass. It is a tough job. Some people get a real kick out of it, though—I have a high school buddy who was once a wedding DJ and he loved it. Gag me with the lowest of the lowbrow spoons. The chicken dance. The Electric Slide. The Macarena. Party Rock is in the House Tonight. Blow my fucking brains out. I will give you a quote: A wedding DJ will play the music you want to hear. A real DJ will play the music you didn’t know you wanted to hear.

But yeah, most people don’t have any comprehension of the world of electronic music. They understand guitars. A guitar makes sense to them, or piano, or drums. You practice and you get good at it. A DJ is, above all, a curator, much like a curator in the art museum. I don’t paint the paintings; I just decide where to hang them, and there is an art to that, too. But then there are DJs who actually do paint the paintings: the producers, the people who actually make the music. I have told everyone within pissing distance that I am going to produce music when I finally retire. Maybe at 65, maybe at 70, who knows. But I will clear the trading computers out of my office and build a massive music studio, and get out of bed every morning and produce music full-time. Why don’t I do it now? Too hard. Too time-consuming. Too much work. I basically have three full-time jobs, and if I wanted to produce music, I’d be up all night, and I value my sleep too much to do that. I will be a 65-year-old music producer if it kills me. Maybe I’ll produce trance and get my tracks released on Anjunabeats and travel around and play festivals as a senior citizen. Why not?

But yeah, among my friends and neighbors, there is very little understanding of what I do or how important it is. A reminder: I opened for Zedd at Omnia—and brought the house down. That’s like playing in Carnegie Hall. But to them, I’m standing there pushing buttons and turning knobs, and…they don’t see what the big deal is. To play a two-hour DJ set is to tell a story, from start to finish. You bring up the energy (and sometimes the tempo) over time, until you have the place ready to explode at the end of your set. This is very, very hard to do. I still go to clubs, as a spectator, even at age 52, because I am doing research and development. I want to listen to live music to get ideas for my own sets. When I was living in NYC, I went to clubs all the time, and listened to the best. I knew that when I moved to South Carolina in 2010 that it was really going to cramp my style in terms of music. And it has. But I’ve put in the reps—hundreds of thousands of hours listening to music, making mixes, posting them on SoundCloud, hustling gigs, generally making a nuisance of myself, promoting parties, pumping social media—for many people, it is a full-time job. I make time for it in between trading and writing books and newsletters and teaching.

Here is something I do. If I am in a club (or even at a wedding) I always go up and compliment the DJ. Always. Did it at a wedding over the weekend. If they’re busy, I just give them a thumbs up. Even at the highest levels, it can be a thankless job. You’re always dealing with some C U Next Tuesday that doesn’t like your music. If you were playing a guitar, they would keep their mouth shut. But a DJ is a second-class citizen. At every event, there is some guy standing in the crowd saying to himself, “That looks easy. I could do that.” At that point, 2 CDJs and a mixer should lower from the ceiling, and a booming voice would say, Well, do it then, dickhead! I took a few lessons from my friend Mike Lingle when I got started, back in 2008. He gave lessons to many people. I was the only one who stuck with it—too hard for everyone else. If it was easy, everyone would do it, right?