A D.J. Could Save Your Life Tonight

Photo by Chad Batka

(via The New York Times)  By

On New Year’s Eve, you’ll be dancing, one hopes. If you’re lucky you’ll be dancing to an honest-to-God disc jockey — not to someone’s Spotify playlist or the musings of the latest demi-celebrities to fancy themselves party conductors. A real D.J. is part shaman, part tech-wizard, part crowd psychologist, all artist. Many people claim the title but far fewer embody it.

That’s because, for the art of D.J.ing, technology has been as much of a disrupter as it has been a boon. New software and hardware tools allow the neophyte to deploy a base version of skills that take decades to perfect. We’ve also seen the nurturing of an entire generation for whom music is an à la carte experience. Add to that the skepticism, if not outright hostility, much of our society shows toward the notions of expertise and hard-won knowledge…

Read more:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/opinion/sunday/dj-save-your-life.html

Dear David Guetta…You Suck.

guetta

(Reprinted from Melkor)

by Scott Melkor

Dear Dave (can I call you Dave?),

How are you? It has been a really long time! I hope that you are doing great.

Anyway, I was writing to let you know that you are the worst and represent everything that is wrong with DJ and EDM culture. I recently had the displeasure of reading your interview with Beatport. Riveting stuff, really. I particularly enjoyed the following excerpt.

“Not everything went smoothly behind-the-scenes, though.. Something crazy happened to me on the [first weekend],” he says. “I’m using Rekordbox and Pioneer to play, and before I saved my playlist to my SD card, my computer crashed. So I just had to put all my music in a random order on USB sticks at the last minute, doing it really old school, scrolling to look for the records I wanted to play next.”

There are so many things wrong with you, and with this paragraph, that I felt compelled to write you this heartfelt letter…

Read more: http://themelkerproject.com/

%d bloggers like this: