Is DJ culture slowly dying?
- Feb 18, 2009
I feel slightly odd to be babbling on about this, but when venturing out to local clubs and even further afield, it shocks me that there is a lack of vinyl being used by so called "DJ's".
When every other kid my age was fascinated by some white boy rapper called Eminem and some nu-metal monkeys called Limp Bizkit, myself and a few other friends would instead be engulfed in drum and base, trance, electronic and gabber style shenanigans. As we badly tried to mix one record together to perfect our craft, I'll always remember people asking why we bought records on vinyl instead of CD. MP3 was still a few years away.
There was some sort of shared spirit and community amongst ourselves when listening to vinyl. Everyone brought round their collection of freshly bought releases and bootlegs. Evenings and afternoons would be spend listening to them and working out the best song to blend it in to.
Coming to the tedious age of fourteen, it was time to start sneaking out to gigs to witness bands and DJs overload us with noises that you couldn't get from traditional instruments. The first DJ set I ever really witnessed was when I saw an unknown someone warm up for Orbital. To a couple of kids, it was an amazing experience to see someone control a room of people with a few black discs. People buzzed around the dancefloor, but it could have been down to the pills and strange green liquid that some were drinking.
Over the years, hazy memories recollect nights in sweatbox clubs whilst people roll out everything from hard house, trace, electro, gabber drum and base, glitch, noise and a few others in between that don't really fit in to any sort of category. Randomly, the best set I ever saw was a free gig that was hosted in my local train station. DJ Dexter, who was at one point a part of The Avalanches, rolled in to town and defied all the laws that I thought made up DJ'ing.
Long before DJ Yoda came on to the scene, I witnessed every single sort of style being mixed perfectly quickly and efficiently. The highlight of his set had to be when System Of A Down's Chop Suey was somehow mixed in to Aphex Twin's Windowlicker. Combining angry metal in to sleazy drill and base didn't seem possible.
All of these times were good and will remain to be good until something else comes along and blows me away. But will it happen anytime soon? I don't think so. Over the years the CD deck has come along and pretty much transformed the way that DJs carry out their sets. Armed with a mixer containing a million channels, the creativity of DJing just seems to have died. Well for me anyway.
Sometimes I can't really be sure that someone I'm seeing is even playing live. Due to the ease of technology it is easy enough for people to record at home, alter the track and make it sound like they are manipulating the song in front of a thousand strong crowd. All I will say is that DJing off CDs' beats carrying heavy record boxes around. Hooray for cutting back pain!
On a plus, with CDs you can actually see someone hunched over a CD deck as they prepare to mix and match various tracks together. What really annoys me and will destroy DJing as I know it altogether are the evil machines known as laptops.
Like using Wikipedia to copy chunks of an essay, laptops are the lazy way out of performing properly. With so much software out there like Traktor, anyone can pick two songs and let the computer beat match for you. Grr, it makes me slightly annoyed that I'll be paying £15+ to go to a decent club to see someone sitting over a laptop whilst they're probably downloading porn or updating their Twitter feed.
Perhaps it's time to start one of those pointless Facebook groups. Maybe we should all cry out for real DJs to come back and use tools of the trade called vinyl. As long as the turntables are working, we don't need sixteen track mixers that are essentially the guitar pedals of the clubbing world.
A DJ is not a fat balding man in a pub who can successfully crossfade two tracks together or have the intelligence to select his next song on iTunes when the last one ends. Most people load their laptops with thousands of tracks to unleash on unsuspecting punters. However, with so many songs, you don't get to know the tracks like you would on a slab of vinyl. So to speak. When purchasing a 12", you have to listen to it, know when the breakdowns are and when it's running out! Unlike CD, you can't simply rewind if you miss the point for mixing in the next song. Everything has to be down on the cuff and without help from a machine.
Hopefully, I won't be walking round a museum one day and overhear a child say: "Mummy, what are those big shiny black discs? Did people really listen to them in the olden days?"
I'm off to single handily burn my CD collection.
