why i DJ

Claiming to be a DJ these days feels more like a cry for help. It’s like buying a Camaro or a Mustang. Yes, on the outside it looks kind of cool, but it screams that you crave attention or that you are getting old and trying to cling to whatever form of cool that you had when you were younger. I get it.

With software just about anyone can be a DJ and sound relatively professional. This has attracted the masses who think they have great taste in music and can get a dance floor moving. This has made being a DJ cliche and feel “douchey.” 

“So if you understand the stereotype that everyone has of the DJ, why do you include it on your website full of deep wisdom and interesting perspectives?”

That’s a fair question you ask. And thank you for the compliments about my other content. That means a lot. 

As an empathy junkie, I am fascinated by what motivates people and what drives them to make decisions and take action. I know that for many, including myself, that music plays a special role in not only creating emotional responses, but also in how memories are created. (Sidenote: The stronger the emotion or emotional response, the better the mind will remember something…but this is something I should probably cover in an essay and not here. Just trust me when I say that emotions and memories are inseparable.) We all have songs that elicit emotions: the birth of a child; the death of a loved one; the summer your friend got a convertible and you cruised all over town with the music on eleven. 

For me, I have a song or a playlist for just about any emotion that I am feeling. Heartbreak. Joy. Pain. Even boredom. Music is the soundtrack of my life (hic). (Sidenote: What is “hic?” It’s something I just made up to let the audience know that I have intentionally done something dumb or incorrect in the name of humor. If “sic” tells the audience that there is an intentional spelling or grammar mistake, “hic” is the extension of this for humor’s sake. This probably won’t catch on, but I kind of like it.) Being a DJ then provides me a platform to not just express how music affects me, but also connect with the audience. 

There are a lot of bad DJ’s. Or maybe I should say that there are a lot of DJ that don’t really connect with their audience. This is why I suspect that being a DJ has become so cliche. 

There are three skills that are required to be a “good” DJ: 

1. Having an appreciation for music across genres (rock, rap, hip-hop, jazz, hippy, Norwegian folk, etc) and an ear for discerning what is good and bad within those genres. I realize that this last part is subjective and depends on the person hearing the music. This leads to the second skill.

2. An understanding of the audience and what evokes an emotional response from them. This is where I think a lot of DJ’s fall short. It’s easy to believe that your taste in music is bestowed upon you from the gods and that you have a divine mandate to share this skill with the world. The hard part is to set that aside and truly understand your audience. What tracks will get that person that you have nothing in common with out of their chair and onto the dance floor? This requires a lot of empathy.

3. Technical skill and musicianship. To be a good DJ you not only have to understand the tools to “spin” the tracks, but have an understanding of music and song structure to mix those tracks into an emotion-provoking “banger” (that’s DJ slang for a track that gets the crowd into a frenzy). 

It’s this last part where I fall short as a DJ. I have enough skill to create tracks and mixes. I know enough about music to not embarrass myself. But I am aware of the gap in talent and knowledge that I have. But the only way to make that gap smaller is to practice, practice, practice (it’s also directions for how you get to Carnegie Hall). So I post things here on my site as a way to get better. It’s not just a way to gauge my skills as a DJ, but to gain a better understanding of what moves an audience. I perceive my DJ’ing as not any different than what I do in marketing. It’s demand-generation through music. 

As with marketing, a good DJ needs to have a point of view. I approach being a DJ from two primary areas:

1. My extended mixes are built around a theme or an emotion. I want to explore a topic through an entire mix with a wide range of tracks. Emotions are complicated and longer mixes allow me to explore the complexities and subtleties of each. This is not to say that these always somber. In addition to exploring themes such as depression, suicide, and jealousy, I have made mixes about holidays, road trips and friends. Often I will create my own tracks to include in these mixes. (Sidenote: By “create” I mean a mash-up, or the blend of two different tracks to create a single new track. I am not writing or playing music.)

2. Some of the most interesting things come from two seemingly disparate ideas. Not just in music, but in life. I like to explore things that may not seem to go together: country and industrial. Jam-band and hip-hop. Seventies soft-rock and electronic. There is beauty in the juxtaposition of these contrasting styles. 

Let me answer the original question: Why do I include this DJ section here on my website? Because what I do with my mixes is no different than what I do with the other sections. It’s just another way to explore those same topics. 

But then again, maybe I am more “douchey” than I think.