Is DJing an art?
Not the way I did it
I was a bad DJ. Not as bad as the DJ who climaxed his memorial set at Trade to house legend Tony De Vit by playing Cher’s ‘Believe’ and got chased out of the club with whatever the muscle Mary equivalents are of banjos and pitchforks. Or as bad as the DJ at a rave so ferociously coked up he kept snapping at successive petitioners, “Soz, don’t do requests,” apparently unaware that for the past half hour he’d been playing the Ghostbusters theme on a loop. Reading the room (or dance floor) is one of the more advanced DJing skills. I, though, was bad even at the basics: beat-matching (you can forget key-matching); choosing a DJ name that won’t make you blush in years to come (say, Fatboy Saleem).
Music not only is the most time-bound art-form but in the purest way, more so than the narrative arts (which really are about cause-and-effect), and in a particular and technical way when it comes to DJing. Particularly DJing with vinyl records: without having audio waveforms visualised for you or a computer to do the job. If it’s an art then it’s one of timing on several levels.
You have to listen to the tempo of the record playing on the speakers (or monitor) and the tempo of the record you plan to put on next playing on your headphones, and hear which is faster or slower and so adjust the tempos to match, subtly enough your audience doesn’t notice. You’d be surprised how hard it is for the untutored ear to tell apart two tempos that aren’t obviously divergent. After a lot of fruitless practice, the skill pops into place like the day you realised as kid you could finally balance on your bike. Once you’re confident the records are beat-matched, you have to work out where to align them, when to mix across from the current to the next. Usually this means overlapping the outro of the record finishing with the intro of the one starting; most dance records are in 4/4, and their opening and closing bars are helpfully beats-heavy, providing an obvious ‘cue point’. But sometimes you’ll have to figure out how to drop in a record that opens with a beat-less swirl of sound or a brass fanfare or an a cappella vocal whose tempo you have to judge with your own foot-tapped cappella. And you have only the length of each record playing - three, four minutes - to beat-match the next, find your cue, then mix into the next record before the last runs out and leaves a humiliating, music-free gap—the hated ‘dead air’. (It’s not just for the visual similarity you can liken DJing to spinning plates.) This gives DJing a continual time-bomb element. The longer you take the more there’s a rising panic of ‘ah shit!’ and quicker and shorter resets. One time, with the current record ominously paring down to nothing but its drum-beat, I rushed putting on the next in a literal, physical sense: I didn’t fit it onto the turning pin, and it and the slipmat flung off the platter in a spirograph twirl. All your equipment is disturbable. The weighted but weightless-feeling record arm sways and bobs too sensitively, the needle screeching across the vinyl like a fingernail stuttering down a blackboard. Two records that’d seemed in sonic and even visual sync can creep out of it, a compounding error that needs time to reveal itself when a few minutes is all you have. You lower your communal headphones - the perished cushioning like dog-paw pads - to check your tentatively beat-matched tunes only to hear on the monitor a terrible clatter—what Boy George called “the sound of a drag queen falling down the stairs.” The cross-fader - a little toggle in a horizontal slot - is both saviour and stigma here. No matter how in sync or out two records sound, the cross-fader pushes the incoming one to the fore and hushes the outgoing. But fade across too sharply and you admit your failure out loud. (The cross-fader always felt to me like it was slicing through something not totally giving.)
Vinyl DJs might not have the hands-on musicianship of turntablists, or even of modern club DJs who can live-remix records with their MIDI controllers or add effects and samples with Kaoss Pads. But neither do vinyl DJs have only the curatorial role of a playlist-maker who just sits and hits play. The other skill of DJing is deciding what to play when: having an idea for how a set might go as per the venue or night while being able to riff, go on tangents, improvise as per the ebbs and flows of the crowd. In a flash, you decide to swap the record you’d planned for one you think’ll intensify the atmosphere better and so go leafing through your record stack. (Not too haphazardly, mind. With the multiplier-weight of vinyl, the majority portion of your records tends to slump back and crush your fingers.) That’s what makes foreign records shops so appealing - more so than foreign bookshops, where there’s a language barrier you don’t get in dance music - shops that smell of dry ice and weed, with records in whitewashed rough-edged MDF boxes, Galapagos Islands of musical discoveries only you get to bring back and show off.
There are DJs whose sets are like exhibitions of the exotic, tasting-samplers of white labels. Progressive house DJs especially like to boast of “taking you on a journey” (‘Dancers taken on a journey end up in Lyme Regis’ as the old Mixmag joke goes). Other DJs are stern teachers. They don’t play crowd-pleasers but crowd-refiners; instead of drawing in more dancers they sort the riff from the raff, “cleansing the dance floor”. Cleansed dance-floors often don’t repopulate; no one likes the smell of cultural Dettol. The inverse of these are DJs with a sense of humour, ranging from cringe - a Windows error sound that turns out to be an intentional sample remixed into the set - to Dadaist pranks like following a synthy break not with the re-dropped beat but an entire episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, booing of the crowd notwithstanding. Or mash-ups so daft they become transcendent. Slyer jokes too, like the DJ at party at an ad agency who sampled Bill Hicks’s “If you work in marketing, kill yourself” bit—or least I think it was a joke and not a Barleyesque co-option.
The power to make or fuck with everyone’s night is the attraction of DJing. Look at the way they arrive, the DJs, with their chrome-shoulder-padded record cases, heavy as a church bell, look at them fiddle with EQs like they’re tightly navigating a spaceship, literally leaning in while making a stank face. Every dancer their cheer-leader. Hitting stop for the slow-mo wind-down of the final record has the dancers clamouring ‘One more’, their version of ‘encore’. Talk about audience participation! DJing warrants such clichés as ‘putty in my hands’ or ‘the audience hanging on your every word (or tune)’. A displeased audience in a club can always try one of the other rooms; at a house party you’re the only show in town—talk about a captive audience!
It’s not just the response of the audience but the tiny gap between them and performance that makes DJing almost unique (or in the same category as live music - more gigs than recitals - where dancing during a song or cheers either side tell the musicians how well they’re doing). At a play the actors, usually the director, maybe even the playwright get to see the audience reaction live, but then theatre-goers aren’t meant to be that reactive, not before the final curtain anyway. Spoken word poetry gets an odd mid-performance whoop from the worst people in the world. Film and TV creators might be mad enough to follow a hashtag on air-date, producers might sink to using those dystopian audience-feedback remote-controls, but otherwise they’ll only see a live reaction at a premiere (“Baloney!” Christopher McQuarrie reports an old man yelling after the festival premiere of The Usual Suspects). While with a book you have to either read your reviews or over somebody’s shoulder.
The more po-faced fans of stand-up comedy sometimes make the case it’s an art and of the purest sort with reasoning which could apply to DJing. Both DJing and stand-up make their audience feel more reliably, potently and obviously than other art-forms. They have an obvious marker of audience satisfaction - dancing or laughing - and audiences too that are in contexts where they’re meant to show this sat- or dissatisfaction. With both, the feedback is immediate and even feeds into the performance, an intimacy other art-forms can only dream of. With both, the performance is the creation: notes and planning and practice aside, the ‘art’ happens live. (Gigs and concerts mostly involve music that the musicians wrote, DJ sets mostly not; but if there’s an art to collage then shouldn’t there be to DJing?) In fact both DJing and stand-up have something in common with one-off art happenings, Alan Moore-style magic shows: art as spontaneous, context-dependent, as “you had to be there”.
But what if this is exactly what bars DJing from being art? Is the artist’s job really to marshal the audience’s feelings? And even if so, isn’t a DJ more the audience’s servant than their master, won’t any DJ ultimately have to pander or else see the last dancer walk out (except I guess for those dance-floor cleansers)? Cultural expressions pegged to audience demand are a type of service. They’re an example of what Michael Fried called “theatricality”, meaning a performer’s self-consciousness of performing, of being watched/heard by an audience which leads to exaggeration, falseness: a loss of artistic autonomy to a mutually needy relationship. (And who DJs by themselves but to practice? Which recorded sets aren’t of live performances or essentially auditions?) Art can please, and an artist won’t get far if they never do, but it’s not art if it’s made only to please. It has to be made for itself; in that “has to” lies its freedom. The freedom to please combined with the freedom from having to. My sparse dance floors and lack of invite-backs were probably just signs I was avant-garde.