What is a DJ?

[H20nly]

maybe its time for EDM to find a new angle.

yeah like instead of drugs everyone could take echinacea and instead of dudes acting all hard and shit they could stop staring at the DJ (for a few minutes) and dance.

[cmcpress]

they could stop staring at the DJ (for a few minutes) and dance.

^^THIS^^

[Sage]

maybe its time for EDM to find a new angle.

yeah like instead of drugs everyone could take echinacea and instead of dudes acting all hard and shit they could stop staring at the DJ (for a few minutes) and dance.

Or you could just go to less shit clubs?

[H20nly]

yeah, if i pay extra and tuck in my shirt it will be more fun.

[beats me]

yeah, if i pay extra and tuck in my shirt it will be more fun.

I think it’s also a bad idea to go out during the week when you can go out on the weekend and pay twice as much for the same scene with ten times the douche factor.

[H20nly]

well alcohol and pills make such a sweet combo. no one ever fights or gets too out of hand. maybe its worth paying extra and being with more people and more drugs... FESTIVAL! oh yeah! 3 days of teeth grinding, chest pounding love n stuff!

[starving student]

why seek out the respect of being a musician and then try to take the musicianship out of the dj, I don't get it. I have allot of respect for djs and see them no different than any other musician as long as they can play their instrument. Are we talking about something else here or what?…………
you can't have it both ways imo

[memes_33]

Frank Zappa:

"The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively—because, without this humble appliance, you can’t know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a ‘box’ around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall? If John Cage, for instance, says, “I’m putting a contact microphone on my throat, and I’m going to drink carrot juice, and that’s my composition,” then his gurgling qualifies as his composition because he put a frame around it and said so. “Take it or leave it, I now will this to be music.” After that it’s a matter of taste. Without the frame-as-announced, it’s a guy swallowing carrot juice. So, if music is the best, what is music? Anything can be music, but it doesn’t become music until someone wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music. Most people can’t deal with that abstraction—or don’t want to."

if you (or, for that matter, anyone else around you) consider what you are doing as "dj'ing," then you are doing just that.

[beats me]

why seek out the respect of being a musician and then try to take the musicianship out of the dj, I don't get it. I have allot of respect for djs and see them no different than any other musician as long as they can play their instrument. Are we talking about something else here or what?…………
you can't have it both ways imo

Huh?

I’d say less than 50% of DJs are interested in the tradition and technical side of it. It’s a means to an end and tech makes that end a lot easier to achieve. Far more DJs are interested in keeping a dance floor packed with music of their choosing.

I spun my cousin’s wedding a few weeks back and will admit I got a huge warm fuzzy feeling keeping the floor packed with people ranging in age from 3 to 80. And yes I played hits. And no that’s not a given outcome at a wedding…throw in the fact that it was outdoors with limited alcohol on hand and starting the dancing at 6:30 with the sun still blazing down on their heads. That’s not inviting dancing conditions for most people. The playlist still had to be carefully navigated to keep people on the floor, no huge tempo changes…wedging in AC/DC without people losing interest and being able to go back into dance music without a hiccup. Throw no less than 4 complete stops for typical wedding activities like cutting the cake, toasts, garter toss, etc. then having to win people back on the floor instead of feeling like they should just go home for the night.

But was I using respected skills during any of it? Fuck no. Do I care? Fuck no. Did anybody there care? Fuck no again. I respect DJs that approach it like a musician but I don’t put my own skills or interest in that category and a lot of other DJs don’t either.

[starving student]

to be honest I don't think the op or the article in question is talking about wedding entertainment, it's not comparable but the fact that you are comparing the two is kind of my point, you can't have it both ways, these people selling out stadiums and clubs are either musicians or not, and there's nothing wrong with not being a musician why should there be, but then when they turn around and want to be treated like a musician it's at that time that it doesn't make sense.

[regretfullySaid]

Signals are starting to get mixed here because there are 2 different arguments going on.

1. What is a DJ? Someone playing music to get the crowd dancing; take them on a journey.
This brings in the 2 questions:
a: Are you doing it because it's popular and you can be famous?
b: Are you doing it because you love music and you want to play music and make a crowd dance

2. Is Dj'ing musicianship?

Just wanted to clarify that, as Starving is saying Wedding DJ'ing doesn't have anything to do with the OP, which he is saying is about #2

Regardless, there's a huge point in the wedding dj'ing story, which is about THE ROLE OF THE DJ.

Personally I'm tired of both arguments, as Andydes previously put it.

It's just the lines have gotten blurred because of controllers and producers who feel they need to perform in order to get $$$ because of how things have changed. You have the traditional dj and then the controllerist who wants to "hyper-remix" their own shit live and then there's the huge hodgepodge in between those 2.

For the sake of argument, who gives a fuck how they do it as long as the crowd isn't just standing around looking at the person on the stage instead of dancing? Both sides need to be there for the right purpose. If the crowd is there to watch the dj do what he does (which they can't unless there's an overhead camera) and the dj is there to be stared at and adored, then they all might as well just jump off a cliff because that seems to miss the point completely and sounds rather fucking boring.

Whether any of them have any taste is a whole other argument....but hey, if it makes you happy...

[starving student]

what I'm saying is that we all understand the context here and in the article, we all use computers, grooveboxes, turntables and midi controllers and consider ourselves musicians but what's with the double standard going on, my little niece can press play, a dj she is not but this little girl is a dj

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wyFQP3joj0

talk about djs wanting to be adored and glorified, what the fuck is so special about a dj that one deserves a double standard not given to any other musician

[beats me]

I can see how the wedding or corporate DJ could be seen as bottom tier but I've also done club and bar gigs where I've done little more than what I was doing at my cousin's wedding with the same results. I've also done a few more under ground genre specific gigs that I found nerve wracking and not as satisfying, possibly because in those situations almost nobody is high or drunk enough to really rock out before midnight and I've always been an earlier DJ. I usually feel like a talentless twat compared to the later DJs, but I don't aspire to much in DJing. How did I get those gigs? Like everybody else, I knew somebody. For me as a DJ my job is to get asses on the floor and keep them there and how I do it is nobody's business.

There's too much luggage attached to the term DJ from those into that culture. If you took the sloppiest of 3 chord punk guitarists up through classical guitar soloist (or whatever) nobody is going to claim neither is a real guitarist. They're both playing guitar. A DJ is somebody who plays mostly some other artists' prerecorded music, period. For whatever reason we have yet to distinctly label all levels of that except for turntablist.

Similarly with my own music I tell people what I do is compose music, but without fail they translate that into me saying I'm a musician. I can play instruments but not at a level where I'm comfortable with musician as my label.

[knotkranky]

I love a good club when it all comes together. A great DJ can make or break that so I don't lump all DJ's together and I'm excluding exceptions to the rule.

Begin Rant:

A real musician can still perform without "music", a DJ cannot. A DJ jams with no one, tho he/she has dozens of real musicians at a button press. Sure, just simply forget about the 80 piece orchestra with a combined music education time of about a thousand years under your index finger.

DJ'ing is more like a one man cover-band. And the whole dramatic button pushing thing is pretty hilarious. Reminds me of WWF or Vegas magic acts. And who needs timing talent if the box will drop your beats right on the 1. Oh, you do that with turntables? 99.9% of people in the club don't care. I prefer tables tho. The rest of us check out the booth to find out how hard yer workin. Pretty silly.

Anyway, DJ'ing is a promoters phenomenon and not a musical one imo and most DJ's are shrewd promoters or their managers are promoters.

It's simply a showcase of great music with all your favorite acts and melodies set to a choreography with options. Practice or program a couple dozen transition cue's n tricks, throw in girls, alcohol, drugs and you bet Tiesto was great, his name was at the top of the advert ffs.

I'd forget about the comparisons or how DJ's relate to other musicians on a competitive scale. It just doesn't relate. It doesn't need to relate to be enjoyable.

No, you're not a musician and stop being so insecure about it.

[andydes]

Really this is just a case of complaining that the talented people are often overlooked while the less worthy get all the respect and the big bucks. It's not just the music industry, the whole world works like this.

I'm an engineer (mechanical design). During the industrial revolution, our lot were the celebrities. They wore top hats and monicles and were the toast of the town. Now, in the UK at least, we're the least well payed profession.

If I were bitter about it, I could point out that the likes of me designed and built the modern world. All of it. The rest of our civilisation grew up around what we do so the rest of you fuckers can all use our shit.

But you know, that's life. So there's no point worrying about it. If you enjoy what you do and do ok out of it, then be happy you don't have shit job. Or no job.

What is a DJ? Does it matter?