The supposed role of a DJ is arbiter of musical taste, manipulating and selecting the music most appropriate for an occasion. There’s certainly no shortage of aspiring DJ’s—just look at the craze for “iPod DJ nights.” Nevertheless, without much to distinguish a club’s “iPod DJ” from your friend playing tracks in his basement, these amateur DJ nights always leave something to be desired. The best DJ’s spend years honing their trade, scavenging record stores, understanding music genres and their history and learning the proper ways to transition between tracks. What is truly remarkable is the democratization of music through changes in technology and dissemination methods, bringing DJ culture within arm’s reach of your average trendy teen. What’s changed?
New DJ equipment
One of the hardest parts of DJing is picking records. Since the beginning of the trade, DJ’s have had to lug heavy crates of vinyl (or in recent years CD’s) to the club. It required meticulous decision making and luck to bring the right mix of genres and sounds for an audience. That all changed with the advent of Serato and its predecessor, Final Scratch. These DJ 2.0 tools come with special pieces of vinyl directly linked to your digital music collection on a laptop, allowing DJ’s to play, mix, and manipulate digital music live just as they would a record on a turntable. Ableton LIVE also allows DJ’s to manipulate digital compositions in real time, incorporating new rhythms and effects on the fly. This year, DJ’s have been salivating over the Pacemaker, the latest portable digital music gadget.
New dissemination methods
MP3 blogs and podcasts are influencing the musical landscape like never before. Whereas DJ’s once depended on a record store for new tracks, they can now pick material from a network of musical tastemakers online who post rarities or hot remixes that aren’t commercially available. The influence of MP3 blogs on the DJ community is especially evident in the recent rise of electronic musicians such as JUSTICE and Simian Mobile Disco, who built much of their cult following online before exploding onto dance floors worldwide. Many critics have tagged the phenomenon as “blog house” due to the initial online-generated buzz.
The geek as DJ
The influence of this new technology on DJ culture has allowed a new breed of DJ to rise to fore and make the profession more accessible to the masses. In the late 90’s, “nerdish” DJ’s like Moby and Richie Hawtin gained huge followings by exploiting new DJ technology, leading the way for the adoption of new tools by the DJ community at large. Recent years have seen the trend carry over to the worlds of hip-hop and pop music, where “nerdy” DJ’s like Diplo, Girl Talk and Flosstradamus have used technology to bring new genre-defying mixes of hip-hop, techno, world music and pop to huge audiences.
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