Aug 24 2008
Where Have All the DJs Gone?
BY THEBOSTONBACHELOR.COM / August 24, 2008
Friday night a friend and I ended up getting free tickets to a shindig hosted by Nicole Richie and Joel Madden. Yes, we decided to go. Don’t look at me. To be honest, I had no fucking clue as to who Joel Madden was; I thought he was the guy who designed handbags. Needless to say, about 20 minutes into the night I find out that he’s the host DJ and a member of the band Good Charlotte. Though I didn’t know any of the band’s songs, I figured that this guy, being in the music scene for a while, at least had some musical sense?
Well it turned out that the setlist for the night was the same typical shit you’d hear in any Ed Hardy sportin’ club. Not the worst I’ve ever heard, not the best, but just your typical safe, setlist. A little bit of G-Funk, a little bit of dance club hip-hop, and of course that annoying “Music is my boyfriend / music is my girlfriend” song. That’s when I had to ask myself, “Seriously, what ever happened to the art of DJing?” The days of Grandmaster Flash, Mix Master Mike, Cut Chemist, DJ Q-Bert, DJ Premier, and DJ Shadow are long gone. I mean, even that kid from the movie Juice would probably blow most of the current “DJs” out of the water.
The fact remains that the art of DJing has fallen somewhere between a plastic drinking bird toy hitting random keys on a keyboard and the shuffle feature on your iPod. Unfortunately, this trend will only expand in the indefinite future. Thanks to hard drive technology, broadband filesharing, and lossy compression, any bored asshole out there with a laptop, some freeware software, and an hour of spare time can claim to be a DJ. Shit, even me.
-The Boston Bachelor
