Who earns the easiest money in showbiz? And when I say “earns”, what I actually mean is “gets paid”. If David Guetta and Calvin Harris can make up to $1m for a festival-headlining set – a couple of hours’ work – there can only be one answer: DJs. Because boil it down and all they’re doing for such vast sums of money is quite competently playing music that somebody else actually created. They are proficient labourers rather than artists. In what other field is taking the credit for somebody else’s brilliance so venerated?
Ah, but they get people dancing, you say. Yet how difficult is it to get people to dance when they have come out with the specific intention of dancing, and a reasonable proportion of them are on another planet? These people have invested heavily in having a good time, so it invariably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given the sheer number of floor-filling tunes made during the past six or seven decades, it’s hardly a great feat to choose a few that other people will tolerate or even like.
To be clear: my disdain for DJs is not an exhumation of the racist and homophobic “disco sucks” campaign, or a tired reclamation of “real music” (whatever that is). I have nothing against clubs, clubbing, “repetitive beats”, revelry, dancing, music, people enjoying themselves, fun, humanity. And I should add that I respect and admire those who are so proselytising about their musical genre of choice that they put on their own club nights for the love of it, rather than as some self-aggrandising vanity project. I just find the totemic worship of “The DJ” really weird.
I think I at least understand where this need comes from. In the early 1990s, dance music was so often dismissed as “faceless techno bollocks” by a sneering music press that Rising High Records repurposed the phrase for a T-shirt. The cult of the DJ feels like a reaction against that sort of genre snobbery.
More importantly, clubbing is a communal act; it’s all about coming together, and so it helps if there is some sort of human focal point. Whereas at gigs that focus is clearly the artist on stage, at a club … well, the people who created the art aren’t there, so the person working the record player gets the vicarious adulation. All the other people who, in their own small ways, make your evening special – the bar staff, the lighting engineer, the cab driver who takes you home – are eclipsed by the chancer taking the massive decision of whether to play I Feel Love or One More Time next. No wonder it goes to their heads.
At the start of the 00s, I worked at a dance music magazine for a couple of years. Many of the regular contributors were DJs, presumably commissioned on the basis of “Hey, if they can successfully drop a needle on to a spinning record and be lauded for it, how hard can writing be for them?” I’ll spare you the answer to that. But I will just say that years of being surrounded by slack-jawed sycophants had left many of them with a disproportionate sense of their own brilliance.
If anything, that distorted sense of their worth is even worse now than it was then. The number of celebs queueing up for their turn on the decks does rather suggest that it should be seen more as a glorified hobby than a proper job. Don’t try to tell me that the likes of Paris Hilton or Gok Wan could transfer their “skillsets” to anything difficult. It’s proof, were it needed, that DJing is not a real job – it’s time to put the “dancy” back into “redundancy”.
Phil Mongredien is joint production editor for Guardian Opinion and Long Reads
