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Should DJs who have never taken illegal drugs be banned from the decks?
Dance music used to be all about getting off your chops to some amazing futuristic electronic sounds. The DJs would get as fucked up as...
At what point did remixing mainstream pop rubbish become acceptable?
Don't get DJ Mag wrong, there's been a long tradition of the remix as a credibility boost in the music industry. Back in the day, from the late '80s and the first crossover of house music onwards, dire popstrels of the ilk of Simply Red and the Spice Girls (or rather their record companies) would be queuing up for a taste of authentic dance flavour, getting cool names to remix their tracks in order to boost sales of 12”s.
The problem? Too many DJs...
Slowly and surreptitiously over the course of the last decades, a plague has infested and infected club land. It’s a disease that has eaten away at the core art of the DJ and at the very dynamics of almost any club night you care to attend.
Ageing or raging?
It’s time for fading '90s producers to stop hyping their own records with snotty attacks on EDM and focus on writing some decent tunes…
Time for a history lesson
Memory is a crazy thing. Psychology suggests that huge chunks of our memory are false constructs, whopping great brain porkies designed to bolster up whatever zany truths we’ve decided to believe about the world. Say, for example, that you think of yourself as a virile, dancefloor dominating master of the decks, a near mythical hybrid of Julio Bashmore, Sasha and Larry Levan.
Why is shuffling being mocked and banned?
I’m going to tell you a little story about dancing — this is a dance music mag, after all. It’s 1991. I’m deep in some ramshackle Northern warehouse rave. I’m at one with the universe, have just had my sixth life-changing conversation of the evening and am now busy chatting with my fourth new best friend in the last hour.
When did dance get so damned elitist?
“In the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove… One day Jack declared, "Let there be HOUSE!" and house music was born. And, you see, no one man owns house because house music is a universal language, spoken and understood by all... Jack is the one that can bring nations of all Jackers together under one house. You may be black, you may be white; you may be Jew or Gentile. It don't make a difference in OUR House.”
Commercial dance and rap don't fit
EDM doesn't need rappers legitimising its stadium-sized stasis and banality
Buying Views
“Money can’t buy you love,” sang The Beatles, although most people do want to be loved. This is especially true of a lot of top-flight DJs, narcissists at the best of times, who feel all at sea if they aren’t constantly getting reassurance about how great they are — and popular.