"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."
"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."
DJs often command festival-headline fees approaching $1m for short sets while primarily playing music created by others. The role is characterized as proficient labour rather than original artistic creation. Large, willing audiences and alcohol- or drug-altered states make getting people to dance comparatively easy. A long history of floor-filling tracks reduces the difficulty of choosing a few acceptable songs. The critique rejects homophobic or racist disparagement of disco and accepts clubs, dancing and revelry as valuable social practices. Respect is expressed for devoted promoters who organize nights out of love rather than vanity. The cult of the DJ is partly framed as a reaction to 1990s genre snobbery, exemplified by a repurposed 'faceless techno bollocks' T-shirt.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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