DJ Culture in the Mix

Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music

Bernardo Attias, Anna Gavanas, Hillegonda Rietveld, Bernardo Attias, Anna Gavanas, Hillegonda Rietveld

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623569945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

The DJ stands at a juncture of technology, performance and culture in the increasingly uncertain climate of the popular music industry, functioning both as pioneer of musical taste and gatekeeper of the music industry. Together with promoters, producers, video jockeys (VJs) and other professionals in dance music scenes, DJs have pushed forward music techniques and technological developments in last few decades, from mashups and remixes to digital systems for emulating vinyl performance modes. This book is the outcome of international collaboration among academics in the study of electronic dance music. Mixing established and upcoming researchers from the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Australia and Brazil, the collection offers critical insights into DJ activities in a range of global dance music contexts. In particular, chapters address digitization and performativity, as well as issues surrounding the gender dynamics and political economies of DJ cultures and practices.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Hillegonda C. Rietveld

The electronic dance music DJ: party leader, sonic entertainer, auditory artist, music programmer, record mixer, beatmatcher, cultural masher, music producer, creative music archivist, record collector, sex symbol, role model, upwardly mobile brand, youth marketing tool, dancefloor parent, witch-doctor, tantric yogi, cyborgian shaman, the embodiment of studio-generated music. Mixing music recordings into a long danceable sound track, we find them at work at discos, clubs, rave parties and dance festivals; in smoky dark basements, custom-made dance spaces, squatted warehouses, damp railway arches and lofty penthouse parties; filling stadiums, seducing the beach crowds, playing the crowd. At their best, dance DJs save our nights with their music, push our dancing bodies to the limits of endurance, lull us gently to a restorative state and make us feel reborn. In short, the DJ is endowed with a hefty dose of aura, authenticity and cultural capital; and so are the tools of their trade, not least the residual disco dance single of 12-inch vinyl analogue format. Admittedly, there are plenty of dance DJs offering banal sets of inoffensive dance MP3s, at worst driving their audiences to alcoholism with dull tunes on a distorted soundsystem, as bar-owners count their drink profits. But what do we really know about the dance DJ and the cultural discourses that surround them? Can we explode the myth of the masculine, and increasingly whitewashed, millionaire DJ? How do dance DJs perceive their role, their music, their technologies and their career prospects? What does the DJ do, to make our secret fleeting moments on the dancefloor so special?

Electronic Dance Music

Dance music genres (such as techno, trance, house music, garage, drum ‘n’ bass, dubstep) shatter into a myriad of subgenres, known in the US under the umbrella term ‘electronica’ and more widely understood as electronic dance music, often abbreviated by scholars and journalists as ‘EDM’. However, during 2012 in the US, the rich meanings of the term ‘EDM’ seem to have been narrowed in the popular media to electronic pop-dance (Sherburne, 2012), a marketable ubiquitous music format that cannibalizes globally fashionable electronic textures. The sounds of electronic dance music have been shaped over several decades by audience tastes, DJ practices, production techniques and genre formations associated with discotheques and dance clubs; post-industrial warehouse parties; post-colonial dance halls; countercultural dance festivals; and globally spreading rave parties. An arguable commonality between the diverse sounds, user-groups¹ and spaces that reside under the umbrella of electronic dance music may be a shared relationship to the alienating effects of computerized and accelerated globalization, which is articulated in local inflections (Christodoulou, 2011; Rietveld, 2004).

During the genre development of electronic dance music, the tempo on the dancefloor hardly ever dips below 120 BPM (beats per minute), keeping the pace of the heartbeat rate of a person in exercise, in excitement or even out of their mind, as the accelerating pace can reach tempos to 160 BPM and above. Although acoustic instruments can be heard in the mix, as well as incidental field recordings, the dominant sounds associated with such dance events are electronic, synthesized, sometimes analogue, but mostly digital, with a distinctive dominance of the bass-line and programmed repetitive beats. Butler (2006) offers notational analyses of several drum ‘n’ bass and trance examples, demonstrating differences in rhythmical approaches. Of importance here, though, is the central role of the DJ in the development of such rhythmical structures. For example, breakbeats are produced from, or inspired by, the rhythm breaks that can be found in older R&B recordings, creating flow from these deconstructed, ruptured, components, a practice borrowed from hip-hop and electro DJs. In this way, the genealogy of breakbeats can be traced rhizomically through a soundsystem culture that initially developed in Jamaica (Belle-Fortune, 2004; Christodoulou, in this volume; James, 1997; Keyes, 2002; Reynolds, 1998). By contrast, programmed ‘four-to-the-floor’ disco beats, as can be heard in house music, techno and trance, enable DJs to produce a seamless beatmatched mix that keeps their dancers locked to the dancefloor in a hypnotized state (Gaillot, 1998; Rietveld, 1998, 2004, 2007). In addition, some trance recordings rely on washes of synthesized sounds, rather than on beats, for mixing – initially to enable the Goa-based trance DJ to segue one tape-recorded track onto the next, as the hot climatic conditions of India, where backpacking trance fans congregated during its genre formation in the early 90s, made vinyl unworkable (Rietveld, 2010).

In short, new dance genres evolve as the music is adapted for the DJ. This is mostly done by DJs, both as remixers and as electronic music producers. The specific dance genre formats help DJs to segue the recorded music components of their mix together into a kinetic musical journey. Simultaneously, genres develop in response to the musical preferences of the participants on the dancefloor, who ruthlessly vote with their feet; the more participants feel engaged with, or seduced by, the DJ during a dance event, the more likely dancers will continue dancing – in some cases for hours on end. In this way, the DJ may be regarded as a facilitator (Ferreira, 2008), a component in a network of relationships between the participants, music culture, DJ technology and entertainment business (see also Yu in this volume).

Writing the DJ

As the development of the dance DJ can be traced back over more than 30 years, there is a need for an academic collection wholly dedicated to the DJ in electronic dance music. During the 1990s, several journalistic books appeared in the English language, offering insightful DJ narratives aimed at fans and practitioners – in particular, an extensive volume penned by German journalist Poschardt (1998) and a successful tome by British writers Brewster and Broughton (1999, 2010), both offering useful histories. In addition, Haslam (2001), Phillips (2009) and Belle-Fortune (2004) made their mark in this area. The majority of factual books in which the dance DJ plays a role seem to focus on scene and genre development – important examples can be found on disco (Goldman, 1978; Shapiro, 2005); club, rave and techno music culture (Collin, 1997; Garratt, 1998; Reynolds, 1998; Sicko, 1999; Silcott, 1999); drum ‘n’ bass (James, 1997); reggae soundsystems (Bradley, 2000; David Katz, 2003); and hip-hop (Chang, 2005; Toop, 1984). Finally, there are plenty of technical manuals available that describe the work practices of a DJ, including Brewster and Broughton (2002) as well as Brophy and Frempong (2010).

In the academic realm, a range of research monographs has appeared, helping to constitute an emerging field of DJ studies. Particularly in the area of the electronic dance music DJ, Farrugia (2012) addresses the careers of (female) DJs in the US; Hutton (2006) investigates the role of women as DJs in a British night-time economy; Rodgers (2010) gives voice to women as DJs and music producers; and Rietveld (1998) shows how the DJ authors a fluid musical text in dialogue with dancers. Not only do these research publications define academic DJ studies in the context of electronic dance music, they also explicitly address a gender gap in what is produced in the popular press as a male-dominated occupation, in which the DJ is generally described in the masculine singular third person: ‘he’, ‘his’, ‘him’. Further monographs in electronic dance music offering some reflection on related DJ practices include Anderson (2009), Buckland (2002), Butler (2006), Gaillot (1998) and Thornton (1995). In terms of other, yet related, music scenes, underground disco music DJs of downtown New York are detailed by music historian Lawrence (2003) and ethnomusicologist Fikentscher (2000), while DJ-related histories, aesthetics and techniques in the hip-hop scene are specifically assessed by Mark Katz (2012) and also, to a lesser extent, in publications like Rose (1994) and Keyes (2002). The ‘selector’, as the DJ is called in the context of reggae soundsystems, is usually subsumed by their creative sound engineer and leading ‘toaster’ (called the ‘deejay’, comparable to the talking, rather than programming, radio DJ) but is given some attention by authors like Veal (2007) and Patridge (2010).

In addition, a range of research papers that are dedicated to DJ practices can be found in conference proceedings (Ferreira, 2008; Fikentscher, 1997; Straw, 1995) and particularly in academic journals (Back, 1988; Christodoulou, 2011; Fikentscher, 2001; Hadley, 1993; Herman, 2006; Langlois, 1992; Lawrence, 2011; Nye, 2011; Reitsamer, 2011; Rietveld, 2011; St John, 2011), some of which have been collected by Butler (2012). Furthermore, edited volumes in popular music studies offer a mix of journalistic and academic work in which one can find the occasional chapter or extract that engages with the role of the DJ or the practice of DJing (Gavanas, 2009; Fikentscher, 2003; Ford, 2011; Haslam, 1998; Houssee and Dar, 1996; Rietveld, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2011; Shapiro, 2002; Toop, 2000, 2004).

It is high time, therefore, to introduce an academic collection that is wholly dedicated to the DJ in electronic dance music. After meeting at Graham St John’s electronic dance music panel for the ACS Crossroads conference in Jamaica, Anna Gavanas and Bernardo Attias started the process by producing a special edition on the DJ for Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture (2011). Being part of the Crossroads panel I joined them after the journal publication for the current edited collection, which morphed into a stimulating international collaboration between a mix of established and young researchers from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and the US. This was enabled by online forums, email and video-conferencing, as well as meetings and joint presentations at various international conferences that are geographically spread as far apart as Spain, Sweden, Jamaica and Hawai’i. The resultant chapters offer an engaging variety of registers in their approach to the topic, not only in their discursive and musical focus, but also conceptually, moving from sociology to media studies, and from critical theory to the use of pulp fiction as ethnographic tool.

DJ Technics

The DJ, or disc jockey, is literally a rider of the recorded music on discs, a surfer of seemingly endless sound waves, music to move to and music to be moved by. Being dependent on music recordings for their practice, the DJ personifies the product of the music studio, which is further actively embodied by the dancers (Ferreira, 2008). The music studio is the place where contemporary compositions are created and assembled from sound waves that are recorded and produced, manipulated and edited, to be polished into a repeatable musical experience, cut on analogue record or converted to a digital audio file, which is then mechanically reproduced or digitally cloned. In turn, the DJ uses the turntable as a musical instrument (Shapiro, 2002), recombining music recordings as the building blocks of the sound track of the dance event. As music for DJs by DJs, each dance recording can be understood as, ‘what Umberto Eco has called an “open work”‘ (Gailllot, 1998, p. 49), the meaning of which is anchored i...