Hanging The DJ: An Experiment

What happens to the DJ when everyone is the DJ?

This past weekend I threw my somewhat regular smartdumb party at Club Tee Gee here in LA. As an experiment, I advertised the party as ALL REQUESTS HONORED. On the DJ side of things, there’s a taboo around taking song requests that I find to be uninspiring or at the very least unquestioned. Also: “I’m sorry, don’t have that one!” just doesn’t work like it used to! I wanted to see what would happen if I actually just played everything everybody told me to.

Club Tee Gee is, in fact, not a club. It’s just a great neighborhood bar with a side room for dancing. In that way it reminds me of all the Cabaret Law-era club-not-clubs I frequented in New York twenty years ago: Savalas, Plant/Hanger Bar, Royal Oak, Trophy Bar, 205 Chrystie, Home Sweet Home, Don Hill’s, the basement of Lit Lounge, the basement of Tribeca Grand, etc.

The most interesting parties in dance music culture in New York seemed to be happening in these smaller rooms, not at the sanctioned ‘real’ clubs like Pacha or Peter Gatien’s dens of iniquity. Even Output, which opened up a few blocks away from where Mina and I were living in Williamsburg, felt more like a Times Square tourist attraction, though the sound there was quite lovely.

Most of the DJs in the smaller rooms I frequented weren’t well-known outside of the city, at least not yet. The soundsystems were hit-or-miss and very midforward. Maybe this was my experience, but everyone seemed to be on good terms with the DJ. It wasn’t weird to swing by the booth, say hello, and make a request.

Open format was a given, redlining was a way of life. There was an inclusiveness and playfulness I don’t encounter much in dance music these days. The early Hollertronix days in Philly were full of glorious trainwrecks and it was just the best. In an alternate universe of my design, Nick Catchdubs would be the biggest DJ in the world.

The other weekend parties at Tee Gee tend to be more disco-oriented and very curated. But for whatever reason, I've been allowed to play open format, which for me usually ends up being extremely open format. It might start with an 18-minute Basic Channel b-side with the bass knob all the way up and the treble knob all the way down, and end with four Rihanna records all playing back at the same time.

“Proper” dance records with builds and drops and all that sound kind of try-hard in such a small space. You end up looking like you’re auditioning for something, and it’s just not what people seem to react to. In retrospect, my personal preference for the energy of rooms like Tee Gee has almost definitely influenced the sound and arrangement decisions I make in my own productions.

People-wise, my party is not exactly die-hard music fans or people who can say “I was at the club last weekend” with a straight face. I don’t think anybody who comes to my parties knows or cares about, like, Hessle Audio or sigilcore remixes of Lana Del Rey. Outside of my regulars, you get a lot of people looking for a cool place to throw a birthday or bachelorette party, or people from the mostly residential neighborhood just looking to dance to the back end of “Macho City” or the Black Cock edit of “You Got The Stuff” before they walk home and hit the hay by 11.

The diversity of the walkup is what makes the party special. But it also makes having a cohesive vibe difficult. On the request end, you’re getting people asking for a lot of stuff they heard on TikTok, which they swear “everyone will freak out if you play this.” The ‘everyone’ of this equation is hard to reconcile, when the request that comes in right before is for Bad Bunny, and the one before that is for “Last Train to London” by Electric Light Orchestra.

Then there’s the issue of authority and expertise. Many people who are at my nights have no idea who I am or what I care about. I’m just a Random Bar DJ – straight, white, not young, not ‘zany’ – who seems arbitrarily chosen to select the music for the night. Which maybe would be fine any other night except that night, since it also happens to be their night.

Technological advances often favor individual freedom – the ability to control one’s own environment, for instance. Before you even see your Uber driver, you can determine what music will be playing and how much or how little the driver will talk to you. Music in clubs or club-not-clubs is one of only a handful of places where the individual has no control over what sounds are entering their ears. It’s limited, but DJs have “power” in that regard. And power assymetries, no matter how insignificant, create resentments. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some subconscious bias toward thinking of the Random Bar DJ as something of an old-world nuisance – a technological inefficiency.

All this can lead to a lot of suspicion if not outright antagonism on both ends, neither of which are strong party vibes at a neighborhood bar on a Saturday night. Add alcohol into the mix and you get a lot of people who are very eager to tell you in no uncertain terms that they should be in charge of the party, at least for a little bit, or at the very least that you shouldn’t be.

ALL REQUESTS HONORED. june 29, 2024. los angeles. photos by zita szasz

So Saturday I decided to join the mob and hang the DJ. Technically I still facilitated the playback of music, but my taste and input took a backseat to everyone else’s. Adam Moerder joined me as host and traffic controller and fellow improviser, as we figured out real time how to go from one request to another.

Top headline: It might have been the most fun I’ve had playing records in years. The party was packed til the end. Far from feeling like a human aux cord, I felt like a jazz soloist. The CDJs were my instrument, and I was playing over other people’s changes. Familiar music, played in an unfamiliar way – textbook smartdumb.

I know not everyone can afford to take this sort of risk with their sets or livelihoods. But here are a few observations from the night:

1 – The Sound of Taking Requests. The impact of any one particular request was secondary to the broader psychological impact on the room that we were taking requests in the first place. “Are you guys actually taking requests? Is this real?” I felt a profound sense of relief from people when we said yes, of course we take requests – as if the entirety of their bodies had been tensing for a fight they no longer would need to have. Every few minutes it was like little fireworks going off in the room, as one pocket of friends celebrated their request being honored and another pocket realized theirs might be honored any second now.

2 – The Shaggy Effect = Zero DJ Resentment. Even when we weren’t playing requests, people thought we were playing requests! And if you don’t like this one, hey – it wasn’t me! Listening to the music that was played took on a light anthropological quality, a way for everyone in the room to learn a little bit about everyone else in the room in the refracted way our musical tastes can say something about ourselves.

3 – The Requests Themselves. Adam and I expected it to be heavy on Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, Bad Bunny, Dua Lipa, songs that were popular on TikTok like “Pedro” by Jaxomy, and for lack of a better way to put it, songs you’d expect to hear at a young millennial’s wedding. We were right about Chappell Roan and Charli XCX and “Pedro” and wrong about nearly everything else, including “Espresso”, the #1 song in the world right now, which was easily the night’s lowpoint.

Here’s a smattering of the requests people made on Saturday:

Electric Light Orchestra - “Last Train to London”

Cherub - “Doses & Mimosas”

Chappell Roan - “HOT TO GO!”

Don Omar - “Danza Kuduro”

Christina Milian - “Dip It Low”

Eddy M & Gabe - “Naquele Pique”

Kendrick Lamar - “Not Like Us”

La Bouche - “Be My Lover”

Dua Lipa - “Don’t Start Now”

Shaggy - “It Wasn’t Me”

Los Angeles Azules - “Nunca es suficiente”

Ariana Grande - “Into You”

Charli XCX - “360”, “365”, “Von Dutch”, “Club Classics”

Dee-Lite - “Groove Is In The Heart”

Disclosure - “She’s Gone, Dance On”

Notorious B.I.G. - “Hypnotize”

Daddy Yankee - “Lo Que Pasa Paso”

Sean Paul - “Temperature”

The Killers - “Mr. Brightside”

Celine Dion - “My Heart Will Go On” (CYRIL Remix) (Soundcloud only!)

La Bouche - “Be My Lover”

Dolly Parton - “9 to 5”

The Dare - “Girls” (“I’m not sure you know this one, but…”)

Pitbull - Any Pitbull (“Literally anything by Pitbull”)

4 – Charli XCX and the Sound of Club-Not-Clubs. There is a difference between records made to perform well inside a club and records that are made to sound like they are a record being played inside a club. Charli XCX’s album is firmly in the latter category. None of these records, with maybe the faint exception of “Von Dutch”, have the kind of clarity of arrangement, the macro-dynamics, and focused low-end that I associate with a “competitive” dance record. In a word, there’s just too much shit happening – too much information. I also believe that’s what makes this album so special: It performs the smashed, smeared sensory overload of experiencing a loud dance record MP3 in a small club.

5 – It’s Not What You Play, It’s How You Play It. The job of the DJ, all the sudden, wasn’t to pick the songs and read the room but to focus entirely on getting from one request to another. This was not a chore – it was exhilarating. Every few minutes was another McGyver situation. To set up “Hypnotize”, Adam pulled “Notorious” by Duran Duran, whose beatless chanted opening was an easy way to make a drastic tempo change from Kim Petras’s “Treat Me Like A Slut” (a request, though I suspect Adam would have played that anyway). We were off the sync grid pretty much the entire night, which meant the transitions were longer and a little more abstract and way more dramatic, with long beatless and ambient periods, as if every request got its own professional wrestling style walkup music moment.

6 – The Theater of DJing. As I mentioned earlier, the CDJs genuinely felt like expressive musical sampler instruments and not just beatmatching machines. I found myself using the hot keys constantly to play out little rhythms of one record to get into the next record, or to create a bit of theater. For more difficult transitions, we would turn off the house lights while we’d play a weird unplaceable snippet of a record into a blizzard of delay feedback that, when it finally receded, was revealed to be the first hit of “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.” It was borderline idiotic. But it turned the whole night into a game of audio hide-and-seek that to my mind beats the branded professional DJ ‘track id?’ create demand for an unreleased record version of all this.

7 – RIP Staring At The DJ. The irony isn’t lost on me: The night where we were doing more than we’ve ever done in the booth – the night when we were genuinely performing – is the night we encountered the fewest Benjy from Sound and the Fury staring at the DJ style stares. It takes a lot more work to hide the work! Which, again, strikes me as very smartdumb.