and what do you do exactly?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Hime" <hime1@gte.net>
To: <idm@hyperreal.org>
Sent: Monday, September 18, 2000 4:33 PM
Subject: [idm] I find myself almost agreeing with Tonya Headon
quoted 54 lines Tuesday, July 4, 2000
> Tuesday, July 4, 2000
> I HATE DJs
> Every one of them. From your great-uncle who tries to spin Rush's "Tom
> Sawyer" over Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" (the unholy din created being only
> marginally better than the originals), to the big international brandname
> DJ's and their coke-stained slipmatts, to the guy you went to school with
> who's changed his name to "Mike-E-Blunt" or something equally ridiculous so
> he can pull chicks (Yeah mate, I remember you from school, and the cologne
> you're wearing doesn't hide the fact that you still smell).
>
> There's no art to being a DJ, and there's a craft only in the sense that
> some DJs are less actively insulting than others. They talk about "taking
> listeners on a journey", but they really mean that they've created the
> musical equivalent of cheap air-travel: no breaks once you start, no choices
> about the "entertainment" you're given, no escape from the unpleasant people
> jammed in around you and a vague suspicion that the guy at the front smiling
> down at everyone and making weird arm motions is demonstrating the use of a
> life jacket. They wax poetic about "educating" their listeners, but all you
> really learn from one of their sets is that drugs will make anything
> bearable, and that thirty quid is seriously too much money to have to pay to
> see a man who can't even play an instrument. They talk about revealing
> something of themselves through the records they play, but I'd like to see
> one of them have the guts to spin their favourite Journey record and reveal
> their geeky adolescence. And they are all geeks - the "jockey" in their
> honorific is accurate insofar as they are all short and whiny, and they all
> ride to glory on the back of a winner created by someone else.
>
> Almost worse are the silly fools (drugfiends and journalists mostly,
> although that's really just one category) who rave on about some wanker's
> ability to play two records at once: "He was like liquid lightning, maaaaan!
> His hands were unleashing musical metallurgy to alchemise the blood of his
> willing captives!" If ecstasy is the happy drug, why do all these crank
> writers sound like they've been party to some awful voodoo ceremony gone
> wrong? I'm sorry, but the truth is that beatmixing - ie. playing two
> records, both in 4/4 time, both with four beats to the bar, simultaneously -
> is as easy as falling off a log. It's almost as easy as catching a nasty STD
> from one of these guys (I once had a friend who went down that sorry path.
> She now spends her entire time in a bath tiled with sandpaper). As for
> turntablists, well, if I wanted to hear meaningless snippets of songs lost
> in interminable stretches of irritating noise, I'd just keep flicking the
> tuner on my radio and save myself the bother.
>
> The only thing that stops me popping off the lot of them right now is a
> slight case of indecision. Which is worse? Those who make the crappy records
> or those who spin them together so that the terrible noise need never end?
> Perhaps I should pack some extra rounds of ammunition...
> Tanya Headon | dis/agree? | 7/4/2000
>
>
>
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