In what other field is a couple of hours’ work taking the credit for somebody else’s brilliance so venerated?
W
ho 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. Given the sheer number of floor-filling tunes made during the past six or seven decades, it’s hardly a great feat to choose a few that other people will tolerate or even like.
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. I just find the totemic worship of “The DJ” really weird.
