DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music
Language: English
Pages: 344
ISBN: 1623560063
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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producer-DJs like Skream, Kode9 and Mala, who pioneered the sound of dubstep. From 2002, the weekly Co-op club people congregated for several years on Sundays at Plastic People in East London, to engage with the newest broken beats, a rich mix of musical influences from deep house, UK garage and drum ‘n’ bass to Brazilian funk, and new jazz. Here the friendly inclusive multiethnic crowd is absorbed by the challenge of broken beats,3 featuring DJ-producers such as IG Culture, Dego (from 4Hero),
more stage’ (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 21), the staged spectacle of the (masculine) DJ as the unique embodied presence of studio-produced recorded music is successfully accepted by fans as an authentic experience. From their obscure cultural role, the hidden sonic dance scene, a internationally marketable stadium DJ emerged as an iconic global popular cultural role model to a growing mass of fans. Where the visual performance takes centre stage, we find fans massing together as atomized individuals,
contextualize, both historically and politically, the DJ as a deterritorializer – that is as a cultural labourer, who explodes the boundaries of sonoric power/knowledge. By explicating the medial interface between music and digital music technologies, we also investigate how this relationship functions as a ‘creative, active operation’ that deterritorializes the power/knowledge spaces of EDM culture (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 300). We conclude by arguing that this relationship marks a
being older than Keiran (25 and 24 respectively at the time of the interviews); both are experienced musicians but relatively inexperienced as DJs, similar to the bedroom DJ producers addressed in Whelan (2006); as such, they are exceptions to the young DJ-producers that established DJs refer to as ‘the kids’. Keiran explained his reluctance to release more of his own tracks, feeling that this would not be noticed due to ‘a lot of fucking kids, they’re just making rubbish and no one holds it in
mediocre march not worth $50’ (Gelatt, 1977, p. 147). Yet Sousa was not alone in his condemnation of the phonograph; Alice Clark Cook, for example, expressed concern in 1916 that ‘mere listening to a machine’ was a poor substitute for musical training, encouraging ‘mental muscles [to] become flabby’ (Kenney, 1999, p. 57). The phonograph industry responded to such concerns with an advertising campaign in the 1910s, defending the phonograph as a boon to musical education (Kenney, 1999, pp. 58–64;
