This post originally appeared on Hideous Things
In the summer, not long after restrictions had been lifted, a friend of mine posted a long rant on social media. He’d provided the equipment for a gig, and he’d had to change the mixer something like five times (it may have been more). Basically, a mixer for every DJ. My mind was blown.
Now, it’s quite normal for the headliner to request a particular mixer – but everyone on the line up? That is madness. How the promoter even allowed this to happen is beyond me, and what kind of prima donnas were they dealing with?
A while back, a Leeds music venue installed a mixer that seemed to cause a lot of bother. It was a Rane rotary mixer. I’m not sure the exact model, but the horror it inspired seemed to be the result of its rotary faders being above rather than below the EQs. At the time I thought a lot of people were being very silly, because it was getting referred to as ‘that scary mixer’, and seriously, IT WAS JUST A NORMAL MIXER WITH THE DIALS ABOVE THE EQS INSTEAD OF BELOW THEM. That’s all. This mixer turned everybody into divas.
That wasn’t all that long ago – a year or so before the pandemic – but in the time since, I sometimes feel like ‘diva’ behaviour threatens to become the norm. Since we’ve all been back in the maelstrom of social life, I’ve had a great time, but it’s been peppered by some moments of genuine despair. Preachers, predators, and prima donnas seem to be the thing of the day, although I’m still not sure if it’s that I’ve forgotten what arseholes people can be, or if a lot of people have just forgotten how to be.
The incident my friend posted about wasn’t an isolated one. I heard other similar stories around that time. A DJ insisting on the newest model of Pioneer CDJs for example. As if venues had loads of money to throw around after the pandemic. And I wondered – how did he play his gigs before? When only the previous versions were available.
Another thing that happened towards the end of the summer was that I got a friend request from someone who clearly had bizarre and grandiose ideas about their role in life. I won’t be putting a name to the story, but he was a reasonably well known DJ from a long time ago, and he has listed a big club and a respected radio station as his accreditations on social media.
I don’t have a DJ page on Facebook. It’s something I probably should have done a long time ago, but I’ve never got round to it (to be fair, if I wasn’t a DJ and a promoter, I would probably avoid facebook altogether, but that’s a different rant). Anyway, because I don’t have a page, I get friend requests from a lot of people I don’t know personally, and if they’re legit, I’ll accept them. When this guy sent me a friend request, it seemed fair enough. The heyday of his career, as far as I’m aware, was a little before my time, but I was aware of him, and I assumed there was nothing sinister at play.
I think he’d been sitting quietly in my friends list for a few weeks before he messaged me. The conversation went like this:
DJ From A Long Time Ago: yo
Me: Hey
DJ From A Long Time Ago: how are u
Me: Good thanks 🙂 You?
DJ From A Long Time Ago: same
DJ From A Long Time Ago: you dj
Me: I do indeed
DJ From A Long Time Ago: snap
DJ From A Long Time Ago: any good
Me: I hope so haha
DJ From A Long Time Ago: haha
DJ From A Long Time Ago: ill be the judge
(I actually laughed out loud at the last comment. ‘I’LL BE THE JUDGE’! Who says that?)
DJ From A Long Time Ago: you’re hot btw
Me: Nice of you to say so. Tbh I care more about the music being good.
DJ From A Long Time Ago: well i can advise
(I chuckled at this part too, and wondered where this would go next.)
Me: Thanks
DJ From A Long Time Ago: cost ya
(I burst out laughing. I didn’t want to delete him yet, because I really wanted to know what the hell the next part would be.)
Me: Oh right?
DJ From A Long Time Ago: ha
DJ From A Long Time Ago: you down
Me: Well I’m not entirely sure what you mean, so I don’t know.
DJ From A Long Time Ago: truth or dare
Me: This is a weird conversation
He stopped replying after I said that. I was half disappointed, because I did have a burning curiosity to know how much of a creep this guy actually was, but also I was kind of glad, because I was busy with some much more important things, and also it was all quite shitty behaviour, and I couldn’t be arsed. After I’d not heard from him for another five or so minutes, I screenshotted the conversation and blocked him. Nobody needs someone like that in their life. He’d managed to come across as both a preachy cunt and a predatory weirdo in the space of a few short sentences.
Not long before this I’d played a gig, and it was a really good party, but the predators were out in force. Male, female, gay and straight. It was just a weird night, because it seemed like half the people I spoke to had just had some creepy encounter where someone had made them feel really uncomfortable. I’d not escaped this either. I wondered if being locked down for all that time had made people super weird. Or maybe it had just made us all over sensitive. But no – you shouldn’t have to put up with people being predatory. Although, having said that, a push to make spaces too ‘safe’ makes them uncomfortable in a whole different way.
The other box that guy had ticked, the DJ from a long time ago, was the ‘Preacher’ box. Bukowski warned us to beware of such people in his poem ‘The Genius of the Crowd’, and he was dead right.
“I’ll be the judge” – that really tickled me. The sheer audacity of it. It was also funny because I know a fair few people who are successful, respected DJs, and brilliant musicians, and they would never say such a thing. I am lucky to know quite a few people who have been endlessly supportive and encouraging to me, and who’s talent and skills I admire greatly, and not one of them has ever come across as preachy, or would designate themselves the role of ‘the judge’. Anyone I know who has come over in that patronising kind of way tends to have been someone without an awful lot to back it up.
This is not a cautionary tale, nor is it a rant about how awful everything is right now, or how terrible people are. It’s just a few observations I’ve made recently, and I think that they are issues that need to be addressed, especially as they are occurring in a scene where the overwhelming atmosphere is one of positivity. Thankfully, in spite of the preachers, predators, and prima donnas, most people I’ve met through the music scene are extremely sound. I’ve had some amazing times with people where despite a language barrier, we’ve thrived on the universal languages of tunes and the sesh. That is a beautiful thing, and it makes it all worthwhile.