Getting Down

If you really love music then do not become a DJ. As a DJ, it is your job to always be listening and looking for new music. You’ve got to keep your set fresh or else your audience will grow tired of what you play. This is a natural human tendency – growing tired of things.
So, Mr. DJ, take that audience to DJ tiredness factor and multiply if by 1000. Most of the shit I play, I’m sick of. Sometimes after one or two spins. When you’ve got so much music at your fingertips, why listen to the same song over and over again? You’re just wasting valuable minutes when you could be listening to something new. You see — it’s a fucking curse.As a kid, I listened to the same Steppenwolf’s Greatest Hits tape all day, every day, for a year. I long for those days when I could drive across Canada with CCR’s “Down on the Corner” on repeat.

The problem is, DJs treat music like drugs, always looking for that fresh fix. The more you do, the quicker it wears off.

My roommate is standing over my shoulder as I write this, and just said, “if love was a drug, would we declare war on it?”  This has nothing to do with what we are talking about, Sacramento Newbie, but I think it’s still worth mentioning.

Aldous Huxley sums up my point nicely in Point Counter Point:

“The man who has formed a habit of women or gin, of opium-smoking or flagellation, finds it difficult to live without his vice as to live without bread and water, even though the actual practice of the vice may have become in itself as unexciting as eating a crust or drinking a glass from the kitchen tap. Habit is as fatal to a sense of wrongdoing as to active enjoyment. Actions which at first seemed thrilling in their intrinsic wickedness become after a certain number of repetitions morally neutral.

Robbed gradually by habit both of his active enjoyment and of his active sense of wrong-doing (which had always been a part of his pleasure), Spandrell had turned with a kind of desperation to the refinements of vice. But the refinements of vice do not produce corresponding refinements of feeling. The contrary is in fact true; the more refined in its far-fetched extravagance, the more uncommon and abnormal the vice, the more dully and hopelessly does the practice of it become.”

So to answer your question Sacramento Newbie, getting down for me is very hard these days. I suppose my best fix is mash-ups. It’s not enough to hear a James Brown, Can, Led Zepplin, or Young MC song, but all four skillfully mashed together is just enough to make me wanna get down.