What Does Your Preferred DJing Format Say About You as a Person?

November 28, 2016, 10:55am

This post ran originally on THUMP UK.

The dullest things in the world are as follows: student politics, rugby union, and arguments about what the best way to play music in clubs is. Last week, Pioneer announced that they’l be releasing a new DJing app. WeDJ is an iPhone application that lets anyone—yes, literally anyone in the world with access to an iPhone and an internet connection—live out their DJing fantasies. Via their phone!

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While it hasn’t quite provoked the same rage that the “sync” button you’ll find on most up-to-date decks has, you can guarantee that somewhere, in some dingy room where the afterparty’s never ended, someone’ll be moaning about us being “a step closer to the death of the DJ.” That once noble artform, surely as important as poetry or painting, is set for destruction and desecration. The idea of the selector as a kind of seer, psychologist, and magician rolled into one coked-up form is, they say, coming to an end. This, however, is what happens ever time technological advances make something ever so slightly easier and a bit more fun.

Ever since the nation’s most notorious sex offender had the bright idea to play records nearly simultaneously, DJing has become the last bastion of the snob. For reasons that’ll never be made entirely clear, there are people out there who want DJing to be difficult and exclusive, who want it to be an activity imbued with the kind of significance reserved for neurologists and chip shop owners. These people—the loudmouthed pub bores of club culture, all cider-breath and fag-ash beards—are the people who’ll snidely tell you that the things you enjoy aren’t good like you think. They’ll sit there, gut busting through their vintage Tresor t-shirt, stinking to the high heavens of self-regard, and tell you, with a straight face, that “real DJs” don’t use USB sticks. These are the lumbering authentocrats of club culture and they must be stopped.

Still, not wishing to be as domineeringly prescriptive as characters sketched above, we sat back and had a proper think about the pros and cons of the most common formats that DJs DJ with and decided to settle the debate once and for all by delving deep into that most pressing of issues: what does your preferred format of DJing say about you? The results might shock you.