alien pimp wrote:the only point of a dj at a party is to watch the crowd and interact
therefore i don't make much of a difference between mistabishi and a dj who shows up with the playlist already made up in his mind (sometimes written on paper) and performs same longtime rehearsed set everywhere regardless the crowd in front of him.
the only live thing about dj-ing is actually the interaction with the crowd and the ability to read the audience and adapt your playlist. if you don't have that, you're as good as a cd for me
edit: there's also dj's able to adapt the audience to their sound or sell them anything he feels like playing. but those are the few exceptions
All of this.
The DJs job is to take you on a journey. Either that's a journey that he sets out and you follow (see someone like Venetian Snares or Aphex Twin for the extreme end of that) and he does as much as he can to coax you along the way with whatever interaction and hype he can, or it's a journey that's moulded by the interaction between DJ and raver - those types of sets are rarer and people that can genuinely pull it off deserve their titles as the top DJs.
However, someone who is primarily a producer and needs to put together a clubset of their own stuff? I'm not sure why they should adapt what is, afterall, their own vision of music simply in order for the crowd to give them yet more props. Is it not enough that they wrote that music you're dancing to?
Makes me think of producers like Joker. I love his stuff, but he's a bit of a shonky DJ... if he stood up their with Ableton running through a set that was actually well mixed and then just did the hype thing, I think I'd be just as happy. I'm paying my money to see someone I respect musically, to listen to his music on a soundsystem that nobody I know has access to (seriously, to whoever said 'my mates got a system'... does it compare to the F1s at Corsica?!), to be around hundreds of likeminded people all loved up and on the same vibe and to have access to a bar (and perhaps other businessmen in the establishment)... all those things go into the ticket price, you're not just paying to see one bloke play his own records with the highest degree of accuracy possible.
He does look like Will Young though.
P.S. Most hiphop heads would probably scoff at the average level of mixing in Dubstep. It's not exactly the most advanced part of our genre... spinbacks, doubledrops and all the tunes within a few bpm of each other... yeah, it's a skill, but there aren't many Dubstep DJs that I show up to watch their turntablism. If I wanted that I'd go and see DJ Shadow.
