Confession of a DJ feat. The Live Music Conundrum

Before I try my hand at intellectual analysis, can I just say: DJ Rupture's Gold Teeth Thief blew my mind. How dare you share this music knowing we'd have to drop everything and dance to the whole mix? Clayton's essay "Confessions of a DJ" actually made me think of an episode of my life ten years ago. I was enrolled in a hip-hop class on Manhattan's Upper East Side, which generally involves a veteran dancer from Brooklyn tasked with sprucing up a group of reticent white tweens (I could sense the teacher's frustration with our lack of swagger, and because of it, I danced twice as hard). One week, Ms. Aurelia reached a boiling point. She had just pressed play on (what I imagined was) one of her favorite songs for our warmup, and, as usual, the class of fourteen girls stood stiffly in our stiff "hip-hop" uniforms. The following quote is a paraphrase of what Ms. Aurelia said, assembled from memory:

"You have to pay respect to the music. Acknowledge the music. Bob your head or something. Tap your foot. Show respect. Show that you're listening. When you stand still like that it's like you're not listening."

From then on, I can't stay passive when it comes to music. Yeah, cool, I get to be an energetic dancer when it's expected: the club, concerts, listening at home. But the flip side is that I use all spaces that play music - supermarkets, coffee shops, bad concerts, food trucks, cars prowling at night - as an opportunity to bob my head and tap my foot. I can never go back to a place where music is neutral, because it isn't. Not anymore. Clayton uses his piece to dispel the myth of "passive" dancing in relation to a DJ. He describes building communication skills with regard to space and energy. To a lesser extent, I've encountered enough mediocre DJ's to weave criticism into my dancing (half-hearted swaying is one of them). But the bottom line is that all music deserves (initial) response. So maybe we should be more discriminate with where we play music. Or maybe we should play it everywhere.

This brings me to the Amen Break (which I noticed in the beginning of the Gold Teeth Thief mix). The Youtube documentary solidifies the Amen Break as a cornerstone of electronic music, to the point where it sounds intuitive, and sampling it is also sampling the entire history of its use, like building on a pile. As result, the drummer who originated the Amen Break gets buried a little, and hasn't received compensation anywhere close to what he deserves legally. But the way Clayton rationalizes this phenomenon toward the end of his piece is that DJ'ing (and musicking in general) isn't lucrative in its purest form, except if you consider experimentation and breakthroughs to be riches (which he does, in a way). Are artists supposed to swallow down a lack of recognition in order to contribute to a larger musical patchwork? If an artist needs money to survive but money ruins musicking, can music be made under a capitalist system?

One thing that Clayton only touches on is the listener's physical experience in a space. How does space determine the type of dancing, listening, and socializing that goes down on the floor? I was thinking about these things when I went to a concert at Finlandia two weeks ago. My roommates - Sarah and Abby - and I got there in time for the second act, Orange Guava Passion. Finlandia - the "venue" - is clearly someone's house, but that creates college atmosphere. Everyone is between the ages of 18 and 22. When it comes to the experience itself, here's my insight: height is capital. Being the tallest in my group, I had a wonderful time, barring one song where my head was right in front of the speaker. I could see fairly well without bobbing around, and I wasn't getting pushed as hard. I wanted to say that it was a problem with the space, but the truth is, this had been my experience in all "open-pit" concerts I've ever been to. The sweat, the violation of personal space, and the crushing were all part of the experience. But what if it was the space? OR: the lack of it.

The reason why Finlandia (dubbed Findi) is so successful (and crowded) is that it's one of the only not-Brown-funded-or-meddled-with spaces that hosts live music on campus. And maybe this is me signaling to Brown University that it should embrace these rough attempts at musicking, not quash them into nothingness, so that my shorter friends can enjoy live music, close to home, without suffocating. But what if the crowdedness is the experience?? Okay, that was all I had to say.