A DJ Saved My Life
In the beginning there was Jack. And Jack had a groove. That groove was house music.
It’s a groove that has ebbed and flowed, a gentle tide that has warmed those who bathe in it, much like a certain Balearic island does. It has sucked in the toes of those waiting tremulously on the shore.
Now, there are an infinite number of grooves, and an infinite number of ways to create them, to play them. If the originators came back from their often-untimely graves, they would barely recognise what their scene had become.
That’s because DJing in 2023 is objectively weird. People still play in nightclubs. Warehouses. Basements. Fields. Festivals. But they also play in hot air balloons. In cubes. On desert islands. On pyramids. On top of The Pyramids. On top of mountains. In what looks like a bathroom.
Electronic music has taken over concert halls and stadiums. Even the Acropolis. Seriously, look it up.
A Martian lands from space and also fails to recognise the ritual of modern dance music. Villalobos is a cult - and a unit of cultural information - if you follow the Worst Techno Memes Ever page on Facebook. Solomun is a shaman. If Berghain is the church, Justice could provide the cross. Tong is the don of what is a mostly non-Swedish mafia.
Some of the finest practicioners are so revered that they’re known only by their second names. Some are so revered that no one even knows their name - or face - at all.
Anonymity is the mask that allows their art to flourish. Or their social media presence to flourish, an intentionally unintentional benefit if you agree with those who can’t stand certain DJs who wear joker masks and describe their sound with somnambulant terms such as ‘high tech minimal’.
But if Kanye West can scream he’s the biggest rock star on the planet to a quarter of a million people at Glastonbury, electronic pioneers are, for the most part, secure enough to simply know they are genuinely exalted in their moment of crowd connection.
It’s a world where Ross From Friends is better than Ross, from Friends, thank God. Where relationships are formed at the bar. In the queue for the toilets. On the dancefloor. In Boiler Room comment threads, where PhD students in the art of killjoy debate whether analogue is better than digital, live is better than recorded, tech-house is better than techno, or, for that matter, house.
Yet the purpose: to elevate the body - and occasionally the soul - persists. Eris Drew and Octo Octa talk of transcendental spiritualism. DJ Shadow talks of meditative release, of taking communion with the crowd. Ecstasy can be over and over, if you listen to Prospa.
Want to see what pure joy looks like? Check Craig Charles’ face when he drops a Superstition re-edit on top of the French Alps. See George Fitzgerald, five hours into his set, so in his element that he practically enters the periodic table. Catch your writer, checking out Gorgon City at 3am in Hackney Wick, reaching out to touch glittering confetti like shards of Elysium.
All of my fellow electronic music fans will have understood the pain of enforced lockdown, and how our industry, and culture, exists on a financial knife-edge like never before. Sometimes, the only thing to do is to pray at the feet of your favourite shaman.
Because every time I elevate, I return. I sit in my parent’s conservatory, age young. One question: are you raving or behaving? Annie Macmanus asks it every Friday from 7. I’m allowed to stay up, because at least I’m not roaming the streets like other kids my age; I’m only getting into trouble in the deluded corner of my mind that thinks I could pull off a fake ID, even if I somehow found out how to procure one.
I no longer spin records myself. There remains something intensely emotionally and physically draining about being shouted at for the fifth time to work Tom Jones into a lo-fi house set. The thrill of a booking followed by the crushing despair of the reality is, I imagine, akin to a cake tasting invite where the sole option is Battenberg, and has only enhanced my respect for the perseverance of those genuine professionals of the craft.
But my dance spirit lives on, because it knows it has to. It has to respect the spirit of those who came before it. Who sat on Detroit pavements with soldering irons. Sweated in Chicago lofts stitching tapes together. Grafted in London basements to send a pirate signal. Ran mad Sheffield Sounds with home-made systems.
This is not Gold - Always Believe in your Soul; although I'm sure there's an EDM remix of that somewhere. This is gold plated cables for optimal sound quality. This is golden moments at Studio 54, at Paradise Garage. The number who remember those moments is dwindling, granted, but their legacy fades far slower.
More legendary venues have gone to the wall during the pandemic. Others have resurrected themselves, only to find themselves on life support, condition critical. For those of you complaining about entry fees, the numbers speak for themselves; the simple fact is your venue isn’t making the mint off you that you think it is.
Electronic music might be a $6bn industry, but the spoils aren’t shared evenly. Besides, tell me where else you could get 8 hours of pure entertainment for £15 these days? (Or even £5, if you can plan your life obscenely far in advance.)
But we mustn’t cry for what we could lose. We must remember those individual moments of utter euphoria that defined our experience in the first place. Only then will that inspire us to give them the love and attention they deserve.
Seize the night. After all, dancing might be all we have left soon.