storiesfromtheweekend :: Find Your Inner DJ

May 7th 2012

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Becoming an amateur DJ is hard. Finding the right DJ name is even harder. Consider taking your first name and mixing it up with a fun element about yourself, your first pet, first street or your first STD. Kind of like what porn stars do. Or go to Quiz Meme. But be careful what you choose because once you settle on a DJ name you can’t change it back. Ever. And make sure you run it by your friends – not your fans. Fans will say anything!

Like most well-meaning enthusiast DJ’s I have no real understanding of what I am doing but a whole lot of unstoppable passion. I once murdered an entire house party by playing the dub step version of Dido’s ‘White Flag’. Nothing is sadder than taking a banging house party and reducing it to a couple of drunken loiterers in your living room waiting for a maxi taxi.

House Party Music Misfires usually happen when people misjudge the vibe of the party. Like the time my friend Tom took an epic gamble on the acoustic jazz guitar version of Phil Collins’, ‘Another Day in Paradise’. Wrong. Or the time my house mate thought what the party needed was some Boy from Oz. Wrong Again. Other offences include commandeering the communal i-pod and changing a song half way through a track. They don’t do that on the radio.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it like Dave Grohl. If you find yourself at a Britney Spears My Prerogative Party, don’t instigate a Nirvana Revolt. Get your Britney on! Who knows, you might even find yourself gently nodding your head to ‘Womanizer’.

House party anthems vary from tribe to tribe so I decided to conduct a non-scientific poll. Turns out all my colleagues at work love a bit of Warren G, ‘Regulate’. It’s not surprising they want more of the G-funk era; ‘Regulate’ made it to Number 1 on House Party Anthems Volume 4, 1994.

I love ‘Regulate’ but I always found the narrative of this song slightly implausible – a bunch of hot chicks break down on the South Side, and who should rock up but Nate Dogg and the G-Child. Two very helpful blokes… Or are they? Instead of calling the ladies a tow truck they decide to take them to the Eastside Motel. A veritable den of iniquity. But the babes don’t mind, they would prefer to ‘funk on a whole new level’ than ring the NRMA. And who could blame them, right? Real DJ’s have all the fun.

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