The discomfort: He loves to show off his (bad) taste in music.
The zone: Can he complete a DJ set without being booed off the stage?
I’ve always harbored this fantasy of just blowing people away with my music. Well, not my music, but my taste in music. It’s pretty much been a lifelong preoccupation. There’s just one problem: my taste in music.
In fourth grade, I smuggled in a Black Sabbath 45 to play during a class party, the 45 oh-so-cleverly concealed in a “Dukes of Hazzard” promotional record sleeve. The concealment was as much to reassure me as it was to fool my teacher. For all the transgressive gravity of bringing a slab of heavy metal tuneage to a grade school that had a smiling blue leopard for a mascot, I might as well have been carrying a lunch box full of anthrax. I half-expected to be tackled at the door. “Stop that boy — he’s got something in his backpack. Oh my God — it’s ROCK ‘N’ ROLLLL!” (Imagine the school secretary diving for me in a slow-motion action sequence.)
I arrived at the classroom unmolested. When it was time to put on some party music, my trusting teacher, Mr. Cartier — who apparently thought I was a sane, innocent and well-adjusted fourth-grader who had not yet drunk from the black blood fountain of the metal gods — dropped the vinyl on the record player without so much as a glance at the label. I snickered to myself, expecting Black Sabbath to trigger something apocalyptic and bacchanalian — but age-appropriate — to occur, like the walls suddenly bleeding finger paint as female classmates whipped loose their pigtails and we all just started savagely eating Elmer’s glue.
Instead, Mr. Cartier, upon hearing that first sludgy Sabbath riff and that voice gargling, “I! AM! IRON! MAN!,” discreetly plucked the record from the player and replaced it with Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing.” It was my first big musical diss.
*****
I’ve always had pretty awful taste in music. I’m embarrassed to admit that my favorite band is Pig Destroyer. You don’t even have to hear them to know what they sound like. Embedded in the name is the suggestion of brain-scrapingly loud and propulsive steel wool dosed with juvenile fascination with zombie cheerleaders. By comparison, Metallica sounds like light adult contemporary rock for people who own yachts, and Slayer sounds festive. Other really terrible bands I listen to make Philip Glass and John Zorn sound like they’re pandering.
[HEAR MORE: Listen to female DJs discuss their craft on " KNPR's State of Nevada ."]
I don’t want to be like this. Every once in a while, I’ll go on a big reform push like an obese person feverishly embracing a new diet. I’ll listen to lots and lots of jazz, the fiber of music. And a little classical, the itchy ruffled collar of music. I’ll smile and nod theatrically to Coltrane and purse my lips in thoughtful, constipated fashion to gusts of Berlioz. But I’ll soon go back to my old ways, bingeing on manic, dense, high-calorie musical genres with names like glitch, grindcore and drill ‘n’ bass, bleep hop, grimestep and skronk noir. It is probably no coincidence they all sound like exotic skin rashes.
*****
My next shot at something that resembled deejaying wouldn’t come until junior high school. On a drive up to Mount Charleston for a weekend church youth group retreat, I had designs on shocking the Holy Spirit out of our unaccountably churchy youth group leader, Angie. She was piloting our parish van up the final ascent of Highway 157.
“How about a little music?” I said, innocently offering her an unmarked cassette. She popped in the tape, and a stream of demonically babbling, hypersonic skatepunk began shooting from the speakers like spirits unleashed. It was my authority figure bunker-buster: a bootleg copy of Suicidal Tendencies.
“Oh! I love Suicidal Tendencies!” she said. “But grab my copy from the glove box, would you? It sounds a lot better than this one.”
I could practically hear the subversive cred draining from my favorite band in deep, sucking glugs.
(And let’s skip any stories about my wildly dissonant Iron Maiden/The Smiths phase, during which posters of Iron Maiden’s undead mascot Eddie and pictures of a pouting Morrissey competing on my walls made my teen bedroom look like it housed a sensitive necrophiliac of ambiguous sexual orientation.)
*****
So when local promoter Brandy Provenzano asked me to DJ as part of an ongoing weekly contest she produces at downtown bar Artifice, I couldn’t resist. Okay, so I wouldn’t be headlining like real DJs usually do — that is, on top of some gleaming ziggurat spurting neon fountains of Red Bull. But I would have the ear of a crowd for a half-hour and, most importantly, I’d have an excuse to drink martinis on a weeknight. This event for people who think they can DJ is called “So You Think You Can DJ.” The goal: Perform a 30-minute DJ set without getting the air-horn treatment from the crowd. If you make it through your set, the judges score you, along with other rival DJs, and send you to the next round, which entails (hurray!) another Tuesday of drinking martinis.
The competition would be tough. All I had was my dinky little iPod Nano stocked with the musical equivalent of cat food — fit for human consumption only in desperate circumstances. I had hurriedly bundled what I thought would be songs least likely to turn the room into the final scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Others were taking this a bit more seriously. One hulking, leather-jacketed DJ contestant looked like a “Road Warrior” extra and hefted what looked like a bathroom scale from “Battlestar Galactica.” Covered in dials and readouts, it was a full-on DJ machine, and could probably also bake bread and launch a satellite if it wanted to.
“And this button here controls the hyperflux alternating resonator,” he was pointing out to another contestant DJ, a local music writer who had a laptop in his shoulder bag, practically throbbing with gigabytes of music for every possible mood, vibe, whim and holiday.
My Nano went flaccid in my sweaty hand.
*****
This is an age when anyone can be a DJ — and that’s quite all right with DJ Rex Dart, who hosts “So You Think You Can DJ.”
“I love the idea that a professional club DJ has the same basic tech as the guy with an iPod at the bus stop on a corner,” he tells me.
Of course, that doesn’t mean anyone can be a good DJ. Being a good DJ is about more than flogging an audience with your own self-aggrandizing playlist. It entails — and this is the truth I tragically realized too late this night — a bit of collective mind-reading and mass empathy.
It’s nearly my turn. After a woman dubbed DJ Filth successfully completes a set of what I dismiss as palatable guff, my second martini has convinced me that my playlist, by contrast, will neatly pry open the skulls of everyone in attendance and violently reboot their brains into a state of psychospiritual upgrade. Newly christened DJ Drood, I take the dais, and plug in my iPod filled with music that is suddenly edifying and important and special and right.
*****
I start off with something light — you know, a song that sounds like a burping jukebox adrift in the Pacific. I follow with a tune that sounds like a Nintendo being ritually eaten by gremlins.
The crowd: insensate, unfazed.
My playlist then spits out a hard-angled rap jawbreaker that sounds like getting pistol-whipped by a pair of tire blocks.
The crowd: faces in their drinks, unimpressed. You fools! I think.
Then I play a rock song that tumbles out of the speakers in a swaggering platoon of mullets and bad tattoos.
Someone sarcastically pumps his fist. I make a mental note to punch him in the face. Musically, that is, since he’s bigger than me.
Then I play a song that sounds like a cyborg giving painful birth to a mewling litter of Tetris blocks.
The crowd: waving their hands … angrily, as though trying to drive off mosquitoes. And WOONK! that sound — what is WOONK! that noise?
I confess that I didn’t even notice the sound of the airhorn at first — because its shrill, insistent bleat blended so nicely with my next song, which sounded like a donkey trying to ice skate with a piano strapped to his back.
To continued humiliating WOONK!s, I step off the stage, a failure once again. I am bowed, certainly, but not broken. I’ll be back.
But next time, I’ll bring different music — and a better attitude. And I won’t be tossing out tunes intended to terrify, shock, baffle or provoke, but something to … cheerfully share? Brighten spirits? Soothe? Gently provoke?
It’s an idea. The possibilities swell when I remember there’s a crowd to engage. Bad taste loves a vacuum. Now I understand the phrase: Let’s make beautiful music together.