by Knox Bronson (with props to "Actual Physical War on DJ's")and Nobody Cares That You Are a DJ")

Did you hear the one about the DJs?

One DJ said to another,"Do you want to go to a movie?"

And the other one replied,"I don't know ... who's the projectionist?"

In a just and fair world, DJs, if mentioned at all in the press, would be relegated to the business pages where they belong. But this is not a just and fair world and the marketers have taken over every aspect of culture. Therefore, there is no culture, only carefully crafted  messages or products targetted at a certain demographic niche.

And I have heard it so many times: "You don't know what you are talking about! There's Z-Trip and Q-Bert ... !" and God knows who else.

I watched the movie "Scratch," which was quite enlightening and made me much more conscious of the "art" of turntablism and I have come to realize that DJ's are, at best, modern pecussionists, drummers, for lack of a better word -  and, as anybody who knows about music will tell you ... drummers are the natural enemy of singers.

As an aside: I have loved the radio DJs, from the glory days of AM radio and the true underground FM in San Francisco - KMPX - where it started, up to the crews today at KCRW, KALX ... Steve Masters' reign as program director at Live105 in the 80's ... Steve Jones' Jonesie's Jukebox in LA today ... Nic Harcourt et al @ KCRW - for over 45 years! So they do not factor into this article in any way.

"The Grey Album," by Dangermouse, and the attendant media frenzy makes further silence about the decline of creativity in the world of popular music impossible.

I just got into a huge argument with my 20 year old son. I was listening to a RealAudio clip from an NPR website about the hoopla surrounding the mixtape/mashup release by Brian Burton, aka DJ Dangermouse, of the "Grey Album," wherein he has sliced the greatest pop album of all time (The Beatles "White Album") and mixed the resulting mishmash with the a capella raps of one of today's biggest stars, Jay-Z, from his recently released "Black Album." And I was cussing under my breath several feet away from him. He looked away from the MTV Hiphop Top 10 show to ask what the problem was.

I savaged Mr. Mouse and his misappropriation and butchering of cultural treasures. My son sprang to his defense, which, in retrospect, is kind of funny, because I know for a fact that he had not yet heard the "Grey Album." But my comments were about DJ's in general and I suppose this was more of a generation gap skirmish.

Still, it got my ire up and I said,"When you have spent years working on music and learning how to play an instrument and how to arrange music, you will not defend this pinhead so strongly."

"Dad," he replied,"it's JUST A MIXTAPE!"

And he was right, but he did call me long distance a week prior to this discussion to see if I knew where to find this particular mixtape online.

It is the most well-known mixtape of all time, now.

There has been huge media attention. The staid Wall Street Journal had a half-page feature on the phenomenon of the "Grey Album." The New York Times reviewed and discussed the implications of its release and the resultant cease-and-desist order on behalf of EMI, giving DangermOuse publicity beyond calculation. Also mentioned was the subsequent destruction of the remaining CDs, and the organinzing of 150 website to offer free downloads of the album on "Grey Tuesday" at the end of February. This was a problem: a virus had infected media and could not be contained. (I'm aware I'm part of it right here, thank you.)

Even more amazingly, the British music magazine, Q, has just included Dangermouse in its 100 most important people in the music biz list. Something has gone seriously wrong with our culture if a craftsman as sloppy as Dangermouse (can't even make up his own name, stole it from an English cartoon) is elevated to such Olympian heights.

Before we go any further, let me say that the "Grey Album" is almost unlistenable and truly does not merit the attention it has received. I happen to like Jay-Z quite a bit and I grew up with the Beatles—I can still rememberwhere and when I heard many of their singles the first time—and I love all kinds of music, from classical to experimental electronic music, but the sad fact is that Burton has no musical talent. His loops are sloppy, his drum programming stunted.

Sadly, the "Grey Album" would have come and gone as quickly as any runner-up on American Idol, had it not been for the laziness, as well as the cluelessness, of the mainstream media who played this farce as some seminal event in pop music history.

Like most DJ's, he lives off other people's creativity and hard work. By his own accord, he put two and a half weeks into the "Grey Album." As one who has put 4 days into arranging and orchestrating two bars of original music, I am not impressed by his effort. All he did was slice audio & pull out samples from the mix and used them to make "beats" to go under Jay-Z's raps.

The vast majority of DJ's are masters of one, and only one artform: that of endless and grandiose self-promotion.

DJ Lord, from Georgia, said it best: " I see myself as a messenger. I mean, I didn't father sound. I'm just a host and this particular sound manifests itself through me. I'm just happy that I'm not at a degree of mastery to where I can control it, somewhat."

If you can decipher that last sentence, please let me know. In fact, while you are at it, please let DJ Lord know.

Not for them the painful hours and days and years that are required to master an instrument, the excruciating frustration that makes one want to literally throw the guitar out the window nor days creaking by as one meticulously struggles to arrange a delicate interlude.

No, the DJ spends three hours learning how to beat-match and then buys a hat. Some buy the hat first. DJ's, for those of you uninitiated, must wear hats.

DJ apologists are quick to point out that many DJ's make their own music, but even most of those work with producers who do the actual writing and arranging (the DJ will say "put a whirly sound here and a drum-roll there and then the breakdown...") and the DJ will put his name on it. I can think of a gang of DJ's in SF right now who have made their careers outright stealing music from people.

Another local DJ/musician told a [performing electronic musician] friend of mine,"I get paid $4000 for DJ'ing. And $1500 to perform my own music. If you want to make it as a dance artist, just find the cheesiest house track out there, sample it, loop it, thrown some shit on top of it, give it a cool name and you'll be huge."

But back to the Grey Album. Burton knows to spin (in the old sense of the word, as in spinning tales), parse, finesse, and redirect the discussion of his thievery.

He describes his work thusly (I have deconstructed, to use an already overused term, his remarks below):

"If you had like ... uh ... an empty coke can sitting on the table and you had a knife and cut it up and peeled it back and made a bird out of it.¹ But if you tried to pour water in it, it'd fall out all over the place 'cuz it's not supposed to hold water any more.² And that's kind of the way l wanted to look at this record—it's not supposed to be bangin' in the clubs³ ... my intent was for it to stand on its own and then ... you know ... see what happens."⁴ Burton identifies Harrison's "Long Long Long" as the song that "essentially opens the album"⁵ and talks about how he had to alter the 3/4 time signature to fit Jay-Z's "Public Service Announcement," which, like almost all Hip-hop and club music, is 4/4. "I knew there was ... that this was going to be, if this did get to any certain level, it would bring up a lot of questions that I just don't have the answers to. Not to try to be funny or anything ... there's a lot of grey area with this whole thing ... I just don't know. I don't know."⁶

1. Uh no, Brian ... you did not take the empty coke can and make a bird out it. You took the coke itself and mixed it with someone else's wonderful work of art akin to, say, vanilla ice cream and made a float. The only difference is that the "Grey Album" is sloppy, unmusical, full of mediocre loop editing and pathetic drum programming, whereas a coke float is a timeless treat in the author's opinion.
2. Again, spin control: if "Grey Album" should stand on its own, it must hold water. If it cannot (and in reality does not) stand on its own, it is merely a garbled, attention-grabbing, pointer back to the original works. In other words, he has defaced the canvasses of masterworks with his own sloppy, spray-painted tag.
3. Translation: " I pray to God it gets played in the clubs."
4. Translation: "I couldn't create an original piece of music if my life depended on it, but I bet I can get some press if I play this right."
5. Uh, no, Brian ... "Back in the USSR" opens the album. "Long Long Long" was the last song on side 3 of the original double album.
6. But you do know Brian: you know you are simply stealing and mixing the work of others, great artists, who worked for years in obscurity (both the Beatles and Jay-Z), mastering their craft, learning how to write songs, paying their dues in hell-holes hither thither and yon.
   

The reality is that like all thieves with a "philosophy" or a "manifesto" (i.e. socialists and communists, or that percentage of clerics on the oil dole with nothing to do but foment anti-American fever, or the [energy industry] worms who put Bush in office, and, of course, most DJ's), he masks his crimes in a language that not only absolves him of any guilt, but lends moral, aesthetic, or spiritual justification, if not superiority, to his chosen racket.

The album’s profile may have gotten even bigger when the music activism (note to self: add "activist" to list of thieves) site downhillbattle.org urged fans to post the music on Web sites for a day to protest EMI’s cease-and-desist order. Nicholas Reville, a co-founder of the site, says more than 150 sites participated.

“What’s going on is that EMI is censoring a work of art,” he said. “Not only are they telling musicians the kind of music they can or cannot create, they’re trying to tell the public what we can and cannot listen to. We think EMI’s attempts to censor it and prevent the public from hearing it are a huge problem and we shouldn’t allow that kind of corporate censorship.”

Note to Nick: if you want to go after the recording industry, the RIAA, EMI, and all the rest, great, but don't do it at the expense of the Beatles and Jay-Z. The "Grey Album," mixtape mashup, so poorly executed, diminishes both.

NPR reporter Joel Rose said "The Grey Album" was downloaded 100,000 times in the past week, making it a top 10 album. No, Joel, it is not a top-10 album: no one paid for it. Reporting it as such won't increase your chances of getting laid.

And no one would have noticed had not EMI and the RIAA gotten involved. We can thank them for all the hype surrounding the mediocrity for this.

Invariably, younger people accuse me of just being an old fart, out of touch.

And that, of course, is true. But, unlike many of my boomer peers, I have great respect for the range of Eminem's talent, and how he speaks for my sons like John Lennon spoke for us. I also have spent some memorable nights at some great clubs where a great DJ kept the crowd dancing far past sweaty exhaustion ... it was wonderful what they did on those nights. And I respect the craft that goes into maintaining that level of energy on the dancefloor.

But DJ's rarely put themselves on the line as artists, like performing musicians, especially singers, do. Singers stand in front of audiences and open their very souls in order to make a connection that means something with the people in the crowd. I have experienced that with certain performers over the years and I carry them with me in my heart to this day. I cannot say that about some excellent DJ sets I have heard - I remember the lights, the sweat, the four hot girls dancing dirty nearby.

But not the song.

This kind of connection cannot take place within the structure of the DJ craft: The DJ simply plays records. Occasionally, a DJ will throw in some effects or mixer tricks or on-the-fly samples to great effect and these require a certain flair for invention, but in the sober light of day ... who in the crowd will really remember?

I have had an intermittent correspondence with Ishkur, whose excellent Electronic Music Guide is an amazing and essential resource for anybody interested in the very short, but complex, history of electronic dance music—all the major genres, their sub-genres, and the sub-sub-genres, with at least four audio samples of each, and their antecedents and inter-relationships defined in Ishkur's breezy and informed style.

I was able to determine that, beyond any shadow of a doubt that Plastikman's "Consumed" and Aphex Twin's "Xtal," both in the Ambient Techno section, were one and the same song, although in a different key. (I know ... how many versions of "Satisfaction" have made #1 ... let's see ... "Wild Thing," "Gloria," "You're Pushin' Too Hard," the list goes on ... but hey, the Golden Rules of Pop [#1 - if it worked once, it'll work again] apply to electronica as well.)

In any case, Ishkur is a younger man who longs for the purity of the [rave and dance] scene he encountered as a youth, much as I long for the purity of 60's and 70's pop). And while he agreed with much of this article when I showed him an earlier version, we finally reached an impasse. He wrote:

I think there's another factor about DJing that you don't really touch up on, and is actually kind of important because it is a skill--as much as you don't feel it should be one--that doesn't come overnight and can't be taught: the ability to find good music.

A DJ is one-half musician, yes, but the other half--the half that makes him or breaks him--is the business side of the equation. DJs have to be marketers, promoters, collectors and networkers as well. They have to get into all the obscure nooks and crannies of the underground music world, make relationships with labels, get on mailing lists, record pools, deal with clubs, owners, and other movers-and-shakers of the scene.

This is not as easy as it sounds, and it takes years to build up the sort of connections and repertoire that will really jumpstart your career. There's more to acquiring records than just going to the store and looking for the racks. Being a DJ is a full-time job, where you spend at least 8-10 hours a day pouring through lists, calling people, and go on scavenger hunts trying to find the best music for your set to play that evening at the club. Because those records are not going to come to you. You have to seek THEM out.

DJs are obsessive-compulsive consumers....they will spend weeks getting their hands on just one record, and will kill to get their hands on a promo copy of a record before everyone else does. Like real estate agents with their special lists: Having exclusive rights to something gives them power. White labels and dub plates are the black gold of the DJs arsenal.

Not everyone can do this. Not everyone wants to put in the time, care, dedication and astute diligence it requires to procure the best records ever, and then to keep on track of the latest happenings to stay on top of the pack.
The dance music industry moves VERY fast, and what is popular one week is very easily played out the next.

This is reiterated by DJ Tiesto, possibly the biggest DJ in the world, in a recent issue of Remixer magazine, a bible of DJ Culture. He goes on about seeing Coldcut play the same songs in sets over the course of a year (Keywords for Tiesto's further contemplation: they played and sang songs live they had earlier written.) He said,"That's easy. I can't go an play the same records a year later when I go spin at the same club a year later."

"Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.

"That is the secret of great art and it's effect on us. The creative process so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work.

By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life." -Dr. Carl Jung

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