The Lost Art of DJing

I was on twitter the other day, sending a few tweets and DMs and boosting egos with Retweets when I saw a friend of mine tweet something that had been in my mind for a while. His tweet read "Being at the club this past weekend(after months) made me realise DJING is a dying artistry." If you know anything at all about Djing or music, you would know that the really good DJs are in short supply. He the followed it up with another tweet which read " it felt like the music was being played from an aux cord (also why am I think about Djs when I should be making a sandwich)"….why am I writing this instead of getting a young nubile to fellate me while daydreaming about Zendaya? The answer to that is really simple, I care about the art and about hip hop.

Real dj’s are few & far between, a dying breed maybe...but they haven’t all left us yet. They are here. They’ve been here for decades and will continue to be here making you move that ass. With the arrival of the Internet, music and file sharing sites the world changed and with evolution of technology we became able to do thing we weren’t previously able to do (I’m not going to take you through a history lesson, you know where the fuck I’m going with this). Nowadays anyone can be a dj but can they actually DJ? Majority of these new school DJs are trash, they lack the skill and finesse that great DJs have.

I remember the times when DJs actually broke new tracks that the public didn't know (the Internet has changed that but it's not impossible to find hot tunes to play for the people in the club) DJs were looked at and as a highly regarded people of the community like your Doctors or police and even priests/pastors…think about it, DJs were like the psychologists of the night. These guys were the true shrinks because they knew how to make you dance and feel the right emotions in that moment, in time standing still wishing the rush would never end. This was always accomplished with 2 turntables, vinyls and a pitch controller. They set the true standard for the show because it was about the skill these artists were going to bring. The turntables never lied, either you could mix or you couldn't. It wasn't something that everyone can do. It took years of respect for the turntables to be able to talk without talking at all. To recover and still rock the crowd is truly what it is about. It's not the music itself, it's the showmanship and attitude of the craftsman taking you to another dimension. Nowadays a lot of djs play the same thing, there's no skill involved. They play the same songs which isn't bad if the song is Good, but I believe how you play it and which song you play it after makes all the difference between a good DJ and a wack one.

The Internet has killed a lot of things…i believe its also to blame and it has ended the exclusivity of songs. In the 90s and early 2000s, DJs used to get the latest songs and when they would play them in the club or at a party everyone would be asking them "whose song is that?" and that doesn't happen anymore. In the past 2 to 3 years we've seen the rise of a new artistry (if you can call it that) it's called auxing or aux master, whereby someone is entrusted with the aux cord to play GOOD music from their phone or laptop or whatever device that has the dope tunes. Not anyone can handle the pressures of handling or curating the aux…you see it is similar to Djing. I'm not saying that auxing is the "evolution" of DJing but DJs can learn a thing from the aux masters...PLAY SOME DOPE EXCLUSIVE SHIT!

I’m not sorry calling DJ’s wack, as a South African DJ, if “Sister Betina” or any kwaito song is your go-to song then you’re probably wack. There’s a lot of great music on the Internet, especially on Soundcloud, great musicians that need to be unearthed and put on but ya’ll are stuck on bullshit repeating songs. I’m going to learn your craft and show you how to do this, son. I’m not gonna sit and let the beautiful art die.