Heard a new song on the radio tonight while driving. “Wake Me Up” by by Avicii. Awesome tune! I looked it up online and it is by a guy who is a DJ, and there is all this “concert” footage. I’ll admit he knows how to “compose” but going to concert to watch a guy twist knobs…really? Maybe you kids need to get off my lawn…
-rainy
Deadmau5 is a DJ who wears a huge mouse-head when he “performs” live. Sometimes it isn’t even him on the stage. No one cares.
Deadmau5 on the subject: we all press play
The New Yorker just had a great article on how Las Vegas is raking it in with huge clubs featuring celebrity DJ’s that sign contracts for $250,000 a show. Yes, it is a racket.
Well, it’s not a racket - it’s programming. But for 5,000 people who want to get buzzed and jump up and down dancing, it doesn’t require much attention to the music and the beats can be really fun to dance to.
[QUOTE=will.i.am]
“They shouldn’t even call it dance music,” Black Eyed Peas frontman/Wynn DJ will.i.am says in the piece. “They should call it look-at-the-d.j.-and-get-drunk music.”
[/QUOTE]
It’s simply custom club/dance music - a very, very different thing vs. a concert featuring songs, musical performances and improvisation.
Is it 1990 already?
There is a difference between the Vegas celebrity DJ’s mentioned above and stuff like Avicii or Deadmaus. They’re just playing songs for people to dance to like a radio DJ whereas the music being referenced by the OP is more EDM (electronic dance music). My 12 year old son can’t get enough of EDM and spent most of Lollapalooza dancing his ass off at the EDM stage.
Some other top EDM artist are Steve Angello, Skrillex, Justice, and of course… Daft Punk.
Some of the best DJs are pretty amazing live. Watch this youtubelink of Kid Koala playing moonriver (you can skip to about a minute in if you want to see the showy stuff), and you can watch a few other live performances to see how much improvisation goes into it.
You can do similar things with DJ Shadow performing, say, Organ Donor, orDJ QBert performing for a more scratch based performance.
You go to concerts like this to hear how it all comes together live and in person not so much to watch what the DJ is doing. Not everyone can make music like this outside a studio.
Avicii doesn’t actually seem to be live mixing much, if at all, in any of the clips I watched, so…I don’t know about him. You go to the concert to party to a predetermined soundtrack? It’s less impressive to me actually. But it takes all kinds. EDM isn’t much my scene anyway, but people like Skillrex and Daft Punk do actually live mix from what I have scene.
Apologies for the stupid remark above.
I thought you made a good point - well except that 1990 is much too recent. There is absolutely nothing new about star DJ’s doing concerts, and DJ created music like scratching and dub goes back many decades.
Thankya, I figured it was largely a manipulation of prerecorded sets, and he confirms that. That doesn’t really make it any less of an art, but don’t imagine it took a lot of live skill to pull it off. It’s somewhere between listening to a well prepared recording and watching a live performance, but closer to listening to a well prepared recording. There’s far less chance of failure than in a live performance. If he goes off to the bathroom, the show can go on without him.
I personally still can’t figure out why paying to listen and dance to prerecorded music ever caught on, anyway. Parties should be free. In my eyes, there’s more reason to go see one of the modern DJs than there was to go to a disco. It’s just not different enough to get me to go there instead of a live show.
The New Yorker article makes the point that the superstar DJs, the ones that can command a quarter mil a night, write their own songs and that distinguishes them from the ones who just manipulate the music of others.
Which reinforces what the Deadmau5 link says.
And I guess that was part of the distinction between the two in my mind. Going into a club you sort of expect canned music, but also the bar-scene part of it. I just always thought of a ‘concert’ (big open air event) as live music performance, not just a big club with no walls and port-a-potties.
I know but it was a bit snippy.
Yep, Dub especially. Another fav would be the Northen Soul culture as personified by the all-nighters at Wigan Casino - mid/late 70s.