Outlook and Dimensions, a pair of UK-run festivals which used to temporarily takeover Pula in Croatia each summer, are famous for putting on a boat party series across each festival. Each party sees a hundred-ish punters emerge from the campsite, amble down to the harbour and hop aboard a dinky vessel with their pre-booked tickets in hand. The boat chugs out into the open waters of the Adriatic Sea and anchors up for a few hours of dancing. If you get lucky, a someone selling balloons will have snuck on and set up shop in one corner. Nicely lubricated and (hopefully) with sea legs intact, everyone is escorted back onto shore, ready for the mainline festival programming that stretches far into the next morning.
I remember one boat party I jumped on for the 2011 edition of Outlook festival. It was hosted by the dubstep-adjacent, Berlin-based record label Hotflush. Roska set pace with sweet-as-u-like funky house as the sun went down, a treat given the festival had fucked up his transport to the site beforehand. Afterwards, a hungover tae fuck Scuba smirked his way through a paint-by-numbers wedding DJ abomination for a good chunk of his set. Midas Touch, Nothing But a G Thang, you get the picture. Eventually, he moved onto the festival tunes-du-jour (Battle for Middle You, etc.). The ravers happily indulged him for the duration, including myself. The sunset backdrop and Malibu on ice pacified any speck of resistance.
Reflecting back on this moment, I can’t help but see this as part of the same speculative DJ bubble that has blessed us with the Grimes @ Coachella mess, the latest in a long line of DJing nadirs to be discoursed. Artists capitalising on the availability, low overheads and increased profit margin of DJing compared to a live performance. The elevation of the DJ to a performer in the first place, someone to be perceived and made a spectacle of. The relentless commodification of the dancefloor itself, coupled with a transactional, disdainful relationship between the DJ and dancer. Was the “revolutionary potential of the dancefloor” anymore present on this boat party than in the Coachella crowd, I wonder?
Every time this happens, anyone who claims to care about the integrity of rave culture is reminded of the Frankenstein monster that it has become today. While celebrity, influencer culture has trickled down into DJing no differently than in boxing, for example, DJ idolatry has been a force that can be traced upwards from spaces that were once classified as underground. Maybe looking at these cynical DJ sets hurts a bit more if you can join the dots to scenes you had believed were radical at one time in your life.
The economics of making dance music are fucked and play a big part. Make an underground hit so that you can be booked to play other people’s music and sell drinks, rising to bigger rooms by making bigger hits. This is propped up by an audience who have been conned into thinking that a person’s ability to make music directly correlates with an ability to build symbiosis with a dancefloor. This reverse meritocracy incentivises artists to see DJing as a cynical exercise that must be navigated to get money for reinvestment into their actual artistic practice. Does Aphex Twin’s DJ set at Field Day have more artistic integrity than Grimes’ because he knows how to operate CDJs and didn’t contract the Rekordbox prep out to someone else? I would bet that he didn’t want to be up there pressing play anymore than she did tbh.
What to do, then? Abolish DJ idolatry at all costs, first and foremost. Find practical ways to value music (and compensate it’s creators properly) above the second-hand performance of it, especially when the art isn’t intended for live performance. If you feel like you want to DJ or throw parties, challenge yourself on why. What purpose or community benefit are you creating, honestly? Can you pay people properly? Can you be intentional and of service to the punters, not your ego or wallet? In these situations, some Terre Thaemlitz bars are demanded.
If demanding payment for our labor means culture industries would collapse, then so be it. Perhaps we would finally begin conceiving of cultural production in terms larger than industry.