Issue Index

Original Features

Practical

Food & Drink

Travel

Style

Music

Illustration by Yukiko Leitch

Shakespeare said, "First, let's kill all the lawyers," but on the whole I'd rather hang the DJs. That's right, disc jockeys. And I'm not talking about the mellifluous chatterers who fill space between songs on the radio. I'm talking about club DJs who don't seem to notice that people aren't dancing and that the music they're playing may have damaged their brain.

Take the scene at a dance club in Roppongi a few weeks ago. Early on, the man behind the microphone played a mix of dance classics - funk, a bit of pop and some rock. By 9pm, almost everyone was dancing - lots of smiles too. About 9:30pm, "the DJ" arrived. After turning up the volume two or three notches, he announced himself at length, then turned up the volume two more notches and unleashed a torrent of bomp, bomp, bomp, bomp, bomp, bomp - "house" music or whatever contrived sub-genre he was pushing. The dance floor emptied. The music had become so loud, conversation was out of the question. Even simple communication like, "Drink?" meant speaking from the diaphragm directly into the recipient's ear.

So now, nobody wants to dance and nobody is capable of talking above the electronic roar of hyper-repetitive bomp-bomping. Apparently, this particular nightclub had seen this scenario before and had the means to deal with it - sexy dancing girls. Strange, that. At places where the bartender or whoever else is handy cues up real music or live bands play, you don't have to pay sexy girls to dance - they rather enjoy themselves doing it for free. The hired vixens' presence did, however, succeed in drawing people onto the dance floor momentarily, although within another 30 minutes, everyone had left except four or five guys shuffling their feet and looking up worshipfully at the girls. I soon left myself, disappointed that a night that had begun so charmingly had been sonically squashed by some guy wearing headphones hunkered down in front of a turntable behind a "No Requests" sign. Somehow I got the feeling he wasn't there to please the customers.

Obviously, someone, somewhere genuinely enjoys this kind of music. It's not like it's a secret plot to promote numbness, stifle human interaction and encourage drug use. But ulterior motives are involved, namely making money. Electronic music is more profitable than that stuff created by people who actually play instruments, sing and compose. With a "real" band, record companies have to pay for a whole gang of musicians, their instruments, roadies, larger studio space, tour buses and so forth. Likewise, nightclubs find it much cheaper and simpler to book DJs than bands. And because the cost of producing and promoting "DJ" music is ultimately much lower, we can expect it to plague our dancehalls until something cheaper to make and/or easier to promote comes along.

Many thanks to reader Amanda Reckonwith for this Rant.