HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO? :: Don’t you find that these days everyone with a lap top thinks they’re a DJ?
I wonder if these would-be DJs have thought beyond the high of crowds and music to sacrificing their normal way of life in exchange for “DJ normal”. Have they asked themselves if it’s even possible to live normally as a professional DJ?
In other words: How far would they go to become the DJ they want to be?
DJ normal includes the type of mad schedule a DJ leads; a 9-5 lifestyle is non-existent, so too are normal friendships and romantic relationships. DJ normal means being off touring the world, working in different time zones, facing cultural and language barriers – just for starters. (This is why I prefer working on-camera covering the music scene. Even the pressure of having to entertain a dance floor filled with 10,000 people – or down to a paltry 100 – for hours stresses me just writing this.)
DJ normal can often include the regular temptations of sex (speaker sluts are the new groupie) and drugs. Getting naked as often as can be imagined, free drugs of any kind literally handed to them – how would they handle that?
Some might call all of this amazing on-the-job perks; being gifted the freshest tracks from the hottest labels in the world would also doubtlessly rank high on a would-be DJ’s Perk List.
Until it all ends. Because, eventually, DJ normal also often means simply running out of steam, even when the talent continues to flourish. The human mind and body and spirit can only take so much of DJ normal before it can’t anymore.
DJ Junior Vasquez tells GGN publisher Shaun Proulx in Proulx’s forthcoming book HIMBO! Sex, Drugs, Celebrity, The Law of Attraction and Other Adventures of his extreme experience:
“T was a work drug. For me, I did it to stay awake and stay focused. It was a catch- 22. I thought I needed it to stay focused, but I wasn’t focused because I was on it. Then add in the Xanax. I did it to play, to stay focused. My sets got outrageous. You’re playing eighteen to twenty hours, which is insane. Every day. Maintenance bumps as I call it. You’d have your black Tuesdays.? Ash Wednesdays. Holy Thursday and then Good Friday. Thank god it’s here again.”
And, from my experience knowing many international DJs, when balance is lost, whatever the imbalance looks like it is the beginnings of returning to what most of us would call a real normal life, one ironically quite similar to what most wannabe DJs are living now.
Normal, as in take the kids to school, tackle grocery shopping, watch Modern Family, cook, walk the dog, and spend time with true friends (a highly edited group, after about five years living DJ normal). From my observation, ordinary life almost has to set in for DJs after the lights dim, the dance floor clears, drugs are overdosed on, and malaise sets in over opportunities missed living DJ normal.
Then it often becomes that the most important things on the DJ’s rider – aside from proper professional requirements – are a sober contact while at a gig, minimal contact with hanger-ons, a quiet dressing room, and healthy food to eat.
Normal living as most wannabes know it now, can exist for the professional DJ – but only eventually after the dues of DJ normal are paid.
Otherwise we would have a lot of horny, drugged up, drunk DJs playing who would never get the chance to make mistakes, and stop to take notice before its to late to notice their gift of what they give to those on the dance floor. Thank God it’s possible – however abnormal the route – to live life normally as DJ.
It all begs the question: how far would you go to be who you want to be?
– Dancefloor royalty, Miss Raquel is publisher of Scenester magazine and host of The Miss Raquel Show. Join her on Twitter.
