Yeah, maybe I’ll DJ your event. What does it pay? What’s the bar tab like? How about the MDMA tab?
Where is it, a club? I usually only do unannounced warehouse gigs. That’ll be an extra seven hundred. You have to take care of decorating, too. I don’t do “decorations.” Where is this club? It better not be somewhere big and central, with a big neon sign that just anyone can find. I don’t spin for just anyone. Just to get directions to this place people are going to have to complete an elaborate scavenger hunt that includes, but isn’t limited to, the deed to a squash court, a jar of giraffe’s breath and a pack of cigarettes they stole from their mom. I can tell if it’s a mom’s cigarette or not.
And there better be severed fingers involved to get in and get a stamp. I want every person who pays to get in here to know that the show they’re seeing is worth more than one of their fingers, and they’re lucky to be here. Actually, make people cut off the fingers of the people they arrive with. I want best friends to be looking into each others’ eyes and crying as they chop off the other’s pinky, so they never forget the magnitude of one of my shows. Oh, but I also need a 200 person guest list for my friends. My friends are too cool to show up to stuff that I don‘t get them into for free.
Now, what I do on stage is an art, so I need to be left uninterrupted for the whole two hours I play. Except when I’m being brought my free drinks and free MDMA, which I expect every five minutes and every half hour respectively. I expect there to be a row of security armed with tasers in front of the stage at all times to stop anyone who tries to request a “song”. I don’t play “songs”. I play mind-altering electro soundscapes that will challenge, like, the perception you have of what music, like, is. Except I do play some Kanye songs, too. It’s all part of my art. You wouldn’t get it even if I tried to explain it.
But for the sake of what’s written on the posters, which of course you’ll be designing, printing, and putting up — at a height of no less than nine and a half feet — yourself, I play Miami Shuck Jive, but not Miami Shuck Juke. What do you think this is, 2012? Ha! Also, I do underground dub-dick jungle mixes, not underground dub-dick jungle remixes. I’m not a fucking hack. Other styles I’ve been known to dabble in are Chicago hitchhike, Elektra dadfuck, chillwave noisechunk, and Salt Lake City bassdrone polyfunk.
There better be a whole lot more chicks at this party than dudes, because I plan on getting mad laid. Put out some big troughs full of water for them to drink from, because they’re going to be pretty dehydrated from all the drugs they’re doing. Fill the water with drugs, though, too, because they’re probably not going to be doing enough for my liking. I don’t have a real job or dress well, so I need a chance with some ladies who are halfway to the moon and back on ketamine and see me standing behind a laptop on a stage, otherwise this carefully constructed illusion of cool that I’ve constructed just crumbles.
So, yes, if these basic conditions can be met, I will hold up my end of the bargain. My end of the bargain, which may seem on the surface like simply showing up and turning on a computer, but which is really so much more. Because you need me. You need me there to not simply play music that people want to hear, like a band or satellite radio would do, but to play the music that I know people should be listening to, whether they like it or not. Right?
Well, you need me there to bring in crowds of entitled suburban white nineteen-year-olds who have spent all the money daddy gave them for the weekend on their American Apparel outfit for the night and won’t buy more than one drink because they split a 26 of vodka in the parking lot and can’t handle their alcohol even at the best of times. No?
Okay, well, my car seats four and I can give some people a ride there.
Photo by Sicran via Flickr