On 4/10/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'd like to know other people's opinion about this. I was discussing this phenomenon with a friend - DJs playing in restaurants and other types of places (cafés, some types of bars, etc.) where dancing is clearly not a possibility and the DJ is not a necessity. My opinion was that, overall, it's annoying and a negative side affect of the popularity of "DJ culture". As I'm sure many of you can attest - the human jukebox gig can really be a drag. I had one gig that ran for a while and was good but eventually turned into that. Near the end of my stint I was told that someone there was about to threaten me with bodily harm because I played something that was a bit leftfield. Essentially you couldn't just ignore it. I was trying to tell my friend this - these types of gigs allow trendy restaurants to bank on DJs to raise their hipness factor and charge more for mediocre food. I know one local DJ who ranted about DJs bringing down the "scene" by playing in coffee bars. A few weeks after this I saw him spinning in a "upscale" beauty salon! Turns out he seems to have a regular gig there. His opinion was that he's been turned onto a fair amount of music by some DJs in his city (Vancouver) that he's heard in restaurants. Now, he's a producer himself and isn't shy about finding out about music he likes. I doubt most others in restaurant would do the same. They eat, they talk over the music, they pay their bill and leave. My friend is not a DJ, has never played records to an audience anywhere so he doesn't know the experience. I suppose if you're getting paid you're getting paid but I feel there's something just not right about DJs becoming so ubiquitous.
a (good) deejay has the power to set or alter the mood and atmosphere in any room. now, i dont know about playing somewhere where conversation is supposed to be going on at a normal level, such as a restaurant. at that point a deejay would be essentially doing muzak. but in a bar or coffe house or something like that where music can play relatively loudly without bothering anyone, it can be very powerful, even if the people that it is having effect on are not aware of it! im much more skeptical of stuff like corporate shops having deejays in them. the puma store in the yuppie outdoor urban mall in the south side of pgh does that, it is extremely weak. tmo
