Hey, Mr. DJ! Mixers & Spinners Speak Out – The Multiview

We here at Street Team Interviews always dig going out to hear a good DJ spin. Notice I use the word “good.” Every once in a while, you’ll inevitably come across a DJ who, despite all their expensive equipment, massive headphones and obvious intensity, seems to have no idea what they’re doing, what they’re playing or what the crowd wants. We happen to know several good DJs and thought we would pick their brains about what it takes to be a DJ, what they’ve learned in their time and what they might pass along to future DJs. Have a look and let us know what your thoughts are in the Comments section.

Q: What would you say the mark of a good DJ is?

“Not being too selfish in what you’re playing. Knowing what your crowd is going to like. Knowing what songs will transition into other songs whether you’re mixing them or not.” – Jeremy Wheeler, The Bang!, Ann Arbor, MI.

“Definitely reading the crowd. It’s not necessarily putting on your favorite tracks, but it’s being able to tell what can affect a crowd in a way that you want, you know? It’s feeling out the crowd. It’s really listening as a DJ rather than producing sound. That’s what I think.” – Brian “Just B” Alvarez, Ann Arbor, MI.

“I honestly think the mark of a good DJ is knowing their crowd. I’ve seen plenty of DJs that are not the most proficient mixers or beat-matchers, but that didn’t matter because they knew the crowd. They knew what the crowd wanted to hear and found a good way to work it into the night. Also, being able to play with a dynamic. You never want to start the night off with the big track that everyone wants to hear, you have to work into it; Get everyone feeling the vibe, get them all out of their seats, get them dancing like morons, then drop the hot track and send them threw the roof.” – Brad “Dumbchild” Hicks, Ann Arbor, MI.

“I’d say the mark of a good DJ is being able to tap into the feel of the crowd and roll with it. Nothing is worse, in my opinion, than being out on the dance floor with your hair slapped in a pony dancing your face off and then a real stinker comes on. We’ve all seen it happen. Everyone looks at each other, makes a face, and walks off to get a drink or something. Urgh! The worst” – Ayron Michael Nelson, Ann Arbor, MI

Q: There used to be a stigma that, if you weren’t pure vinyl, you weren’t legit. Now, you almost never see a DJ without a laptop or some digital mix equipment. Do you think that stigma still exists in some circles, or has DJing simply evolved naturally with technology?

“Stigmas exist everywhere and they are different everywhere. If you go to Chicago there’s gonna be a different stigma there. If you go to Detroit there’s gonna be a different stigma there. It all matters on the person who’s making these generalizations about what they think that DJing is all about, when really all that matters is you’re playing good songs, people are dancing, and that’s it. What matters is, at the end of the night, if people had a great time, fine. Who cares [about stigmas]. But people certainly do– they not only think of it as an art, it is an art and each way of DJing is an art. It’s whether you can appreciate the certain way someone is doing something or not and if someone is doing something you disagree with.” – Jeremy Wheeler

“I think it definitely has stuck in a lot of cultures and there’s a lot of basement DJ that are just going to play vinyl and they’re not going to [deviate] or they’re going to stay true to their craft and only stick to vinyl. My philosophy, and I struggled with this a long time, was, how do I affect the most people I can the quickest as possible and for me, that was a digital route. If it’s a matter of skill, like, I’ve evolved from CDJs to doing things on laptops to now I’ve got [Serato Scratch Live] Vinyl and [Serato] Scratch [Live] with the whole feel of the record. To me, no one can really tell me that I don’t know how to mix or I don’t know how to scratch because I’ve built my own skill levels and I guess I really don’t knock people like Girl Talk who use Ableton and stuff like that to produce all that big sound. It’s a constant evolution and everything is evolving. If you don’t keep up with it then you’re just going to get left behind. You always pay homage to the old and respect that, but things are on a new level. It’s always changing. Music is evolving and you have to keep up with that. Buy the new [mediums], the new technologies, what’s available. It’s coming from so many different places now because of the technology. I think that it’s just a blessing that all this technology came out. It makes jobs a lot easier and you get to hear a lot of people input on music that you wouldn’t normally hear. You get to hear a lot more opinions because of it and I think that’s always a good thing. Whether [that music] is good or not? Leave that up to the people to judge, but who cares what everybody’s talking about [in terms of stigmas].” – Brian Alvarez

“I know that stigma exists. Especially here in Detroit. It almost seems to be a hypocritical argument. Some people who will dog on people who don’t use vinyl are the same people that are using Serato. Serato is laptop DJing! Just because you are using time-coded vinyl does not make you a vinyl DJ. See, I am a laptop DJ. So, I am the guy with the least amount of table space (or on the kiddy table) and the guy that gets fucked on playing time. The thing is, most real vinyl DJs are collectors (those are usually the cool guys) and I’m cool with that, but its the guys who do use MP3s and still get all up in your shit talking about how Traktor can beat-match for you and whatnot that I can’t stand. Mixing and knowing how to work a crowd is DJing, that is the fundamental definition. If people want to dog me because I use Traktor, have them stand behind my laptop and mix like I do. Hell, have them stand behind their decks and mix like I do — live, with no cue monitor! People don’t like laptop DJing because of the same reasons people don’t like electronic music. It is accessible. When things become accessible, everyone thinks they can do it. You just have to take the good with the bad.” – Brad Hicks

“I’m sure that there are people that look down on what I do. I used to use both vinyl and laptop then my digital music collection caught up and passed my meager vinyl collection, so I thought to myself, ‘If I continued to carry this crate of records into every gig knowing full well I have every one of those songs in my laptop, who am I doing that for? Am I trying to get street cred?’ I understand fully there are advantages for some folks. I just don’t happen to be one of them. I consider what I do more “party steering” mainly because I don’t have any superfluous DJ skills per se. I simply like good music, and like to have a blast.” – Ayron Michael Nelson

Q: When did you know you wanted to be a DJ?

“Last year? [laughs] I don’t know. When I really cherish DJing is when I’m DJing for bands. When I’m DJing for nights when bands are playing and stuff. DJing for parties and DJing for groups I’m used to and I’m completely comfortable with. It’s when there’s a little bit of anxiety involved and when there’s a little bit of the unknown involved, and if it goes off well, that’s when I really enjoy it. DJing between bands is something that both Jason Gibner and I have both enjoyed and tried out and I think that, yeah, when you’re out of your comfort zone and if something really works, I think that you really appreciate that more.” – Jeremy Wheeler

“Wow. That is such a deep question. [laughs] I have been involved in hip hop since I was a little kid and when I was a pre-teen, I was writing rhymes, I was breakdancing, I’m a graffiti artist, a producer and basically, I had a hip hop group and they broke up and I said, “What way can I affect people and still be on the music scene and just be dependent on myself?” DJing was the most natural route, so it really completed my circle for me. It was a natural progression. It just kind of pushed me – everything in my life pushed me into DJing and just prepared me for it, so it was a natural progression for sure. Definitely? It was probably conversations with buddies and I saw a lot of other DJs who were doing so-called hip hop and I guess it kinda goes back to your question, you know? Technology being more readily accessible, it had all these other DJs that, to me, sounded like shit, so I felt like it was my job to come up and get some turntables and to represent. If people liked it, then let the people speak, you know? And they have. I feel like I’ve made my spot in Ann Arbor and people have told me that they like what I do, so really, it was a natural progression but it was probably some conversations that really, like, it dawned on me like, “Dude. This has to happen! This is where I belong.” How long ago? Hip hop has been running through my blood since I was, like, a little baby, damn near. But probably a few years ago– a couple years ago. Probably like two, two and a half, yeah. And then I just went for it. My girlfriend at the time was skeptical. She was like, “Aww, I don’t really know if he’s gonna — he’s taking on this huge task of doing all this stuff.” It wasn’t that she wasn’t supportive; she was just worried about whether I was going to make it or not and, well, here I am.” – Brian Alvarez

“I used to sit in my room and listen to Tower 98 in Monroe all the time. I always thought it would be super cool to be a DJ on the radio. When I got into High School I started as a mobile DJ (doing dances and stuff like that) and I was actually pretty good at it. That relies more on your willingness to be an MC though. Two years ago was my first time out DJing again and I realized that you can do the same things with the music and working your mix, that you could with the mic.” – Brad Hicks

“I’ve been to a lot of parties and I’ve had a lot of fun, but I just got sick of someone else deciding what me and my friends wanted to dance to, so I decided to do it myself. I was talking to my friend, Louis, one day and we were talking about how no one was playing the sort of music we really were into at the time and someone needed to cause it was some good shit. So, we teamed up, then he moved away to Chicago. Some time in there I was asked by A2DT to play a party that was super fun and that’s when me and Smiley started playing together and it is a real blast, then he moved away to Chicago.”- Ayron Michael Nelson

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Four Questions About Barack Obama – The MultiView

Today’s multiview stems from a questions I found myself asking just about everyone I ran into shortly after Barack Obama won the presidential election. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to ask some people who took the time to either sit down and answer into a recorder or email their answers back to us. Below are answers from people spanning generations, income levels, race, sex, political affiliations and so on. Interviews were reproduced as faithfully to the original as possible.

We also welcome you to answer the following questions in our Comments section below. Enjoy.

Question 1: Where were you and what were you doing when Barack Obama won the necessary votes and gave his acceptance speech?

“I was at Jason Gibner’s house with his lovely pregnant wife Erin and my lovely lady Mariah and I was fighting back tears as I kind of sat and took in what this meant. And then later on I was very jealous of all the stories that I heard from people of downtown Ann Arbor exploding in a huge flurry of activity and people charging the Diag and high-fiving each other and beeping at and everything like that. I thought that was great, but I was very happy to celebrate this time with very amazing friends and life-long buds.” – Jeremy Wheeler, DJ/comic artist/film critic, Ann Arbor, MI

“I was at Babs’, oddly enough [where this interview took place]. Actually, I was flyering for a gig and I was out in the streets and I hit, like, seven to ten bars that night and just catchin’ the vibe that night. Honestly, it didn’t really hit me until I watched his acceptance speech and honestly, a little shit welled up in me, like I’m not gonna [cry], but — You know what it was? It was, I was proud to be an American all over again. I am so United States. I love everything this country was built on. I hate some of the shit this government does, but I love the fact that I’m able to hate it. Do you know what I mean? And I was really just choked up that I was happy to be American all over again. Like, I didn’t want to move out of the country anymore. I wanted to stay here and do something and I was so happy. To me it was a monumental thing and it didn’t really hit me until I went home and watched the re-run of the acceptance speech and I was like — I was with my buddy and both of us were kind of choked up. It was two grown-ass men watching television and not talkin’, like, ‘Dude, don’t look at me.’ [laughs]” – Brian “Just B” Alverez, DJ, Ann Arbor, MI

“I was actually in my office finishing up work that I had to do for the next day unfortunately. But, I was sort of keeping track of what was going on my computer as it was going on. Yeah, CNN.com and I was just hitting refresh while I was doing my work. I was writing a research proposal for one of my courses.” – Shawn Henry, U of M Grad Student, Mathematics, Ann Arbor, MI

“I was at home in my living room and I was sitting there bewildered, dumbfounded, excited and amazed. It took me a whole 24 hours to really realize that he actually had won. Not only won, but he won. He didn’t just win by a couple of votes, he like, really won by a landslide considering that he’s a black president — and I’m black — I didn’t think that America was really ready to have a black president, to be perfectly honest. I voted for him, of course, not because he was black but just because he was better than McCain. I liked McCain. I just thought he’s a little bit too straight-laced, too conservative for what the country needed as a whole at this particular moment. I think maybe if he would’ve ran in the 80s or early 90s, he would’ve been a prime candidate and idealistic president for that era. But I don’t think with how everybody is just so liberal and more open-minded as the years go on, you know, in the new millennium. I don’t think that — I never thought that [McCain] would win and definitely, Palin didn’t help. ” – Laditra Jackson – Chef, The Melting Pot, Ann Arbor, MI

“I was at home and I was just watching it on TV and I was proud! I was proud of him, not just for being the president but just for conducting himself in the manner that he did. You very rarely see, like, a lot of black young males — I consider him as young. He’s not my age, but he’s young, you know. I just took it as a movement. It let a lot of people know of the different cultures that, you know, African-Americans — it’s not just one stereotype, so I liked that because I think that because he’s president, that other people will look at other black males as positive figures, not just as drug dealers or bangers or somebody who’s trying to rob you or anything. It’s a lot of people that I know that’s black, but they’re so close to white that you wouldn’t really know they were black unless you seen them. Like, if you talk to them over the phone, you’d be like, ‘Oh, wow.’ cuz they’re into more white stuff than, you know, black stuff. It’s definitely a positive thing because it opens up doors for, you know, it might be other young kids aspiring to be a president. When I was younger, I was like, I looked at the ruler of all the presidents and I was like, ‘Ain’t anybody in my family every been president. I don’t see anybody black on here. There’s about 24 presidents on the ruler. I just didn’t even think about growing up as a president was even possible. It is enlightening. It is motivation that you can be what you want to be if you strive for it.  ” – Ralph Cheatham, The Melting Pot, Ann Arbor, MI

“I was at my house in Ferndale. We hosted an election party and had CNN on the TV in the living room and NBC on the TV in the dining room. I first saw it on the NBC and was like “NBC’s Calling it…” walked into the living room and CNN called it and we erupted into applause and then sort of stood around with this moment of awe and wonder. A couple of moments later I went out on the front porch and could hear people cheering on 9 Mile Road in downtown Ferndale so we started cheering on our porch too. We watched his speech from my living room. Wanted so bad to drive around town like the red wings had won, but didn’t.” – Scott Myers, Actor/Improviser, Ferndale, MI

“Lying in bed, watching the vote count. (I was not feeling well). Afterward I could hear screams of joy up and down the NYC blocks.” – Jessie Russell, New York, NY

“Salida, CO. Sleeping.” – Forest Casey, Photojournalist, Los Angeles, CA

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