At the top of the year, Taipei, Taiwan served as a gathering hotspot for the musically inclined. Now, we don’t necessarily mean instrumentalists, producers, vocalists, emcees and the like, but rather the ones who bring all aforementioned elements to the table (literally) and pump the blood into a party. During the Red Bull Music 3Style World Finals, crowds in the thousands saw a diverse assortment of DJs hailing from countries like Japan (DJ Fummy) and Sweden (DJ O-One) to Taiwan (DJ Afro) and France (DJ Hamma), not only battle it out for the top spot, but show off their marriage of technical skills and passion behind the turntables.
With the influx of socially forward aux-cord extraordinaires, what exactly is a DJ in 2019? With the ease of technology coming into play, what is the importance of the person plucking an event’s chunes, and is there now a timestamp on their necessity? The short answer to the previous question—evidenced by the sheer amount of DJs who flew in and packed out clubs like AI, Franny Taipei, Klash and Omni to watch them play—is a resounding hell no.
3Style buddha DJ Jazzy Jeff already dropped a host of gems about the importance of DJ culture, but fellow judges Nina Las Vegas, DJ Craze, DJ Skratch Bastid and DJ Nu-Mark, and competitors DJ Praktyczna Pani, DJ Trapment and DJ J. Espinosa—the latter of whom placed third and first, respectively—have a few nuggets of their own worth jotting down. When they weren’t spinning or critiquing or simply enjoying each others’ handiwork, these eight globetrotters broke down for VIBE what exactly makes up the mind (technical and musical knowledge), body (rhythm, cultural cues, crowd reaction) and soul (passion for the craft) of a DJ.
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MIND
“I had a long history of learning instruments in my family. My dad didn’t learn instruments as a child but he wanted his kids to, so it was forced. I had piano lessons from when I was six years old to when I was 18 and I was quite good at it, but as soon as I left home it was like the pleasure of not having to go to those lessons. I kind of lost a lot of my music theory because I did not get how important and how much I should have treated it. I was in bands and I did do fun community colleges and theater and musicals and stuff like that. I was a full music geek, I just didn’t explore that side when I got to Sydney. As soon as we moved to Sydney we lost that network adn I didn’t get to do it. That’s why I went out a lot because these people like music, but they just weren’t playing it, they were DJing.” —DJ Nina Las Vegas, Australia
“I don’t even know music theory. And I don’t even have a good ear for what’s off-key or not. You would think that Kanye knows music theory right? He doesn’t. You would think Pharrell knows music theory, and he doesn’t. But they’re just good at what they do. My wife was telling me, ‘Some people are good with shapes and things like that, and then some people are good with math.’ I’m good with shapes, I’m not good with math. For me, patterns. I’m good with patterns.” —DJ Craze, Miami
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“Coming from a background where my parents are ACDC, Guns N’ Roses fans, I remember my dad used to come in and blast that stuff all the time. Just like the normal Canadian white kind of family, just normal rock. I wasn’t raised on soul, funk stuff. My parents, were into the classic rock and stuff like that but also growing up in a place where I did, like Sudbury, country, I am an open format DJ at heart. I never choose to pick anything. I just enjoyed music. When I say love every genre, I do. There’s going to be good hip-hop songs and bad hip-hop songs, just there is going to be good country and bad country. I always hear people talking about different genres, but music is music. It’s so diverse and it can hit you and make you feel some type of way. So just growing up in that background and being open to more stuff, when I starting meeting people or getting into clubs and bars and hip-hop back in the early 2000s, that’s when the Ja Rule’s, Fat Joe’s and Jay-Z’s [were playing] the most. I never grew up on ’90s. I had a couple mixtapes—Fu Schnickens, Dr. Dre, and Naughty by Nature. My majority of my growing up followed the R&B and hip-hop, like the Mary Js and the early 2000s. The stuff that was just good, better than what it is today.” —DJ Trapment, Canada
“My whole iTunes is there. But it’s the crates… each crate I can have like 200-300 tunes. It sounds like a lot but trust me it ain’t. It sounds like a lot but within an hour, us DJs will go through 80 records, because it’s more of a performance. We’re not even getting into the verses.” —Craze
“The technicality stuff, I actually don’t do a lot of freestyle stuff in clubs. I love showcasing who I am as a DJ on these stages but I don’t do that necessarily in a club because there is a time and place to everything. If you hire me to showcase cool, let’s get down, but don’t get me wrong, I do cut a lot while I am mixing in the club, but it’s subliminal and it’s lowkey so it doesn’t really stand out above the rest.” —Trapment
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“I just simply started to scratch. I knew what I wanted to hear, and I knew that, if I push this and squeeze that, I’m gonna receive that kind of sound. I started to watch some tutorials and teach my hands, my muscles how to do it. I really like to practice. For me, it’s like some kind of meditation, because you need to focus on that certain thing and your mind cannot be distracted and that is the time when you relax your mind. I realized that making boring things makes me really relaxed. It’s my kind of yoga.” —DJ Praktyczna Pani, Poland
“It’s almost like rare nowadays to see a DJ who is doing tricks and scratching. There are tons of DJs who do it but nowadays I feel like the festival thing is so popular. Those festivals don’t really showcase DJs, so what the kids see is maybe a DJ who is doing a 10-minute warm-up set for artists and those DJs, for the most part, are just playing songs and hyping up the crowd, but there is no searching or technicality involved. And that’s not easy though. There is an art in rocking a crowd with a microphone and not touching a turntable. Festival people, if you are reading this interview, book a couple DJs that will showcase some festival stuff because people will love it.” —DJ J. Espinosa, Bay Area
“You don’t need to scratch a lot. Sometimes it’s too much, like almost mathematic. All you need to bring to the table is try to get emotion from people, and that’s what I’m trying to do. That’s how I would describe my style. It’s not about gender, it’s not about hip-hop, hip-house, techno or anything. As long as you can get emotions from people, that’s a brilliant thing.” —Praktyczna Pani
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“For DJing [technology] is definitely a tool. Even like when the first DVS system came out—DVS is like your laptop and your computer—When that first came out, I was the first one in the whole hip hop world [to embrace it]. People were like “What are you doing? You’re going to ruin the record industry. What do you need a laptop for?” Everybody was talking sh*t. But I saw the future. I was like, this is gonna be the sh*t. And at the time, if you wanted to play an album cut, you know albums the grooves are thinner so it’s always lower. So, if you want to play something from an album in a live club with the bass, the beat back would destroy it. When this came out, I was like now I can play album cuts. My collection could be here. I was doing the first routines using controllers and everything, and people were like, what the f**k is he doing? I’ve always been like, technology helps me, it opens my mind to new possibilities.” —Craze
“[Controllers] definitely make [DJing] more accessible. You don’t have to go out and buy needles, but the way that we learned how to DJ on turntables, it makes it easier for us to DJ on any other piece of equipment. I can DJ on a controller, I can DJ on a CD player, but a person who learns how to DJ on a controller doesn’t feel comfortable most of the time going to turntables or going to CDs.” —J. Espinosa
“I am personally not worried about the computer taking over what a guy like myself does. A computer will never know when energy in the room is really bubbling proper. Yeah, there are algorithms that show, this many person like this, but it’s not the same as really tugging on somebody’s emotions.” —DJ Skratch Bastid, Canada
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“It’s not about selecting just the right thing. Sometimes the right thing to do is to take the left turn and be like, this is where we are going to go right now. That takes a selector. That takes somebody steering the ship. A computer can’t steer the ship like that.” —DJ Nu-Mark, Los Angeles
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BODY
“Miami definitely influenced me with bass music. With party music even freestyle music, even reggae, and even you know reggaeton and mumba, I used to play that because that’s what pops off in Miami. I was born in Nicaraguan but I moved to Miami when I was three. Miami has definitely influenced me, Miami bass is my biggest influence. I got it tatted on me.” —Craze
“Because of my energy, I don’t need to take or do anything to have fun. I feed off of other people. If you are having fun, I am having fun., I don’t really dance in the club, but I will be dancing behind my DJ set-up. When I am behind the decks I am crazy, I am weird, I just talk smack on the mic, have a good time and vibe out.” —Trapment
“Say if I was going to Russia, I would sus out where I was going. I would like talk with the promoter. My manager is pretty good at checking what the music style is, but also I am in a good position where people know what I play now so I’ve got wiggle room. But then if I play like Whistler [Canada], Whistler is a party town. It’s all these kids that work hospitality and Monday night is party night and then they are all Australian, too. They would be annoyed if I didn’t play something that made them remind them of home for a second. So I had my set ready to go but I allowed myself to cheese it up, like this is purely for this audience that I wouldn’t play anywhere else.” —Nina Las Vegas
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“I get booked to DJ in New Orleans and they have their own regional music, you sort of got to know where you are at. And everything I am saying there is a completely opposite answer to that. I was actually talking with Jazzy Jeff about this and he opened my eyes to this perspective. He did a show in Africa, so right after his show, I was chopping it up with him and I was like, ‘Did you play some Afro beat stuff out there?’ and he was like, ‘No. They hear that every weekend so they are bringing me here to do me,’ which makes so much sense as well.” —J. Espinosa
“I played this after party after this massive festival and I played it in a small club afterward and it sold out. These girls came up to me and they were like, ‘Usually after parties are so boring. They are always techno and you did everything.’ I said, what do you mean, and they said, ‘We danced! We didn’t come to this thing thinking we would dance. It was just so fun,’ and I was like that made my day.” —Nina Las Vegas
“I love reading crowds. I don’t ever premake sets for anything. Throw me into a hip-hop club, the most hood stuff, I have an idea. We do this for a living now, so I have an idea of what is big and what is out there. At the same time, you throw me into Sudbury, the North [of Canada], I know how to play and flip songs in different ways. I just know how to read the crowd and read the people. It’s common sense, honestly. DJing is common sense. Playing a hip-hop song, a country song, a rock song and if they are feeling one genre more than they other, then maybe you should go down that road a little bit more and mess around and make it your own.” —Trapment
“I don’t think everyone actually thinks about [warming up the crowd]. Sometimes you are so fixed on what you want to do that sometimes you can psych yourself. Sometimes you gotta say, that is how I want to start but people are not ready to see, so sometimes you have to add a little intro to it. But that is the reading the crowd part. I think sometimes you gotta say, hey I’m here, before you say, this is what I want to start with. The thing about DJing is you can apply it to so many different rooms, sometimes people pay to just come and see my show, sometimes I am opening for someone else, sometimes I am playing a venue in a different city where people have never seen me and I don’t really know. So in all those different cases, I feel like you have to approach them in different ways. It kind of depends on the thing. But I think it is important that you connect with them first before you go over the top. Connect with them first on an easier level. And I save something in the tank, don’t go all out right away cause that can be abrasive.” —Skratch Bastid
“Someone asked [DJ Jazzy] Jeff, what do you do when someone plays five or six of the songs that you are trying to do? He was adamant about, do it your way, play it again but do it your way. I didn’t expect him to say that, honestly. I thought he was going to say have plan B. Jeff was like, play the song again and play it your way, but if you’re dope you will be able to flip it and make the crowd forget they even heard it from the first DJ.” —Nu-Mark
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SOUL
“The trend is that we have a lot of DJs with controllers and everything. I don’t mind, you work whatever you like, if you like to have a small controller or just an iPad. Cool, let’s do that. But it’s all about emotions, being honest and not using music or DJing just to show how cool you are. It’s about good music, we need to provide good music.” —Praktyczna Pani
“Yeah, everybody can be a DJ, and yes everybody can have a playlist with ‘Mo Bamba.’ You play it and people will go nuts, but that does not make you a good DJ. That just means you are playing a record that everybody knows. There’s no rocket science to that. A good DJ— and I hate to sound old school—but a good DJ takes you on a journey. The DJs that I like don’t play the most obvious things. They take me somewhere else. We’re not just there to make you smile sometimes. And this is where I’m different from everybody else here. Everybody else here agrees that DJs are for the people. I don’t think like that. I feel like I’m like the sushi guy that you go to and you don’t order nothing and he’s like here, ‘I’m gonna give you this. I feel like right now you need this. This is who I am, and this is why I’m feeding you this because I want you to experience something different.’ That’s what I’m like in my whole DJ career.” —Craze
“The way I DJ is I play off energy and emotion. I think that is one of the most important things about being a human. People go to the club or listen to music in their car to escape the realities of life, and if you can help people on the dance floor escape whatever that mundane job has given them or family problems or whatever, then you are 80 percent there in my book.” —Nu-Mark
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“It’s so cliche but it does unify people in so many ways. I played in India last year and I’m playing the same songs I played in Sydney. This is wild. I’m in India playing records to people my age who are feeling in the same way that people my age feel in L.A. or France. and it’s just so cool because it just breaks down the same things: people just want to have fun and forget about their normal lives for a second.” —Nina Las Vegas
“I’m still like a b-boy, I still want to be the best. When I see someone do some sh*t, I’m like, ‘I gotta go home and practice. I gotta switch up my playlist.’ I still got that love for it. Everyday I wake up, I practice and I’m like doing something because it’s fun.” —Craze
“It is a blessing to do something that you love. Does not mean that the work is easier. It just means that I am doing something that I love and I can make a living off of it. I think that if there is anything that keeps me going, it’s me realizing that I play music to make people have a good time. It’s as simple as that, there is no deep analogy.” —DJ Jazzy Jeff, Philadelphia
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