Why Drag Your Shit Around Town?
There’s just nothing quite as intoxicating to me as the fruity, flowery, sweet smell of 80s girls at the club mixed with cigarette smoke and music. And I say this because the other night at the DJ set, when I was playing thru 80s dance songs mixed with 90s indie stuff, I cut in some Sonic Youth that I missed the first round. But if you were there and in it, really in it, it doesn’t matter — you can connect to this music just like your favorites.
And I say all of this because the other night we kind of transcended, and the feeling went out to the people who were there. If you are feeling it, you can transmit it. I don’t know how any of this works at all, but the age group that was there got it, and we felt it.
And I don’t think it’s regression, like, oh, take me back. I think you can connect to those feelings because they’re still out there. And that may be the secret. I mean, why would you listen to a song? Why would you dance around and listen to it? Because you can just be doing that. You can just be dancing.
And I don’t know what else there is to do in life, really, besides that.
That’s kind of the magic. If you can deliver this to a group of people who are just trying to go to a tech happy hour and get some free food and drinks, but they get something extra, then you’ve done something. And that’s the magic of carrying these stupid DJ decks around downtown Austin when you could be home in bed or watching Netflix.
That’s the magic.
So that’s what I’m going to chase when I think about building these sets. But you also can’t think about it too much. You have to trust your gut and your feeling and the random playlists that pop up leading up to certain things.
I’ve been doing this seriously, DJing, for five or six years. I’m just now getting good at it. Same with the electronic music. If I had known it took over 10 years to do that — I was just telling somebody this yesterday — I probably wouldn’t have done it. But I’m glad I did.
I thought I could get good in hours.
But I think back to when I got my first guitar, and I picked it up and was like, I don’t know how to play this. And that was it. I had no idea what was going on.
These things take forever. Playing bass well has taken forever. Playing guitar proficiently has taken forever. It is going to take forever to get pretty proficient at keys, although I’m way better than I was a year ago.
But so far as I can tell, I have forever.
I feel like I’ve been around for a really long time, and I’ve got a really long time to go. So I’m just going to keep doing all this.
Who cares? No one, until they do!