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Death of the DJ

Every time I've ever met anyone who works in Marketing, I've been left with a less than positive impression. It's probably due to the fact that working in Marketing entails treating people like brainless, soulless sheep. Sheep with money to spend. Five years in the job is, I suspect, enough to turn an ordinarily empathic, altruistic human into a cynical tyrant who can't meet anybody without wondering which target audience they could best be subsumed under.

The sad thing is that the Marketing-Men's vision of the world is, by and large, correct. Consumers are utterly stupid creatures, who are easy to manipulate and will enthusiastically follow whatever trend the media tells them to. Classical economics likes to pretend that people are single-minded utility maximises, economic agents who know exactly what they want and will always find the most efficient way to satisfy these desires. Rubbish. Most people don't have a clue what they desire, and with life being as disorientating as it is, they're desperate to be told what it is that they want.

This is particularly true in the music industry. The ‘next big thing' is easy to manufacture, even if it is based around something clearly unworthy of adulation. Take for example, the rise and fall of the DJ.

Though it might not look like it from Romania , where Dance music is still the de rigueur music of choice for anyone concerned with looking vaguely fashionable, the DJ is all but dead. Don't tell the kids who live for the electric atmosphere of sell-out House events such as ‘The Mission', but in the west, clubbing has become an increasingly guilty pleasure. People are doing it less, and nobody is talking about it. There's a very good reason for so many big-name house DJs coming to countries like Romania to play. It's because fewer and fewer people in the West are willing to pay the extravagant sums they charge to play.

The superstar DJ was an anomaly, a brief fad from a particular period of music history. His time has passed (of course it is a he – when did you last see a female DJ?). Many of the big UK ‘super-clubs' (Gatecrasher in Sheffield, Cream in Liverpool) closed their doors a few years ago, and previously top-selling dance magazines such as Muzik similarly folded. Ministry of Sound survived by reinventing itself in the mould of a bar-restaurant. Even the word ‘clubbing' sounds unhip. Not only are people now dancing in smaller, more intimate venues, they're also looking for live music. A fact frequently quoted by journalists used to be that turntables now outsell guitars, something that first took place in 2001. However, keep your eye on the latest figures - because you don't need to be an industry insider to predict that this trend is going to be reversed pretty soon. For now at least, Rock and Roll is where it's at . It's guitars that kids are again pretending to play in front of their bedroom mirrors.

There is perhaps no better cultural representative of advanced capitalist society than the DJ. The DJ is the embodiment of consumption repackaged as art. Not actually creating anything new himself, the DJ simply presents other peoples creations. A lot of it comes down to how many records you can afford to buy. Lock yourself away in a room with a guitar and there's a chance that you'll come out a proficient player. By contrast, a good DJ needs to continually invest in his record collection in order to keep up to date. While the guitarist practices, the DJ shops. And of course, the music industry loves it. With global music sales last year reaching their lowest point for sales in reaching their lowest levels for more than 20 years, a generation of ‘vinyl junkies' helps keep the industry afloat.

The most important skill element in DJing supposedly comes from mixing, that is, matching the beat of two records so that you can blend seamlessly from one track to another. This mythologized, much eulogized skill is this subject of numerous books, videos, and ‘teach-yourself' guides. For a significant sum of money, you can also enrol on at a ‘DJing academy', where teenage boys learn not only to mix, but also to look up to other males with unhealthily catholic musical tastes. Again, don't shout about it, but the truth is that anybody can learn to mix tolerably well in an afternoon.

Indeed, it's Dance music's fascination with such mundane technical details that led to the stagnation of the scene. It became increasingly conservative and inward looking. It was only a matter of time before people woke up to the fact that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes.

Dance culture has done great things for Romania . It's opened the eyes of a whole generation to the possibilities of electronic music. Moreover, it means that you're able to walk into an upmarket club and see usually intimidating ‘mafiot' characters dancing and hugging each other, instead of trying to look cool, sat around a table surrounded by a harem of young girls. Ecstasy culture may well be infuriatingly shallow and unworthy of glamorisation, but anything that stops open-shirted men with slicked back hair and lots of gold jewellery from scaring me so much whenever I go out is definitely welcome. However, it's time to face facts. The DJ is quite simply an unworthy figure for worship.