As somebody else who’s not really interested in this I’m also going to make the mistake of giving my opinion.
I’ll probably regret this as I’m not remotely knowledgeable on the subject, and as I’d never heard of the subject of this thread before I don’t won’t to offer opinion on her directly.
But for that, the fact she was described above as the number 1 dj in the world upthread this started a thought train with me: going back 20 plus years and into the times of the superstar dj there were 2 major barriers to entry into that world.
One you need to have some basic skills.
Now the technical difficulty of beat matching records was always massively overstated, but it did have a learning curve that required access to record decks and some time to practice.
Secondly, as most pertinently, it required a big record collection - most often collated with huge quantities of time and money spent on it.
With the move to digital, those barriers went.
You could now seamlessly ‘mix’ records after about 20 minutes practice, and anybody with a long weekend and credit card could have the exact same record collection as anybody else in the world.
Under this new paradigm it made perfect sense for promoters and institutions at the unabashedly commercial end of the market to engender the rise of the dj/model.
If things are basically going to sound the same then why not have a quote/unquote ‘fit young bird’ rather than traditional middle aged nerdy bloke.
It made perfect sense commercially speaking.
It’s a far easier sell.
So is this good or bad?
In truth good or bad probably doesn’t come into it. It’s just shit the way shit goes. It’s a gain for some and a loss for others, and as a straight middle-aged white bloke I’m pretty reluctant to rail against the world not being solely designed for my benefit, because we’ve kind of had that for at least the last 800 years.
If there is an opinion to be heard on this (flush mine down the toilet by all means) it might best be from female producers and/or djs who are no more interested in instagram followers than ugly bastards like me.
Has the rise in prominence of the star female dj persona been a net gain or detriment to their efforts?
Has it opened doors, or just created stereotypes?
Or is it basically just as fucking irrelevant as it is to me?