I think David Medsker can relate to this… Back in my salad days of college, I made extra money with two turntables and a microphone. More often than not, some guy at a wedding reception I was working at would amble up to my DJ rig with a toothpick in his mouth, trying in vain to dig out a small bit of rubber chicken or steak, and stand there looking at my setup. I’d get the once over twice, and then it started.
“So, you do this a lot?” Queried semi-drunk reception attendee.
“Yeah,” I would answer (knowing full well what was coming next).
“Seems like a pretty easy job. I mean, all you do is get paid to play records. Hell, any trained monkey can do that! How hard can it be? You just play some songs, get paid, and go home. Seems like a dream job to me.”
“Well,” I would patiently try and explain, “It’s not as easy as you think. You have to read the crowd, pick songs that you think they will like, watch the tempo of the mix, and know when to play a heavy hitter that’s going to be a crowd pleaser. It’s not science, but there’s a skill at doing this right.”
“Like I said,” Mr. Bibulous Blowhard would intone,”any trained monkey can do this. In fact, I’ll bet you one day there’ll be a computer that can do what you’re doing.”
Flash forward twentysomething years later, and the fucker’s right. There is a computer that can do what I used to do. In fact, if you work in the radio industry, a computer has by and large replaced what DJs used to do. Yep, most DJs who work in the radio industry just play whatever the music director has scheduled into the computer. They rarely have any control over the music content, so it stands to reason that it would only be a matter of time when “shuffle” mode on your favorite music player would morph into DJ mode. And so it is with Apple’s “Genius Mixes” — which comes with the latest version of iTunes. (more…)
Of course! Who better to scare the crap out of criminals than the man who followed up Law and Order with Go Insane? Here in America we can’t get enough of “maverick cops” who have trouble “playing by the rules” and are willing to risk “life and limb” to nab the bad guys, possibly because they’re “mentally unstable” or just plain “suicidal,” and years down the road may end up making “anti-Semitic comments” to arresting officers while “hammered out of their gourds on Cazadores tequila” behind the wheel of an automobile. In order to catch the bad guys, you have to think like the bad guys, but sometimes that means you end up talking and even acting like the bad guys. But isn’t it worth all the apologetic “Whoopsy!” meetings with rabbis and the stints in rehab and the worldwide public condemnation if it eventually translates to some face time with Diane Sawyer?
“Sisters of the Moon” was the last of the four singles released in the U.S. off of Tusk (1979). Someone needs to introduce Kanye West to this one. The beat seems right up his alley for a sample.
When I was in middle school, I had a lot of ideas for music videos. Generally, these ideas were boring and tame — mostly because at the time, I was listening to a lot of really sappy, sad music (I changed from a private school to a public school between seventh and eighth grade and had a bit of a hard time with it). Most of these ideas consisted of one boring act, definitely not enough to sustain an entire video — a woman packing, for example. And instead of ever developing these ideas or incorporating others, I would just do it myself, without even filming. If my idea was a woman running through grass, I’d put the song on, then run out on our lawn. If the song made me think of a woman cuddling by the fire with her cat, I’d turn the song on repeat, then do just that. It’s no mystery why I never tried to make it into the business. I’d be hard-pressed to remember any ideas that coordinate with songs now, except for one: Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs.”
