3. Charlotte the Baroness

3. Charlotte the Baroness

You're supposed to make them dance.

I know I've added a lot of other criteria to the DJ checklist over the course of this top 20, but what's important to 99% of the people who ever go to a club? Whether the DJ got them dancing. By that measure, Charlotte the Baroness is the best I've ever seen, and it's not even close.

Charlotte has only one setting. Which is not to say that she plays only one kind of music -she can be mad eclectic - or can handle only one kind of crowd. But when she gets back there, it's GO, and you can keep your ready steady for some other party.

She can start it - I've seen her fill more empty dance floors than any other DJ. She can finish it, having wrung the last drops of Sunday morning sweat out of the legendary EndUp in San Francisco for years. And she can keep it going in between, her relentless enthusiasm for the 125bpm machine funk doing more than all the nefarious powders in SoMA to keep the floor filled after 3am. She never claimed to be taking anyone on a 'journey' even though some of her music is well out there. The journey was the dance ... and if you needed time for reflection, someone else would happily take your spot on the dancefloor.

She stitches west coast breakbeats and house together like drums were the very fabric of the air. She works the mixer like a personal trainer whipping a sleepy client into shape. Her records tumble across walking bass and sizzle with acid energy. She came from Chicago but claimed her throne in San Frandisco, the perfect Barony for the perfect, shock-haired, 6-foot, rail-thin portrait of underground dance hedonism. She was a star among the people of the night and she lived it right alongside them. Most of all, she never forgets why they were there: to lose it on the dancefloor. That is the name of the game, and there is only one Baroness.

https://soundcloud.com/charlotte-kaufman