Despite the catholic tastes advocated throughout this list, I think eclecticism is a minefield for a DJ. If you’re actually trying to offer your audience something new as a DJ, throwing together a couple of unrelated genres is not the way to do it. Most people already have lots of different kinds of music in their collections – a DJ has to try to make connections between the records s/he plays, and turn a collection into a party.
Jon Carter made his name as a part of a movement (the one that had its spiritual centre in the Heavenly Social) that dared to tackle this dangerous eclecticism head-on, and mostly got away with it. But even more than his contemporaries (Chemical Brothers, Death in Vegas, etc), he really managed to contribute something through the simple act of connecting different genres. It’s not clear that the line connecting house music, hip hop, dancehall, and rock and roll had ever been drawn, or that there was any audience asking for this to be done. But he heard something there, and he tried it.
Of course he had the chops to make it work. At the time Jon Carter seemed to me to be an uncommonly confident DJ, and in a scene that was instinctively self-deprecating, he was unashamed to be good at mixing records. Having the skills to cut and paste live made his experiments go down easier, and soon enough the white indie and techno kids, me included, were looking at ragga chat in a whole new light. His collection became our party.
In 1996 Heavenly had him do the second ‘Live at the Social’ mix album, a sequel to the Chemicals’ opening volume. He had already made his reputation at the club, but the mix raised the stakes for the whole scene: this was a party collage that was totally unique. Funkier than Coldcut, more dexterous than the Chemicals, rougher than tough, it announced the arrival (proper) of a new scene in dance music.
Jon Carter went on to bigger things as a big-room house DJ – with his talent, there was probably no avoiding it. He could play someone else’s party, for sure, but he was never better than when he was starting his own.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzep0GOpC8U
No comments:
Post a Comment