In my quest for distraction, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time watching people d.j. on Instagram. Partly, it’s a reminder of a different time. Many years ago, I would spend my Thursday nights d.j.ing at a small lounge in Cambridge. This was before d.j.s could simply bring a laptop full of music to gigs, meaning there was a lot of moderately heavy lifting. But in those days I would lug my records anywhere, and play them for anyone—at house parties very early or very late in the night, the opening of a shoe store, an empty rooftop while everyone disappeared in search of cigarettes. I was not a very good d.j., and, beyond a little money and the shots from the bartender’s secret stash, it rarely seemed worth the trouble. But I loved playing out. It didn’t matter that, more often than not, someone would sidle up to the d.j. booth not to commend the excellent vibes but to ask for “the birthday song” by 50 Cent. I lived to hear my favorite songs played as loudly as possible.
I had been attracted to the seeming glamour of it all, the all-powerful selector finely calibrating a room’s ambience. But what I realized in those hundreds of hours sequestered behind the decks was that d.j.ing is actually a fairly lonely pursuit. You’re among people, trying to move a roomful of strangers, but you’re also apart from them—the dynamic isn’t dissimilar from that of writing. You’re helping people loosen up and unwind, hopeful that the right tempo might relieve them of the day’s troubles. Perhaps a head nod or tapped toe will metastasize into something more bodily. You’re providing the soundtrack to botched come-ons, shouted confessions, measured walks to the bathroom. You see it all from afar, and then you offer something in exchange. Are you playing for the crowd, or for yourself? In the best moments, a d.j. is able to do both at once.
But, nostalgia aside, I’ve been watching because I like these glimpses of d.j.s working on their craft. Sometimes they’re seasoned professionals, essentially throwing the kinds of effervescent, feel-good parties they would be commanding in more peaceable times. In the future society that emerges from the pandemic’s wake, the rapper, photographer, and celebrity d.j. D-Nice will deserve special commendation for hosting Club Quarantine, a party of hip-hop and R. & B. classics, from his Los Angeles apartment. Tens of thousands joined around the globe, including seemingly every famous person, and even Joe Biden, who otherwise seemed to be in hiding. I watched Mannie Fresh d.j. from inside the otherwise empty New Orleans club Maison. Fresh, who seems congenitally upbeat, kept an eye on the stream of comments, cheering his followers on, encouraging and teasing them. Through it all, he remained most amused by his own wondrous blends, which retrofitted Tears for Fears or Adele with his city’s famed bounce rhythm.
But I’ve been just as charmed watching more intimate rooms and more low-key versions of people playing music for others. Most d.j.s I know hate requests. But seeing one tapped into the comments of a live Instagram feed—this now felt like a sign of life, a connection bridging our social distances. DJ Ayres began hosting noontime “Homeschool” sessions, scribbling song titles and shout-outs on a dry-erase board resting on his turntables. I spent dinner tuned into Prince Klassen spinning seven-inch singles under bluish-green lights. He was workmanlike and serious, save for moments when a particular song, like Carly Simon’s “Why,” coaxed a head nod. I tuned into the feed of the guy who ran Soul Strut, a message board about record collecting that I used to frequent, and it was filled with handles and lingo that I hadn’t thought about for a decade. It was strange to see his face, hear his voice, see the inside of his house. One night, I fell asleep watching the writer Noah Yoo sipping a drink and playing a wicked set of dance tunes. A few hours later, I woke up and tuned into my friend Makoto’s feed. He runs a record bar in Tokyo, where a d.j. was playing spacious reggae tunes to nobody in particular, in the middle of the night.
It’s been cool to see musicians take requests from their living rooms, orchestras play to empty concert halls, and producers like DJ Premier and RZA battle one another beat-for-beat on Instagram Live. One wonders how long artists will be able to play for free—or for app-based tips—online. As we dig out of the crisis—or, as it begins to feel more normal—we can’t forget that this is work, too. A d.j. is often just a mood conjurer, and there’s something ultimately solitary about the trip they’re taking; we’re just lucky to catch a ride. I miss going out to shows, though I have a toddler rather than a virus to blame for why that doesn’t happen as much as it once did. And what I miss most is the strange, magical language of music in the air—being able to make out thoughts that come to you in a stream of tunes. The d.j. finds sense in randomness. You listen, and you recognize the next track’s slow incursion; you hold onto a fragment that blossoms into a whole new vibe.
Instagram often works according to the principle of FOMO, which no longer applies. As well, its tendency toward brevity—the perfectly composed shot, the clever visual joke—no longer matters either. Instead, it’s a place to hang out and drop by for a tune, with the added benefit that you can’t use your phone for anything else while you’re there. As opposed to watching someone spin records in a bar, these are just scenes of people living with music—the emphasis on living. A couple weeks ago, it was my friend Chris’s birthday. He runs one of the planet’s best record stores, Groove Merchant, in San Francisco. The sun had set in New York, but it was still afternoon in the Bay Area, as he played soul singles, with the leaf of a house plant obscuring his face. The leaf swayed in the breeze, or maybe it was his phone tipping to the beat. He was playing a stack of sixties soul ballads, each carried by a kind of epic anguish. But these songs took on a new feel—plaintive, yearning cries filling up a bright room somewhere unreachable across the country. Each song ended, giving way to a low, fuzzy hum of the needle tracing the record’s runout groove. Chris’s hand reached out from beyond the frame to replace each single with a new one. The pleasant plink of the record falling into place, a click to begin the next tale of someone surviving a wretched heartbreak, and the hand disappeared.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How the coronavirus behaves inside of a patient.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- With each new virus, we have scrambled for a new treatment. Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis?
- How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions, and redrawn maps.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under coronavirus quarantine.
