Honey Dijon Boiler Room x Sugar Mountain 2018 DJ Set
Snobs vs. DJ sets
Is DJing musicianship? If you were to ask me, I’d say yes. As much as any other form of musicianship is musicianship, DJing is musicianship. For one, there’s plenty of craft involved, and every bit of craft that goes into a good DJ set – beat-matching, scale-matching, etc. – is a real skill based in sound understanding of music. And there’s no doubt to me that it’s an art. Ever been to one of those shoddy overpriced bars pre-lockdown? The ones with a DJ turning down the volume on songs arbitrarily just to fit in a monotonic instruction: come on. Surely there are great DJs and bad DJs, so there is an art to it. Several other music aficionados, however, don’t see DJing is anything other than someone bringing their laptop to a show and pressing play.
To those aficionados, I present Honey Dijon’s Boiler Room set from the 2018 edition of Melbourne’s Sugar Mountain Festival. While it’s true that fans of electronic music, particularly of the deep house variety, tend to be very effusive, the number of this set saved my life comments should give pause to anyone that doubts the power of a DJ set. But even if it doesn’t, let’s dig a little deeper into the art of the set.
The art of Honey Dijon’s set
The set, one of the most popular on Boiler Room’s channel, is a masterclass in house music. It boasts of an esoteric setlist that weaves through house bangers, high-energy hip-hop, samples of Chaka Khan, New Order, et al, even a sample of MLK’s I Have A Dream speech. It doesn’t attempt to tell a linear story, but in a way appears to stop time entirely. Most of the almost hour-long set rages at a brisk-paced 130-odd bpm, with your standard syncopated house beat serving as its backbone. The simplicity of the groove means most of the tightly-packed audience (remember those days?) dances along maniacally for its entire duration. The esoteric range of samples means they always seem invested, curious about what’s next, not just mulling about between drops.
I find it hard to believe that anyone who sees Honey Dijon hard at work behind her console can miss the innate musicality involved in putting together this mix. She gauges the mood of the audience to make perfectly-timed transitions, each of which are incredibly delicate and tight. She starts on a raging high and manages to maintain that intensity all the way to the end, when she expertly brings a crowd of thousands to an easy landing. This is all you’d expect from any live performance. She’s always hard at work at the console, ensuring the mix is just right and the drops land immaculately. To me, this is no different from someone at a MIDI keyboard and a laptop working hard to get their performance just right. Then why is it that DJs have always attracted the ire of a certain segment of the music-listening audience?
Anti-DJ sentiments’ roots in homophobia and racism
In July of 1979, a crowd of anti-Disco protestors burnt piles of disco records in a Major League Baseball sponsored stunt before a baseball game at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois. The event ended in a riot.
Oh I’m going there. I try to keep a nonpolitical perspective on everything here, but it’s well-documented that a lot of anti-DJ sentiments arose in the 80s because DJs were most popular in forms of music (like house) whose audience were largely black and/or LGBTQ+. This isn’t to say that those who say a DJ isn’t a musician today are transphobic or racist. That would be an intellectually dishonest stretch. But it’s worth exploring the roots of the ire that DJs in particular attract.
In many ways it’s an extension of Disco Sucks. Why was disco singled out? Why not all dance music? While today the especial hatred DJs elicit from a certain type of person may not have its source in bigotry, it is perhaps rooted in elitism. It’s perhaps rooted in this idea that DJs play somewhat inferior music because they stand at consoles rather than at synthesisers. And this idea of inferiority is maybe rooted in that original bigotry, or at the very least, cultural elitism. With other forms of music people don’t like, their feelings are often framed as a matter of differing tastes, but when it comes to this one thing, people often frame their feelings as a consequence of their superior taste. There’s no reason to believe that at all. And there’s no reason for us, in this day and age, as a global audience of music-lovers far-removed from the America of the 80s to perpetuate that sort of narrow-minded elitism.
