The Rise of the Avatar DJ
a.k.a. What music a DJ plays has become far less important than who they are, and more importantly, what they represent.
Earlier this year, I was hired to put together an artist bio for a DJ. That in and of itself wasn’t strange. I’ve occasionally written bios and promotional text throughout my career, and as pay rates for “real” music journalism have largely stagnated, taking on these side jobs has become increasingly necessary to pay the bills. (The ramifications—and potential ethical complications—of that are admittedly tricky and potentially concerning, but I’ll have to save that conversation for another day.)
Writing a bio is generally a pretty straightforward affair. As the name implies, it’s obviously meant to include key biographical details (e.g. place of origin, city of current residence, a summary of how the artist got started and found some level of success / recognition, etc.), but it also serves a promotional function, and is frequently written to cast the subject in the best possible light. Newer artists are portrayed as fast-rising forces of nature that can’t be ignored, while more established acts are described as iconic figures whose influence colors wide swaths of the musical landscape. In essence, it’s a sales pitch, and as such, a bit of exaggeration is often employed, to the point where the average bio includes not only an accounting of career highlights, but also a fair number of florid adjectives and sweeping pronouncements about the artist’s (supposedly) singular talent.
So what was different about this one bio I was commissioned to write? It too had a promotional function, and was stuffed with the DJ’s background info and assorted accomplishments, including a rundown of the most prominent festivals and clubs where they’d performed. In many ways, it was a stock-standard bio, save for one thing: it made almost no mention of what kind of music they play. Despite being a known quantity within the dance music world, the artist—who shall remain nameless, but is very much a critically approved act who plays at credible events all around the world—isn’t really known for a particular sound. (To be clear, this isn’t a “they play everything and so genre descriptors are meaningless” situation. It’s just that writeups of this artist generally include zero information about their musical selections.) And while that initially seemed odd, I eventually came to another realization: in today’s DJ landscape, perhaps that kind of information no longer matters.
The withering of genre boundaries isn’t limited to dance music of course, and is something that has only accelerated with the rise of streaming. We’re now at a point where an entire generation of consumers has musically come of age in a media environment where notions of “mood” and “vibe” trump genre, and where larger historical contexts (i.e. where an artist comes from, what musical scenes they were a part of, etc.) are often entirely absent. Music culture and consumption has been flattened, and though it may disappoint older listeners who fondly remember their youthful days as diehard punks, ravers and metalheads, most teenagers long ago stopped primarily identifying themselves by their favorite genre.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing! In retrospect, the former rigidity of genres (and the ways that people organized around them) does seem somewhat ridiculous, and the idea of a modern teenager freely jamming crunk, classical and crust punk does sound—at least in theory—like a product of a world in which listeners are more open minded. And when that kind of mindset finds its way to the dancefloor, it’s not surprising that contemporary party people aren’t necessarily interested in hearing house DJ X, techno DJ Y or jungle DJ Z. In all likelihood, their decisions about what artists to see and what events to attend have little to do with genre at all. In 2022, what music a DJ plays is far less important than who they are, and more importantly, what they represent. They’ve become avatars for the intangible, and have upended the dynamics of dance music fandom.