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Local DJs Mash-Up the Lollapalooza Perry Stage
Produced by Althea Legaspi on Thursday, August 06, 2009
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DJ Duo The Hood Internet performs at this weekend's Lollapalooza Festival. |
The meaning of “The DJ” has taken on many forms over the years—from wedding and radio jock to the reason you dance at a club. But nowadays, DJs have infiltrated pop culture with the popularity of remixes, dedicated dance club residencies and major tours. This year Lollapalooza has beefed up its Perry Stage with some local DJs—both burgeoning and nationally hyped—who are setting the stage for the new rise of the DJ.
Blog: Musician Steve Albini gets some advice on Lollapalooza
Song: Hood Internet with “Billie "Wildcat" Jean (Michael Jackson vs Ratatat)”
DJing is one of those jobs where your client makes the rules. Steve Reidell or DJ STV SLV, as he’s also known, explains.
REIDELL: The concept of like 'oh a DJ just plays records' is a pretty like age-old sort of, you know, backhanded insult. But there’s, you know, certainly a technique to it you know like the art of like flowing things together that work together, you know, that aren’t just the same tempo. Moving the crowd continuously and not losing the crowd.
Together, Reidell and his partner Aaron Brink or ABX, comprise the crew known as The Hood Internet. Reidell says that learning to beat match, mix and blend well are acquired skills for being a successful and respected DJ.
REIDELL: There is like, you know, this is a pretty new thing to both of us, we come from playing a background playing in bands. And here is, you know, an art to it that you don’t think about when you’re not doing it.
BRINK: I would say live we’re MP3 jockeys.
The Hood Internet is known for their mash-ups, where they take two tracks, typically from completely different musical genres and re-package them into a fresh new track. With more than a million of their free mash-ups downloaded, they say they’ve gone “internet platinum.”
The Hood Internet and other local DJ/electro groups like Dark Wave Disco and Moneypenny are not DJs born from the downtown mega-clubs, as have become familiar. They’ve built successful dance parties in smaller venues, and in some cases venues not traditionally known for dance and electro music, like the Hideout.
Dark Wave Disco was formed in 2005 by DJ partners Mark Gertz, Miguel Martin and Greg Corner. Gertz, who started DJing 12 years ago, says their parties were unique to Chicago at the time.
GERTZ: I had the idea in mind of almost like an Andy Warhol Factory-type thing, like artists, musicians, models, like all kinds of hip crowd coming together to this night, and us playing all kinds of music, with a base of electro, indie rock, with like elements of like Chicago house, because it is Chicago because we all grew up with house and the Chicago dance scene, but uh, something new, cutting edge, newer I should say. Nothing that had been done in a larger scale in Chicago before. And now it’s four and a half years later and it’s like, there are – this main thing that’s going on. Like house has taken a back seat. It really has to the scene that we’re in.
Chicago may lay claim as being the mother of House music, and now the current DJ scene has expanded into the mainstream. Miguel Martin says remixes can take some of the credit. Martin began DJing at the age of 11. He DJs under the moniker Trancid and cites Crookers remix of the Kid Cudi track “Day and Night” as an example of giving old songs new life.
MARTIN: It’s very important, especially remixes of a song that you would never expect to be remixed, whether it be, you know, a rock song especially or even, you know, hip-hop songs that are turned into dance song, you know, a remix I believe it can actually, what it does is opens the audience space to not just that particular genre, you know, they’re huge it’s a big, big asset to the music community, I mean just the whole remix culture right now.
In addition to the rise of remixes and mash-ups in the current DJ scene, mix tapes have also become popular. The female duo and electro band Moneypenny throws a monthly residency called Spandexxx at Sonotheque. Jessica Gonyea says their mix tape is an integral part of promoting the event.
GONYEA: It always consists of artists that we’re listening to at that time, or old weird stuff that we’ve just kind of discovered and if there’s a special guest artist for that month, we’ll include them in the mix tape as well. We do a lot of mash-ups in our mix tapes and so you’ll here a disco song from the ‘70s playing over a hip-hop song from the ‘90s then we’ll bring in, you know, some weird electro thing that was made last week, you know, by some friends of ours, and we just kind of, we play a lot of layering, with timing, we’ll make edits of songs where we will drop the chorus out of the song entirely if we feel like it fits you know the feel and the flow of the mix tape and basically it’s kind of this mini musical journey and it’s - they’re different every month.
Nowadays the DJ technique has changed with the advent of DJ software such as Serrato, and it’s given rise to the idea that “everyone can be a DJ.” But as Martin explains, technology and songs may change, but the artistry remains the same.
MARTIN: Years go along and it’s like you go through different phases, but it’s still always the same thing, it’s just that the music changes, but the actual craft is, you know, I always keep it true to the craft, which is you gotta stay true to the craft, you know which is basically the beat matching, I don’t usually deviate too much from that...you know what I mean, like actually blending music together making a whole long entire set, that just flows flawlessly.
This year Lollapalooza’s Perry stage is larger, with major electro/DJ acts such as Diplo, A-Trak, Kid Cudi and MSTRKRFT. The Hood Internet, Dark Wave Disco and Moneypenny, along with Hollywood Holt, YelloFever, and He Say, She Say round out the Chicago DJs on the Lollapalooza bill.
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