photo by J. Van

Saturday saw my friend Dan turn 30 and 6,000+ people from all walks of life descend on the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to see Grandmaster Flash spin a set for the closing event of the Beats of Basquiat music series. I had a great time, and so did most of my friends, but for a countering point of view, read this.

Personally, I feel that both Flash and DJ Jester illustrated exactly what a DJ needs to be able to do - rock the party. Unbelievably (to me), GMF was able to get 90 percent or better of the crowd dancing, even when the crowd was as diverse as this one. The seamless blend from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" into Deee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart" was brilliant, and his use of call and response tactics were also very good. Certainly I would have liked to hear some of his early hits, but his selection of music certainly reflected an innate understanding of the crowd that was present.

DJ Jester is what people now would nominally term a mash-up DJ; most of his pop selections were carefully integrated with heavy hip-hop breakbeats, adding a certain note of humor and danceability to some tracks that would otherwise have been sorely out of place. Every DJ has his or her own style, but ultimately the goal is to make people dance. Flash used a careful selection of hits, with some skillful blends, cuts, and juggles to tie the disparate pieces together without taking the crowd out of the groove. Jester used rarities, b-sides, and one-hit wonders blended together with identifiable breaks to do the same thing. A lot of people think that DJs "just play records," but only bad DJs "just play records." Good DJs can add something of their own to the proceedings, and manipulate the crowd's mood to their whim. On Saturday, I got a chance to see some masters do exactly that.