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Friday, May 22, 2009
The View from the Booth / News There's a special place for me in hell ...
Posted By Ray Anderson on Fri, May 22, 2009 at 11:48 AM
I cut my teeth DJing on an online reggae radio station. Imagine being a house music DJ on a reggae station... wooooo.
Anyway, the guy who owns the station is cool with the owners of a local reggae club, so we would go in on Friday nights (early of course) and play house, hip-hop, old school r&b — whatever we wanted. We’d have a few of our friends show up ... not too many, but it was cool. It was just good to hear our music over the loud-ass speakers; that was good enough for us.
So, I showed up one night, and there were more cars than usual in the parking lot, so I’m thinking “Hot damn ... we got a crowd tonight!!” Well, we had a crowd alright — a crowd of kids, 7 to 14 years old. “Ay!!! WTF these kids doing in here man?” Come to find out it was a birthday party. What parent rents a nightclub for their kid's birthday party?
Anyway, the sight of those kids immediately put a monkey in my wrench — because now I’m not sure what to play. I was in a hip-hop mood and, not that I play Willie D or Ice Mike or anything, but I just didn’t think these kids would be entertained by Mos Def and MF DOOM. So, I put on some Outkast (What kid didn’t love “Hey Ya”?) to try and appease the kids, when I see a woman approaching the booth with a CD. "Here, can you play this?" Ahite….whatever.
Before I leave the booth, I throw on Akinyele’s “Kcuf me For Free” and head to the patio, ready to leave. About 20 minutes later, one of the guys that works at the club came and got me, and told me to go back on.
So, I grab the Mos Def file and start to play, when I get approached again. “Do you have a Happy Birthday song?” Yep... sure do. So, I reach for the black birthday favorite — Stevie Wonder's “Happy Birthday” and start to play it. I get approached AGAIN “Do you have the Luke version?” HENH? Uhh ... yeah, I do, but its not the clean version. “Oh, that’s alright, just go ahead and play it" (And this is the mother asking me to play it).
As I mentally start to make my slow walk to hell (there has to be an extra hot corner in hell for a dj that plays Luke at a 14-year-old's birthday party) I throw it on, and the place EXPLODED! “Do you have anymore stuff like this?” YIKES!
For the rest of the night (until the club opened for real), there were 13-year-old girls grinding on the mirror to “Shake That Ass Bitch” and “Big Booty Hoes.” The sad part is their mothers were right there with them... singing all the words. Yeah, that’s what you want to teach your daughters — how to pick up a dollar bill with your butt cheeks
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