>>PREVIEW
DJ DAN
Friday, December 15
Warehouse
In a world where many international DJs seem to consider themselves rock stars, US-based DJ Dan is something of an anomaly. In stark contrast to the behaviour of some international DJs, who seem to consider a DJ booth incomplete until it is ringed by flashing neon lights and has 12 Imax cameras orbiting it, DJ Dan is of a different sort. Despite his global reputation (he entered DJ Magazine’s "Top 100" in 2000 and was ranked #5 in the world this year), his platinum record and a resumé that includes remix work for Depeche Mode, New Order, Yoko Ono and Paris Hilton, DJ Dan remains true to form – focused on the music and not on the image. No wonder he’s been called "America’s Favourite DJ," "The Hardest Working DJ in America" and "The People’s DJ" by respected U.S. publications.
To hear DJ Dan tell it, an awful lot has changed on the dance music landscape since he first took up DJing in the mid-’90s.
"When I started DJing, the entire scene in the US was really rave-driven in that there wasn’t really a proper nightclub scene for dance music the way we know it now," Dan explains. "Techno was big for a while, then breaks, and once the real true underground scene went full on mainstream in 2000 we all moved to the clubs, and it’s really taken the club scene in the U.S. and stepped it up a notch."
Dan has certainly ridden the wave that is dance music’s increased mainstream popularity across America all the way to the top, with his recent remix of Pussycat Dolls’s "Don’t Cha" topping the Billboard charts for three weeks in a row. He’s even appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno – a litmus test for mainstream appeal if ever there was one — and has sold over 300,000 records in North America alone. But, if the rise of dance music’s popularity truly has made Dan the poster boy for quality house music in the U.S., as so much of the dance music media suggests, Dan’s good-natured humility doesn’t suggest for a moment that any of it has gone to his head.
"I suppose people know who I am now," he concedes. "But," he quickly adds, "they don’t come for the DJ Dan show. They come because I can play a big party.
"It sounds a bit strange, but I’ve always made a big deal of it not being a show," Dan explains. "I like to think of my sets as a rollercoaster, where I play with the crowd. Up, down, up, down, as far as the crowd goes, to me it’s their party that I happen to be hosting."
"I don’t like showoff DJs," he confesses. "I prefer to let the music speak. The way I see it, I want to DJ in such a way that if there was a sheet in front of me and no one on the dance floor could see me, they’d still be having a great time. To me that’s what DJing a good party is all about." |
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