DJ "authenticity"

Leo Reynolds

For the record, I completely disagree with you, but I don't play or dance to the music you like. But if I did, I would still go about the same way as I went, which is to say, I had the offer of music, I had Chris's set blog to go by, and I reacted very much the same way as you at the time. And I remember saying something like, 'Yeah, but if I just play your tandas, it's not authentic. And: Who says you get to decide what's good music?' And he said, something like, he didn't, it wasn't him, it was music he heard in Buenos Aires and in traditional milongas that has been played for a long time, and stood the test of time since it was first played. And I struggled with that answer for a long time. 

Eventually I came to a gradual peace with it because they are among the best sets I have heard in terms of: a lot of tandas I and others like to dance.  Not totally.  There are some tracks I think are missing.  I'm not so keen on some of the milonga choices. There are a few tracks I personally dislike but accept as part of the standard. On the whole I think to have those top tandas and and setblogs public, and free is invaluable for new DJs and both interesting and useful for others. 

He also said that he knew of people who did play his music, whole setlists and he didn't mind, probably on the contrary and I don't think it's to do with ego.  When I had the 'Larga las penas' practica here, years ago, the kids were young, I was relatively new to DJing and didn't have much time, I sometimes played them.  I think he just wanted there to be more traditional music out there. And whether that was by people finding their own way or people using his tandas.  He knew it was easier if people could copy his tandas or use his tandas as a starting base for their own. 

When [redacted] started DJing, he thought that setblog was an absolute goldmine and said it saved him so much time. But I didn't do that when I played in the city. I did refer to C's tandas, but I made my own because I felt it wasn't honest otherwise or I wasn't learning properly.  All that was wrong.  I think once he said something about making life hard for myself.  It was true. And he said something along the lines of what would I be doing next time,  playing the instruments? 

That's when I realized a lot of that stuff, about, "Oh, it has to be authentic, it has to be mine, it has to be creative", that is the ego speaking, even while I resisted the label "DJ" with my name as having too much ego . And, you know, the DJ is this tiny element. The DJ is nothing, really. The DJ is just there to put the music on the speaker. There are a few skills involved in that to do with the volume and the gaps between tracks and yes, not fucking up your tandas and playing a balanced set that suits the people in the room, but really, playing tango music, and this is how it's put to me, is the simplest kind of DJing there is. The way DJs at events are billed you'd think there was some mystic art when it's really not rocket science. 

There are famous tangos that are regularly put together. So, you know, if you try and mess around with all that, you're just messing up, you're just fucking up things that already work.

If you play for people who can really dance well, you're playing for people who are more likely to know and care about the music.  So that's your yardstick. Unless it's not, I suppose. Most DJs I see don't play like that.

A lot of milongas don't have people who can dance well, but most have some.  If you play for everyone else, they don't typically care that much. You can see it in the dancing. So you play traditional music by listening to the tandas you've heard that work and, if you are smart, learning from published setlists.  It could not be easier. 

The thing I find confounding is how often this simple process is fucked up.  So it's not that it's not that it's a mystic it's just that it's just that it's a pretty easy skill that is bizarrely beyond the reach of most people. I suspect it's usually. on the part of the DJ, overthinking, ego, boredom or an overly pedagogic instinct.  The number of supremely arrogant DJs who want to educate dancers rather than play for them to dance, is depressingly high. 

And then there's people who play the music they themselves like.  What about the frigging dancers?! It's like saying "I love American food" so I don't care what you like, you're all going to eat American.  I suppose that's OK if you know for sure they like American or if you're a closed shop, the kind of place where teachers have "milongas" only for their own students.  That isn't a milonga, that's brainwashing.

That was blog #500.

Mind the gap: milongas v shows

Rward

This was based on a draft from years ago about choosing your own teacher.

Would you not always prefer a natural dancer who is listening to the partner and the music, to some individualist who is thinking about their dancing and what they learnt in class? Surprisingly, not everyone does. Most people, indoctrinated through dance class and through watching dance shows in milongas that have nothing to do with what happens on a social floor speak about levels and technique. 

There is a huge gap between what happens in the milonga (social dancing) and what happens in shows (performance) and yet the shows are adverts for what the show dancers want to teach you in class.

Anyone with a gram of experience in the milongas or an ounce of sense regarding physical safety knows that the drama you see in a show does not translate well or safely into a milonga unless the venue is huge, the attendees acrobatic and they have enough respect to keep well away from others.  A high stiletto swingeing through the air can draw blood like a knife. 

Moreover, what you see in a show by no means converts easily to class either.  It can and should appeal to students of choreography but not to social dancers.  Another gram of sense will show that nearly all dancers in the milonga use a limited repertoire of maybe half a dozen moves.  So class attendees pay all the money to learn the tricks but then don't use them. Why?

Sometimes I wonder if there were simply more people at some milongas would the shows just die out? Wouldn't it just become so blindingly obvious how what happens in a performance is totally unrelated to social dancing and just feeds some fantasy in peoples minds?

I will never forget someone in the Netherlands in about 2013 telling me, after I had been wowed by some performance, that no, they didn't like dancing after a performance as everyone was trying to ape or impress the teachers and the dance floor turned into a riot.  

That's what happens when ego gets mixed up with social dancing.

Ego and offering

On the TV series 'The Piano' amateur pianists play in public train stations and are selected for a concert. Often they seemed chosen for the way they illustrate the healing, enriching or transformative power of music. Sometimes, the two professional musicians and judges described the way a player gave themselves over to the music, was a sort of servant or channel for the music. This is a description that resonates with spirituality. Across world religions and in many spiritual practices a wholeness or oneness with something bigger is described, usually requiring the letting go of the self, of the ego.

It is a fine line. Performance can be a one way street. You do your thing and that’s it. Sharing requires a connection with the audience. Offerings between people are better when there is compatibility. An offering of meat to vegetarians or vegetables to carnivores, or of flowers to a hayfever sufferer might be understood as well intentioned but is not ideal. Clearly, in these cases compatibility and understanding are absent. Incidentally, did you see the recent news that like humans and many other animals, flamingos prefer compatible buddies?

A musician at a folk evening said: that listening is joining in. He said too I think that it was necessary for musicians, not just to listen to each other, but that for musicians, people listening to them is as important as their playing for people, like two sides of a coin. On the website of a heart-led yoga teacher recently I discovered a quote by Ursula Le Guin that distills this idea: 

“Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection.”

Perhaps it is through sharing, rather than mere performance that we arrive at connection. Hearing is passive whereas listening is an active process, which is almost by definition a reaching out for connection; that may not necessarily to the creator(s), but to something created or made accessible in the surroundings, with others or within oneself. When there is that lessening of ego by musician and listener alike that permits connection to the music, to other people, to something bigger, then it is a joy and a pleasure to listen.  Except you are not, at these times merely listening, because even if you are not playing or singing, you are somehow participating.  Perhaps the listener receives the offering of the music, of the invitation to share. A mere performance, in contrast is more akin to leaving the offering at an empty altar or to an unreceptive god.

Last night, after writing the above I came by chance upon the passage in East of Eden, where Samuel and Adam are naming Adam's twins and fall to discussing Cain and Abel.

"And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering. But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.  And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell."  (Genesis 4:1-15)

Somehow Abel who, you will recall, was the tiller of the earth, connected well with God who received his offering but the offering of Cain, the shepherd was not accepted and from there things went very badly.  

Adam said, “I remember being a little outraged at God. Both Cain and Abel gave what they had, and God accepted Abel and rejected Cain. I never thought that was a just thing. I never understood it. Do you?” 

Samuel tries to explain God reaction to Cain's offering and Cain's response to God.  Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding, a failure of communication and connection.

“There’s an advantage to listening to the words. God did not condemn Cain at all. Even God can have a preference, can’t he? Let’s suppose God liked lamb better than vegetables. I think I do myself. Cain brought him a bunch of carrots maybe. And God said, ‘I don’t like this. Try again. Bring me something I like and I’ll set you up alongside your brother.’ But Cain got mad. His feelings were hurt. And when a man’s feelings are hurt he wants to strike at something, and Abel was in the way of his anger.”

Whatever went wrong, Cain's big mistake was his reaction: pride and humiliation and anger. 

He kills his brother and suddenly we are back to Down in the earth you hold your breath and eat the damage of your deeds (Dave Camlin, "No one ever goes there").  We are back to a failure to connect, anger and conflict and wounding and the need to heal.  It is like some great circle of suffering from which we surely want to break free.  And the ego is at the heart of it all. 

Surely the most interesting part in this story is the changing weather of Cain's emotions.  Many artists choose to focus on the murder, but the visionary William Blake chose a tumultuous point in that weather, Cain's realisation of what his ego had done.

Is it enough to make the offering?  Does what we offer and how we offer matter?  Do we just walk in and leave it or do we try to connect with whomever the offering is for? And how do we do that?  And what is necessary for that connection?