DJs Are More Revolutionary Than the Entire Left

The entire left has spent decades trying to create collective consciousness. Last Saturday I achieved it in eleven minutes with a filtered vocal and a well-timed kick drum. I sent the clip to a Marxist-Leninist reading group, because those freaking tankies have mistaken a folding table and a stack of pamphlets for a mass movement.

At 1:42 a.m., twelve hundred people at a converted warehouse stopped behaving like isolated consumers and began moving as a single body. I know the exact time because the clip is on my Instagram. A woman on the balcony cried. Two strangers embraced. Someone who had arrived with a boyfriend left holding hands with a person they had just met. By any serious measure, relations of production had shifted.

I attended one of their meetings. Forty minutes in, the tankies were still arguing over the correct definition of a worker. At my set, I had already brought twelve hundred actual workers, freelancers, and people between projects through tension, release, and a second, much larger release. They asked me to return the following week having read a pamphlet. I asked if there was a remix. There wasn’t, which tells you everything about their approach to outreach.

The dance floor is the vanguard

The communists keep talking about seizing the means of production. At the warehouse, I controlled the mixer, the lighting cues, and the moment the bass returned. The crowd controlled how loudly it screamed. Even the anarchists, who should appreciate a decentralized experience, insist on asking who owns the venue instead of noticing how generously I distributed the drop.

Some critics point to the VIP balcony and say the room was divided by class. The balcony is where our patrons could watch the revolution without getting jostled. They funded the upgraded sound system, which meant everyone downstairs received the same bass. General admission cost only $48 plus fees. From the booth I could see every tier moving to the same kick drum, a more persuasive image of solidarity than the reading group’s seating chart.

The security team took people’s outside water at the door. I spoke to management about it, because hydration is community care. They explained the beverage contract, and I persuaded them to reduce bottled water to $7 for the first hour. Management wrote the new price on a sheet of paper beside the bar; I photographed it for the reading group, whose members called the concession small without experiencing the atmosphere in the room when the sign went up.

From theory to drop

I am often asked what my set was about. It was about abolishing the distance between us. At the top of the second hour I played a recording of a crowd chanting “the people united” over a four-on-the-floor beat. I don’t know which people recorded the chant or what they were asking for. The sample cleared through a distributor, and for those six minutes the room understood solidarity at a level that exceeds the need for historical particulars.

A venue worker told me after the show that the crew had been denied breaks. I told him that no one should have to work under those conditions, especially in a space devoted to liberation. He asked whether I would say something to the owner, who was standing beside us. I had just finished a physically and spiritually demanding set, so I offered him the number of a mutual aid account we had used for our merch launch. He said he was asking about breaks. I told him movements take time.

Our new shirts say ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE in reflective ink. They’re $75, and the people do get a portion: two percent of net proceeds goes to a rotating community partner after printing, fulfillment, design, platform, and management costs. I have asked the partner for a logo to put on the next run. They haven’t sent one, but you cannot build solidarity on my timetable alone.

The reading group says lasting change requires organization. Someone had to organize a guest list, negotiate the rider, and make sure the stage fog did not obscure the drone shot, so I am already well ahead of them there. Their monthly meeting took several votes to settle the wording of a flyer. I watched twelve hundred hands go up in under four seconds, without circulating a draft agenda.

If you are a socialist, anarchist, communist, or one of those tankies who still calls the DJ booth bourgeois, come to my next set and observe the scale of my achievement. General admission is nearly sold out. I can’t comp you, because that would undermine the labor behind the event, but use code PRAXIS for five percent off before fees. We can discuss the revolution after the encore, provided the green room is still open.

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