n New York City, speaks from an underground perspective on a good DJ: “ DJ’s have to understand the concept of programming. How to break a record. How to play with records, repeat intros, lengthen breaks, endings......There is an art to programming your set.......The DJ who plays all his hottest records in a row is not doing his job right. You can’t play all your best material all at once because you want to save some of it for later in the evening. The DJ does not into that power record the same way the crowd does. You are supposed to be separate from the crowd. You’re supposed to be into exposing them to new material. So, what you do is play a track, followed by something new and then you back it up with something they know and like. It’s like a train ride. The crowd becomes trustworthy that you will come back with something they like. It’s the fifteen-minute game. About every third song, you give them a well known song. After one hour, the crowd has been exposed to ten new records. That way, you please yourself and the crowd. Larry Levan was great at this. The most important thing to remember is that musical content, how you program, is more important than actual mixing skills sometimes”( Fikentscher p38). As you can see there are many different things that a DJ has to know. Another view of a good DJ was taken from a book called Last night a DJ saved my life, “ At its most basic DJing is the act of presenting a series of records for an audience’s enjoyment. So at the simplest level a DJ is a presenter. This is what radio DJ’s do, they introduce music. However the club DJ has largely abandoned this role for something more musically creative. To become a good DJ you have to develop the hunger. You have to search for new records with the insane zeal of a gold rush prospector digging in a blizzard. The essence of the DJ’s craft is selecting which records to play and in wha...
