Henry Steinway starts his day of work well after the rest of the working world has fallen sleep. He uses his day to hang out with his posse or watch basketball when he’s not going to class at New York University. At night, he leaves his social life behind to do his job, a job that he says is the loneliest of them all.
Henry Steinway is a Lakers fanatic, an NYU full time student, and one of the most successful young DJs in the game. Three years ago at 16-years-old, Henry attended an introductory Disk Jockey course with his friends, the day he claims is the day he was “born.” Since his “birth,” Henry has been mixing music continuously until he made a name for himself in the internet’s music industry world under the stage name, “Clockwork.” His success doesn’t stop at himself, as his friends created a management company solely for the purpose to represent their talented friend. Henry’s skills on the turntable are beneficial to every one around him, especially his listeners.
Only three years ago when he made his first mix, he felt like he was doing something independent from what his peers were into. Today, he is frustrated with the youth’s misconception that anyone can be a D.J.
I share this frustration with him. Pretty much every person I met in the past year is trying to be a DJ.
In 2010 alone I had some surreal experiences regarding people telling me they are in the process of “becoming” DJs:
My confusion began when my old friend sent me a link to the mixes he made, a guy that I never knew was interested in music. My friends 15 year old brother became the DJ of choice for all his friends events, and what shook me up most was when my mother’s assistant handed me a flyer that invited me to his upcoming gig, informing me that his alter ego was in fact, “TallySwagBeatz.”
The number of bands, stand up acts, and other traditional hobbies seem to be disappearing as the technological age proves that it can, and will, take over every aspect of our world. Including music.
The song that got Henry recognition as the DJ “Clockwork,” was a mash-up of two popular songs. Mash-ups are remixes of at least two or more songs to create a whole different feel. His style is reflective of one of the most popular remix DJs of our youth today, “GirlTalk,” who creates elaborate and eclectic remixes of current pop sounds and anthems, creating a new musical discourse which reflects, winks, ironizes and mocks, while still standing firmly on its own.
The youngest DJ known today is 8 years old. “DJ Jack Hill” did not pick up a guitar at age 4, he learned how to turn knobs and morphed an ear for heavy musical drops and theatrical head-bobs. Hill spun at a local gig where he was discovered by a fellow DJ, and he now holds his own radio show on star radio. When asked what his favorite thing about being a DJ was, the mini disk jockey said, “It’s fun! I like to practice mixing and when I play gigs, I get money.”
You can either make a lot of money making music, or you can do it as a hobby. Spinning has become one of the youths largest hobbies, especially in large urban cities such as Miami, New York, and most noticeably, Los Angeles.
Chris Giuliano has been making music in his dorm room in his free time. He has no ambition to become a heavyweight DJ, but he says he enjoys the reactions his friends have when they hear his beats. “There’s nothing better than watching your friends dance to something that you’ve personally made,” he told me.
Giuliano does not play any instruments. He expresses himself through the use of other peoples creations, but making them his own. Chris tells me that him and almost all of his friends create beats and play them for each other. They post them online and try to play gigs for easy money, and it doesn’t hurt that DJs get recognition from their listeners, “DJs get girls,” Chris tells me with a laugh.
Henry and Chris are spinning in college, and Jack is in kindergarten. Our youth is constantly surrounded around technology and their exposure is starting to branch toward the DJ field. Why would kids take the time to learn how to play guitar when they can use every instrument in the world to create a more dynamic tune?
Equipment for remixing has become more and more accessible throughout the years. Before the introduction of mixing through computer programs, people had to physically use the vinyl records to mix the tunes, as well as buy and carry heavy equipment. Most DJs still use those materials today, but there is now the option to have decent materials for free. Accessibility has made it so that anyone can claim to be a professional.
DJ Clockwork tells me that kids ideas that DJing will make them popular is a double sided draw.
“Yes, people will recognize you, they will know your name and they will scream it. But when you’re working at a gig you’re inside a box literally watching hundreds if not thousands of people have fun amongst each other. And you’re alone. And the love they have for you is present, but so unreachable.”
Henry and his managers place his songs on popular music upload sites that specialize in independent artists who want to share their original tracks such as SoundCloud and Hypem. Through these sites, bloggers repost them, music sites list them as popular, and the rest is history.
“Today, remix (the activity of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms according to personal taste) has been extended to other areas of culture, including the visual arts; it plays a vital role in mass communication, especially on the internet,” said Eduardo Navas, the founder of RemixTheory.net
We know that if anyone were to try hard enough, they can be successful at whatever they want to do. Take Armin van Buuren for example. In 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 he was voted number one in DJ Magazine’s annual top 100 list of the most popular DJs. Before his interest in music became a career, van Buuren was studying law in college. Van Buuren is 36, so he is not a part of the digital generation. If van Buuren were born fifteen years earlier, he would likely have taken the path of Henry and studied mixing music in college.
Henry is sitting on his couch, using the time he has to chew his last bite of pizza to think over my question for him, “is DJing a talent or can any one on the planet become a DJ?”
This question has taken Henry aback. I can see that his alter-ego, “Clockwork,” wants to tell me that it is an innate genius, that what he does cannot be mass-produced through any other medium than himself.
He looks up and tells me, “I guess it is true any one can learn the technique of sound and the use of tables. But it takes dedication, patience, and creativity to really become comfortable enough to create your own sound and understand what people want to hear.”
“What people want to hear,” is a key point to the DJ craft. The mass appeal must have something to do with the fact that the art of remixing allows the DJ to use multiple sounds, tempos, and even songs that bring history to the listener within one song. In our age of attention-deficacy, a 3-minute song with the same singer and same story has become obselete. We want 5 songs within one, and the DJ feels as though the songs that they choose describe themselves, thus wanting to receive attention.
Jacques Attali wrote in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music that, “we are all condemned to silence—unless we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create.” This generation is afraid of silence, and DJing is the perfect form of expression for our technologically savvy adolescents.
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