This is gonna be long, so get prepared, maybe get a drink and get in a comfy chair...
So, tonight I was really pumped to DJ the first party at my school since Spring Break has been over. I got a great set made, worked all of the logistics out beforehand with the tech crew, set my EQs perfect on Ableton and Traktor, but when it came to be the time for me to start, nobody was there. Why? Let me give you some background on my school before I dive into that topic.
My school is located in the back woods of Ventura, CA in a place called Ojai. If you saw the movie Easy A, you saw the town's public School, Nordhoff. I go to one of the town's many private boarding schools and at my school, it is a requirement to ride horses for the first year of your attendance. The "Horse Program" is run by both faculty and students and the student group is called Thacher Pack and Spur, abbreviated PTS (I know the acronym doesn't match up, talk to the dead headmaster from 122 years ago about that one.)
Because of this extremely expensive horse program, many of the school's arts are underfunded (surprisingly we still have a great electronic music program though...) and buying newer, higher quality speakers than the blown out ones that the school is not high up there on the to do list. Now back to the story at hand. PTS set up this dance, and along with taking away the use of my strobe light, which really gets everyone pumped up to go crazy to various electro sub genres, they rented a mechanical bull.
Now tell me, if you were between the ages of 14 and 18, would you rather,
1) attend a dance, which generally occurs every 2-3 weeks
or
2) ride on/watch people get bucked off of a mechanical bull controlled by your peers?
Yep. I thought so, #2. Pretty much nobody showed up for the dance until 30 minutes had passed and my set really had the crowd pleasers in the first 30 minutes to draw people in. After those first 20 minutes, people began trickling in, until the dance floor was pretty crowded.
Now, I've been a pioneer of sorts at my school by bringing Dubstep to the forefront of dances, and every dance has at least 30 minutes of dubstep, and these kids go nuts to it normally, but as everyone remembers/knows, the first week back to school is tiring as all hell. Everyone was lacking energy, and we all know that energy from the crowd fuels the DJ and can make the difference between a good set and a bad one.
I began messing up my transitions, not checking my S4's mixer, my timing was off and overall it was a very un-enjoyable experience. After the first hour had passed, people became more tired and left to watch more people get owned by a huge mechanical bull and soon the dance floor only had around 10 people on it.
At this point, I said "fuck it" and began mixing my favorite dubstep tracks. These 10 people stayed for a while and really danced their hearts out, but soon...cardiac arrest set in (not literally).
Those 10 people all left in a bunch, and I was sitting in the corner of the dark student commons playing Dubstep. I cranked up the levels, sat in the center and sulked in my own misery for a while, and for a little piece of irony played Lupe Fiasco's The Show Goes On. I then played some more dubstep REALLY REALLY Loud until out of nowhere Traktor quit on me. I took this as a sign from God's Only Son, Ean Golden, to GTFO.
So I did. Anyone else have a story like this/want to soothe my broken ego/heart?
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