87 “Hey boy, hey girl, superstar DJ, here we go . . .”
In 1978 my mum went to university, at Portsmouth Poly, and over
the next three years I attended all of the end-of-term all-day
discos.
So, from ’78-’81, three times a year, I danced for 12 hours in the stu-
dents’ union, I watched Top of the Pops religiously and . . .
I listened to my tiny transistor Frosties radio (I’d found it in a charity
shop) and this began my obsession.
1981 was a turning point.
I had enough pocket money, and enough freedom,
to go to Woolworths and buy records.
I started collecting.
So, what’s all this got to do with social media?
Well, at the beginning of this formative period, in Portsmouth Poly
Students’ Union, I developed a love for both punk and disco . . .
. . . it was almost like there was a punk-me and a disco-me, and this
schizophrenia has continued throughout my life.
I couldn’t decide if I wanted to be Donna Summer
or Siouxsie
. . . deep down I really wanted to be Debbie Harry.
I love disco and I love punk,
and post-punk was a kind of happy resolution.
I go on to theorise punk and disco . . .
I’ll think a little more about punk and disco first.
Richard Dyer wrote his paper ‘In Defense of Disco’ in 1979.
He argued against the characterisation of disco as ‘capitalist music’
. . . by saying that all music is inherently capitalist.
And he also spoke in defence of the ‘ambivalently, ambiguously, con-
tradictorily – positive qualities of disco’.
For Dyer, the three key characteristics of disco are:
eroticism romanticism materialism
Central to this is a desire to escape the mundanity of life, the culture of
work, of the office, of the boring job.
‘Disco is part of the wider to and fro between work and leisure,
alienation and escape, boredom and enjoyment that we are so
accustomed to (and which Saturday Night Fever plugs into so
effectively)’.
‘Disco can’t change the world or make the revolution. No art can do
that, and it’s pointless to expect it to.’
A lot has been written about Punk.
Simon Frith’s article Post-punk Blues, published in Marxism Today, is
nostalgic about the ‘heyday of political pop’ in the late 70s.
Frith states that
‘pop music has failed, then, to realise the political fantasies that were
piled on punk’.
‘Punk failed to change the way popular music worked because it is, in
capitalist practice impossible to construct an alternative . . .’.
He goes on, ‘The tragedy of punk was not that it ‘failed’ to change pop
but that so many people thought that it could’.
88 Rebekka Kill
In his essay Listening to Punk, written in 1985, David Laing stresses
that an important legacy of punk was the introduction into lyrics
of vernacular language.
He states that, ‘It was up to punk rock to introduce ‘fuck’ and the rest
wholesale to popular music’.
Laing finishes with the construct of the ‘punk listener’. The punk lis-
tener has two key qualities . . .
1. The expectation of challenging listening i.e. potential for shock,
acceptance of avant-garde elements.
2. The punk listener’s enjoyment of other listeners’ discomfort and
trauma.
So, in this performance work, DJing, my childhood, social media, my
academic life are given a soundtrack. I’m in the work, it’s always a live
performance, and I’m presenting myself as a female DJ, an archivist, a
punk and disco lover, and a music geek, and I’m also framing it in a highly
analytical way.
DOING IT
During my interviews with DJs, I asked the participants to describe how
they got into DJing, how they see themselves, and how it intertwines with
their sense of self, their careers, or their politics.
The DJs were carefully selected because I thought they might have a
unique take on these questions. Hatty Lovehearts is someone who has
had the experience of international touring. With Hedkandi, she was
DJing across the world, living the rockstar lifestyle; she was a brand
ambassador and at one point the face of a L’Oreal collaboration. She was
also the only woman on their international roster, touring the world in
her early twenties. Alice Bailey got into DJing through being on pirate
radio, and throughout her career she has worked in radio, both as a DJ
and as a journalist and also in clubs. Lucy Lockett is a DJ whose archival
and technical skill is legendary. She has worked in clubs, with a focus
on LGBTQ spaces for two decades. She also works for Equaliser, an
organization that runs DJ workshops for female, transgender, and non-
binary people and puts on parties with these DJs. DJ Miss Melodie is a
DJ and producer; she set up Miss Melodie’s DJ Academy to encourage
more women and girls to DJ. She provides one-to-one tuition, and oppor-
tunities to DJ for girls as young as 9 years old. Sayang is a non-binary
DJ. They came through the Equaliser program, and they run a QTIPOC
Vogue house, in addition to producing and DJing. Sayang is also the
youngest and least experienced DJ that I interviewed, only having DJed
for around two years.
During the interviews, I identified some significant similarities in the
participants’ routes into DJing. The first similarity, which is probably the
obvious one, is an early obsession with music. All of the DJs had a fig-
ure in their early life who encouraged or nurtured this interest – parents,
89 “Hey boy, hey girl, superstar DJ, here we go . . .”
siblings, i.e. usually someone older who helped them navigate the coded
male space of the record store. All of them collected music and were fairly
serious collectors by their late teens. One of the questions I asked all of
the DJs was if their interest in music was different, or more intense, than
other girls in their peer groups. There were mixed answers to this line of
questioning. My own experience was that as a teenager, I spent time with
a group of friends who were also into music, both dance music and rock
music, and that so long as I didn’t enter the masculine space of perfor-
mance my interest, and that of my female friends, was encouraged. We
also supported each other, playing records for each other and discussing
bands. Other participant DJs talked about similar experiences, but also
some spoke about being the outsider, or odd one out, or becoming one of
the lads.
The next crucial moment in a DJ’s career is often in their late teens.
Two of the DJs I spoke to chose their university city based, at least in part,
on the club scene, although at this point neither were playing out as a DJ.
Also, a notable similarity is that both of them went out to a club, within a
week of arrival, alone, or with a group of strangers. There was a sense of
urgency in these stories, a need to find a particular community, as quickly
as possible.
The step into DJing publicly was different for all of the DJs I spoke to,
ranging from getting a gig, by saying she was a DJ, and then having to
learn very quickly in advance of the gig, to being shown the basics and
then practicing intently as a bedroom DJ for a long period of time. But
there were also some common themes in this part of the interviews. The
most significant commonality was finding an appropriate context and pro-
motor. In all but one case these were spaces that were already employing
female DJs, and in the other case, the clubnight was specifically looking
for a female DJ. There was a clear sense that some spaces were unap-
proachable unless you were a young, white heterosexual male. The other
issue was access to equipment to practice on, and a commitment to buying
very expensive equipment early on.
All of the DJs I spoke to have had very different DJing careers. They
have worked at a range of different levels and in a range of different con-
texts. Two of them had DJing or DJing/producing and teaching DJing as
their main job, and two more described DJing as a significant second job.
The DJs had worked in bars, nightclubs, festivals, radio, and at parties. They
had worked in international, national, regional, and local contexts. They
had been both employed and self-employed, had produced their own
music and promoted their own nights, as well as being booked by promot-
ers or venue owners. They had worked at all income levels from earning
tens of thousands to a hundred or less per night. At one end of the spec-
trum, the DJ made enough to buy a house, whereas at the other the DJing
and the equipment costs probably outweigh any income. All of them had
experienced different intensity and workload across their careers. Income,
frequency, type, scope, and context of DJ may have dramatically changed
from one month to the next. Some of these shifts were related to child-
birth and having young children, and other times the shifts occurred due
90 Rebekka Kill
to needing stability, or wanting to work more social hours, or to have a
social life or a partner. It is extremely difficult to be working several nights
a week, travelling for work, and have a successful relationship or family
life. Although this can also be true of men working as DJs, pregnancy,
breastfeeding, and support for this is much more complex for women.
I did a gig when I was seven months pregnant, and I struggled to reach the
decks around my bump. I also really struggled with tiredness and working
late at night when my children were very young.
When it came to questions about the DJs’ experiences of misogyny or
sexual harassment in the workplace, all of the DJs responded differently.
Hatty Lovehearts described how she, as the only female DJ in her first club
DJ roles, and on the Hedkandi international circuit, created a hyper-femme
version of herself. She has always had cropped hair, and she would wear
a real hair wig and corsetry. She used her gender to her advantage to get
work as what she admits might be the “token” female DJ. Hatty also said
that she never experienced sexism from her fellow DJs – sometimes from
sound technicians, and often abuse from clubbers, but never her colleagues.
Lucy Lockett, on the other hand, talks about numerous difficult moments,
particularly around changeover. I thought this was a really useful moment
to discuss. Let’s say one DJ is working 10pm until 11:30pm, and then
another will take over. The DJ box is a very small dark space, and in the
ten minutes or so around changeover both DJs will be in that space. Walk-
ing in, you need to know which deck is on which channel and if there
are any technical issues with the decks – there usually are. It’s also polite
to say hello, introduce yourself, and the outgoing DJ would usually say
which song they would finish on and where they will leave the sleeve, so
that the incoming DJ has a few minutes to think about what they will start
with and will be able to carefully put the exiting DJ’s record away. All of
this is done in a space that is often unlit and always tiny. It’s a compli-
cated dance. Lucy describes this moment as one that is often fraught with
misogynistic micro-aggressions. Sometimes it’s rudeness, or not talking
at all. Sometimes it’s more patronizing. Sometimes it’s about not mak-
ing space. My own experience of changeover when DJing has been very
varied. I have made some amazing friends and colleagues because of this
interaction, but I have also been ignored, patronized, and had a number of
pretty unpleasant moments.
It was useful during the interviews to think about different types of
engagements at work in the DJ space to explore these issues, starting with:
1. Other DJs
For around half the group of interviewees, other DJs were not an
issue – they described supportive and nurturing relationships and
friendships. However, for some of the DJs the story was very differ-
ent. They described being ignored, patronized, and there are also a
significant number of stories, from the DJs I interviewed, that relate
to being mistaken for the girlfriend of the DJ, a makeup artist (with a
box of singles) or a fan or clubber, who had gained access to the DJ
91 “Hey boy, hey girl, superstar DJ, here we go . . .”
box and needed to be removed by security staff. In all these cases, the
staff reacting like this were described as being taken aback that these
women were actually DJs.
[G]endering is so normalised that it is often invisible to participants.
One such example is the understanding of DJs as male by default.
In many dance music communities, it is a common experience for
women to have diculty convincing club security that they are there
for DJing work, not to simply “jump the queue” as a clubber. Even
once inside clubs, many women are presumed to be in attendance
only to assist or support their partners (who are presumed to be male).
(Gadir 2017: 61)
2. The audience
Gadir suggests that,
claims that some dance oors are free of discrimination while not
acknowledging that other dance oors are not, are comparable with
postfeminist ideas that gender inequality is a problem of the past.
Although the two political positions are contrasting, both utopian and
postfeminist perspectives of dance music cultures ultimately avoid and
deny the hostility and violence that takes place because of gender –
behind DJ booths, on dance oors and in-between gigs.
(Gadir 2017: 65)
Almost all of the DJs I spoke to had experienced verbal abuse from
clubgoers. Although this may be common across the sector, it was the
nature of these comments that was disturbing. For example, “When is
your boyfriend coming back on? He was better than you”, “How many
c**ks did you have to suck to get this gig?”, and so on. We also talked
about customers assuming that the DJ is available, and the vulnerabil-
ity of being behind the decks on your own, as a woman.
3. Venue staff
Sound technicians, or venue staff with a responsibility for equipment,
were flagged as a group who may need some training or development
in issues of equality. This isn’t just about verbal abuse or patronizing
behavior – here were numerous examples of these staff leaning across
equipment, during a set, and attempting to adjust levels.
One young woman said,
I was setting up my equipment and I disappeared for a minute. The
band had taken my power strip and started plugging their stu into
it. The sound guy took it and gave it to the band, but I was going on
before the band. [It] threw o my whole vibe. I’m a rm believer in
making friends with the sound guy ‘cause they make you or break
you. Having the power strip stolen was a huge symbol of disrespect to
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