The out spoken Carl Cox wrote the following editorial on Inthemix about his school/thought on DJing and it's an extrodinary read into the mind of a living DJ legend.
By Carl Cox
PLAYING IT FIRST
To be involved in this for so long, there has to be a reason. My reason hasn’t been about chasing money, having a record go to number one on radio or being the most popular DJ in the world. All I did was basically believe in what I do and the music I play. I do everything because I feel compelled; whether the music I’m playing is popular or not. That’s still how it is today for me. I just hear a record and think, “Right, I really want to share this track and I want people to understand that I love this music.” So I’ll play it based on that principle.
Two years ago, this track came out by Joe Brunning called Now Let Me See You Work. No one had heard it before at all, and I remember playing it for the first time at Ultra Music Festival in Miami. The whole place was going crazy to a track they’d never heard before. And that for me...
is the reason I do what I do, week in, week out, year in, year out. Because most DJs these days will play music that you have heard, especially from a popular point of view. They know everyone’s going to sing those songs and have their hands in the air.
I have no clue what this record’s going to do. All I know is it’s bloody brilliant, so here we go! I’m flying by the seat of my pants. It’s like, Oh god, this is either going to make or break my career. Then bang: it just goes off. People walk away and from everything they’ve heard that night, they haven’t heard that record. They can walk away and say, “Coxy played this record.” Then they can go and find it, but they know where they heard it first. That’s been my drive.
DON’T FORGET WHERE THE CREATIVITY IS
I think the great thing about being a DJ and an artist is that you’re able to paint your own picture. You’re able to go, “I’m on for four hours, so I’m going to give you a journey into what I enjoy; a collective of sound.” Whether that’s drum & bass, dubstep, trance, progressive, house, Latin, tech-house or techno, it’s all there to be played, and you have to know how you’re creating the night. Most of the music I’m playing, people haven’t heard before. They might be trying to chase it all down, but even I don’t know half the time, because it comes directly from the producer as track 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. But I just know how it sounds and where it fits at a certain point of the night.
The longer you’re at a Carl Cox set, the better it is. It’s not about having an hour-and-a-half, playing the big popular records, and you’re done. It’s all about finding the records that aren’t popular, but have that emotion and feel.
No one can stop a good record. Avicii’s Levels has been overplayed to death, we all know that, and if I played it today I’d probably be strung up on the highest podium, and then burnt to the ground, because no one would understand why. But if that record had never become so big, I would play it, because I actually like it. It lifts people. It has a great melody that makes people smile and it moves the floor. I won’t despise it just because it became that popular. It became popular because it was good to begin with.
What happened though is that everyone saw what that record can do, and they tried to make something like it. It becomes narrow-minded. It can be difficult to push new music and subcultures of sound. If we just keep on the side of what’s popular, all that’s going to happen is: anything that’s at the top always goes down. There has to be someone who ends up at the top, but meanwhile don’t forget about where the creativity is: supporting the next generation creating something weird and wonderful out there. I’m still looking for those moments.
SLOWING IT DOWN
When I started as a DJ playing fast techno, I was in the age group demographic I played to: 26, 27 year olds. And I was able to keep up – now at 50, well, I’m not! So I’m quite happy now for the tempos to go down and rock on the beat. There’s really good music between 122 and 126 BPM; really strong sounds within that realm. I find that the music breathes more, when the tempos are slower. The bassline comes in much rounder, the kick-drums are warmer, the music and melody inside the sound becomes more prominent.
When the music’s so fast, you miss that. It becomes basically one barrage of sound: bang, bang, bang. I can only handle that for a couple of minutes. It’s horses for courses at the end of the day. Nowadays I end up with four decks – in the sense of CD players. I can still be as creative as I ever was on three turntables. It’s just now what’s really nice is you can more or less have the records on-beat, because I don’t synch anything like you might on Traktor or Serato. I never want to lose the art and craft of what got me here in the first place, just by hitting the synch button. For me, it’s too easy.
Many DJs can’t do it without synching, so you’ve already taken out the art of performance. I don’t think that’s wrong, but people like to see me sweating and struggling to keep that record in. That’s always been my craft. It’s edge-of-your-seat stuff. It’s like seeing a rock guitarist rocking out – there’s a few bum notes in there, but he’s going for it. I’m the same when it comes to turntables or CD players. The only difference now is my needle doesn’t jump anymore…
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