The Pop Corporation

For those who have seen Grimes horror show of a DJ set at Coachella and have been hating on her for a while – enjoy this moment – you got what you wanted at long last. That may seem passive aggressive, but it isn’t.

See, one of the unfortunate knock-on effects of the automation of music and DJing, is that audiences have accidentally ended up paying money to watch rich people practice their hobbies – when it goes wrong, it’s funny and we’re right to mock. Or rather, we don’t have to feel bad for taking the piss.

One of the ways a DJ earns their cred is by thinking on their feet. What happens when you prepared for a set and a different crowd shows up? What happens when the equipment starts acting up? In the case of Grimes, at no point did she wing it. She’d paid someone else to prepare her set (something she’s vowing she won’t let happen again), but it speaks to something broader.

The very point of a DJ is knowing that, while they aren’t playing their own music (unless they’re lucky enough to have successful music they’ve produced and can include it in their sets), they’re playing stuff that they’ve devoured and want to share that with an audience in the hope they love it too. In any set, there’s a spontaneity where an audience expects that a DJ will play a track, watch everyone go crazy, and then in the moment think “Oh! I know what I should play next!” If it’s not spontaneous, then it’s knowing that they’ve got something lined-up that’s tried and tested and just works, and you get that by doing loads of gigs, and being interested in other’s DJ sets.

Historically, a packed dancefloor going crazy is the reward for someone being nerdy and getting too worked up in private, dreaming of playing some obscure track and everyone losing their minds to it.

Since the advent of Serato, Rekordbox and the like, best-matching has never been easier. Of course, for some of those who learned on vinyl, this is all terribly upsetting and unfair to them (and they’ll tell you about it endlessly too), but for the most part the technology has allowed DJs to focus on what really matters, and that’s what their song choices are – and there’s the additional boon of not having to lug heavy bags of records everywhere too.

There’s mild annoyance with celebrities and YouTubers learning how to DJ and saying “Oh? That’s much easier than I thought” when they never learned it the hard way and get plumb gigs on the strength of their celebrity – but that’s really not too important. People have always got opportunities on the strength of celebrity, and the democratisation of DJing is a net good. Besides, the mechanics of a basic DJ set aren’t that hard to learn in 2024, and once you’ve worked out how to do it on vinyl, that’s not eye-surgery difficult either.

What you can’t learn is thinking on your feet, which comes with experience. What you can’t learn is that sometimes, you just have to do a set by ear rather than a bpm reader on some CDJs or a laptop while you troubleshoot.

When in doubt, just sling tracks on willy-nilly and stop trying to do long transitions thinking that the software will magically sort itself out. And besides, in the case of Grimes, if one track reads 120bpm and your software says the next track is 240bpm, simple maths will sync those up. Even a pub DJ knows that.

And this is the thing – we’re right to laugh at a celebrity messing up in public because firstly, it’s funny. Mean spirited maybe, but fuck it – and that’s because secondly, no-one is losing a limb over this ultimately trivial event. Thirdly, you imagine this won’t harm Grimes’ career one jot. She’s just getting rinsed this week, and she’ll have to take her lumps, but no-one really cares at their core.

It’s worth remembering that DJing is a strangely intimate process – it’s the realisation of practise, choosing songs especially for your given dancefloor and promoting music like a cheerleader, all the while giving people a good night out. In this case, it’s morbidly fun to watch someone who thinks they pre-ordain a set, outsource it, and watch it go horribly wrong. What any DJ worth their salt has worked out is that you don’t let out angsty screams between each botched mix and get on the mic to talk about technical issues and yelling about how it’s all not your fault. And that’s exactly what Grimes did. Rookie mistake.

Outsourcing sets is lame. Blaming other people is lame. Not rolling with the punches is lame. Just deal with it. Laugh. It’s a fuckin’ DJ set at a festival – half the crowd is on drugs and have a back-up mix if you really need one.

And if you’re in any way serious about DJing in the mildest of senses, why not just go back to some old tracks you’ve got on some USBs from previous shows? Sure, you may have rehearsed a set especially for a prestigious slot like this, but you have always got your previous work to fall back on right? And maybe, we can take a little solace from the fact that this trainwreck at least proves that she wasn’t just miming along to a pre-mixed set, like a number of celebrity DJs are guilty of, right? It’s the calamitous sets like this that are the realest shit and every single DJ has horror stories in their history that they have learned valuable lessons from.

Anyway, for schadenfreude lovers who haven’t seen it, press play and enjoy. For anyone who is a budding DJ or an experienced head who may have got complacent, let this be a timely warning.