my gig at a hip-hop crowd party
so one of my friends who spins progressivish like myself asked me to spin at a birthday party on campus for a mostly hip-hop crowd. they were going to have breakdancers, so he wanted my help spinning breaks and playing some hip-hop tracks. i knew i would have to put up with a lot of BS, but i was broke (well, i still am broke ) and i would be able to drink for free and make a few bucks.
neither of us had any hip-hop tracks, but the guy throwing the party was supposed to bring us some CDs. neither of us had spun any hip-hop before.
so, there were only a few people there so i started out spinning some breaks and then on to prog/house stuff, and then the dude came back with 20 hip-hop mp3s on two CDRs. 1/3 of the tracks were VBR and therefore were not cueable on the CDJ200s. the CDs weren't labelled, so I just started playing tracks in order 1,2,3 i learned that hip-hop BPMs vary greatly...i would have one track at -16 and one at +16 and it would still not be in range. some tracks had decent cue points, and some did NOT...sometimes i would just cue from some point before the first snare and see how it would go. i pulled off some beautiful transitions, but many transitions were just quick fades and some were complete shxt. and 20 hip-hop tracks don't last for long. no way i'm going to mix hip-hop again, i'll just put in a mix CD.
the basement started filling up, and some girl was like "can you play "lean back" again? and i was like "...the track that i just played" and she said "yeah" and i must have given her an "are you retarded? " look because she was like "okay, WhatEver!".
so the hip-hop cashed, and my friend was spinning prog, and these 2 girls and a guy at the bar were like "no techno! no techno!". then, the breakdancers came, which i'd actually met before, so i started playing breaks, and they breakdanced for 2 tracks, and then stopped. i was just getting warmed up, and a little ticked by the general rudeness of the partygoers, so i started playing the nastiest hardest electro breaks that i had....that felt good...
eventually we went back to spinning the same 20 tracks of garbage that we played earlier, and that was it. only two college-boy scuffles broke out the whole night. it's not like everyone hated us; there were people dancing and we got a cheer at the end. so, a cooler of cold beer by my side the whole night, and 20 bucks for hangover food the next day....about adequate compensation for a night of putting up with BS. not something i'd like to do on a regular basis though...
thought i'd share my experience!
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