> see the thing is this, some of us want to invite
> everyone to the party and we get bummed out when 90%
> of them don't want to go. we still go on (we're
yeah, this is true, I can't count how many disappointing turnouts I've seen and
had, but we're also very lucky. The kind of music a lot of us are playing now
is really accessible in a way, and if you catch people at the right angle and
trick them, like making them think you're playing salsa (people love that!!) or
a type of house (which might not be *too* far from the truth), they eat it up.
My experience djing in the last couple years is that the response is either very
flat or really exuberant. I find that drawing that line or making that bridge
between what people know they like and what *you* know they should like based on
what they're already listening to, is the golden formula. It's pretty reliable.
I did see it fail once, when a friend of mine was playing wonderfaul brazilian
carnival style house-related stuff to a latin/afro house crowd and they kinda
liked it but had no idea how to dance to it, but I've had a lot of luck with it.
It's not just house/salsa-to-broken beat, there is a strong connection between
classic soul and, say, Kaidi Tatham and Afronaught. Ok, that's stating the
obvious to music-lovers, but regular people hear it too. I've had lots of
older-than-20-something couples come up and be really excited about a brand new
tune because it was so evocative of 70s soul. This weekend in the park, there
was a guy who must have been in his late 40s or 50s *at least* who was nodding
his head to a lot of jazz, but got up and boogied to jungle! He was so excited
about it. The connections are there, the challenge is making them smoothly
enough to trick people, and hoping against hope that you happen to get a
critical mass of people in the crowd with open minds and infectious spirits.
I shudder to think that maybe it would be a good idea to advertise as house, b/c
I really have a limited tolerence for the monotonous beats (sorry, househeads)
but this phenomenon is something to consider. Agh, marketing/promoting is the
most miserable job for so many of us music types.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Aug 22 2002 - 18:04:18 CEST