I have DJed at some impressively esoteric weddings in my time. I started playing clubs in 1999, but in the mid-2000s I started advertising myself as a wedding DJ on the era-defining digital noticeboard Gumtree. One heroic couple only wanted the music of abrasive Manchester geniuses the Fall for the entirety of their nuptials. Another sweet couple wanted to evoke the night they met at 5am at the London gay club Fire – so hired me to bang out punishing hard house from 5pm in a hotel function room.
From experience, people who hire wedding DJs are usually fairly clear about what they like. They may provide a short list of songs they love, usually across a few genres, and trust a DJ to fill in the gaps. It’s rarer that people are clear what they explicitly don’t like.
However, a story in the Times this week claimed that wedding DJs increasingly “cater for these sensitivities” by “drawing up ‘do not play’ lists, to ensure that a happy couple’s happiest day is not spoilt”. It cited Ben Boylan, founder of Non-Traditional Wedding DJs, who claimed that names such as R Kelly and P Diddy were frequently appearing on such lists. In another piece in the New York Times, a 39-year-old rabbi from Manhattan explained she had requested no Kanye West, given his current pro-Nazi stance. “If a song is controversial or offensive to any community member, that should really be thought about,” she said.
The art of DJing is essentially just a series of choices. You are forced to make a brand new decision every three to four minutes and hope you get them all spot on until the lights come on at the end.
So the idea of curbing a DJ’s ability to choose may seem like a dangerous route to go down; a curb on artistic and creative freedom. Yet this is not a new phenomenon. I am proud that over the past 10 years or so the UK’s dance music scene has fiercely shunned artists who, in the cases of techno producers Konstanin and Boddika, for example, have respectively talked down female DJs and used anti-immigrant language online, or Lithuanian Top 10-scoring producer Ten Walls, who has espoused homophobia.
Whereas other creative industries take decades to erase bigots in their midst, DJs en masse rejected their music almost instantly. To be clear, this isn’t cancellation by some kind of sinister cabal or woke diktat: I have never encountered a single “do not play” list in any club ever, even ones with activism and political causes at their core. I think the fact that DJing is so rooted in fast choices is a blessing in this regard. Choosing “no” just isn’t a big deal. That said, if I’m honest, I wouldn’t be averse to more clubs having “do not play” lists. Sometimes, it would be nice to not have to make all the moral decisions by oneself.
As the Times piece made clear, the more vile things we learn about our favourite artists, the more they rightly trigger our sensibilities. Just as a good DJ knows how to read a room, a modern DJ should already be well versed in deciding which artists and songs may make a room of strangers feel upset.
My own moral approach has always been to remember that a DJ’s job is to spread joy to every single person in that room. Morrissey has made too many statements seen as hateful for many people to enjoy, I can report. Yet the fact that several 1970s rock stars slept with underage girls doesn’t seem to be an issue for older people’s morality on the dancefloor. I paused playing Lizzo when her former tour dancers accused her of sexual harassment and body shaming, and stopped playing Diplo after allegations of sexual misconduct arose. Their innocence or guilt is oddly immaterial: I just don’t want to even risk that someone on my dancefloor might feel bad, period. Beyond the individual tracks that make up a set, that’s my ultimate choice as a DJ – to treat a dancefloor as a beautiful haven, not a “platform” like Speakers’ Corner.
DJs respectfully disagree on artists all the time, too. I personally find Azealia Banks’s previous online hatred abhorrent (it ended for me in 2016 when she used the same racial slurs about Zayn Malik that I got called at school). But her 2012 hit 212 is a mainstay of modern queer clubs, and I enjoy an ongoing dialogue with fellow DJs about her place in the culture.
And even though in the wake of the vile stories told in Leaving Neverland I give a hard “no” to Michael Jackson tracks, I’m keen to stress that nobody ever notices the omissions. There really is so much amazing music out there that you can be a principled, moral DJ and still kill it every time. In short, do not fear a “do not play” list: nobody should feel excluded from enjoying themselves, and if a song threatens that, simply choose something else.
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Oliver Keens is a writer, author and columnist, as well as a DJ
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