Friday Cheese: Get thee back behind the decks, young man July 8, 2011

Of techno's many many sins (and shit howdy, there are A LOT you guys), one of the ones that really got up there was veneration of The Cult Of The DJ. Raves and techno wanted so badly to be the anti-rock, to be about the music and not a product, that it was a long time before the musicians themselves became celebrities - and that required actual mainstream success.

Human nature being what it is, promoters realized that they still needed name recognition. Putting "That thing that goes beep beep oontz oontz" on your flyer wasn't going to really do much for your headcount. So somewhere between the need for names to anchor events to, and actual skills, The Cult Of The DJ came into being. 

Mostly it just got really silly the way fluffy hyperbole about truth and love and transendence and magic was applied to a DJ set - but then again, this was not a scene reknown for its stoic, considered, and subdued behavior: 

(I was going to have an image of a candy raver here, but putting that through google image search yielded... things... horrible things, ye ken)

And with all this smoke going right up the asses of these DJ's, many of them thought that they could crank out some dancefloor tunes themselves. And for the most part, it was a bad, bad idea. You got songs that were put together almost mathematically - hybrid bits of all the little popular hooks and loops and beats of the time. And while it doesn't make for timeless music, it does make for some perfect goddamn cheese, encapsulating exactly a certain moment in the 90's. 

When you listen, you'll know what I mean. It's been soaking in it.