Apache. The Incredible Bongo Band. 1973. Pride.

 Before disco even began to develop, before Giorgio Moroder and programmable beats, men were leaving their hometowns for urban locales hoping to redefine, for themselves and for the culture at large, what their childhoods had taught them about the masculine dynamic. Queer men pre-Obergefell were always made to negotiate the labyrinth of introspection with an actor’s intensity, often in madness-inducing solitude. Then, in the nineteen-seventies, amid bi-coastal struggles to unify a jumbled complex of disparate personalities and sensibilities into an allied consolidation worthy of representational power, a friend—to what would become known as the gay community—emerged, one who had ostensibly been present all along. The cover artwork for Donald Fagan’s 1982 solo record The Nightfly pictures an idealized image of the disc jockey alone with his deck, the narrative of his playlists his sole connection to the outside world. But solitude is not a heroic American virtue. It was the late night disc jockeys in barrooms and discotheques who helped gay men in the late sixties and throughout the seventies find their footing in the cruel era of equal rights America. Dancing is about visibility; even if no one is watching, you dance to feel yourself being seen expressing inchoate emotional dynamics about interpersonal relationships in the public space. Dancing in gay bars in 1970s America was literally experiencing open, same-sex, masculine arousal in a public group setting for the first time, without fear of arrest by the cops, in our country’s long and troubled history. And though technological advancement of compressed computer files has made the in-house nightclub DJ as quaint a function of gay culture as the handkerchief code, their role in the history of gay liberation is solid. In the grip of self-recognition, perhaps, hip-hop DJ’s heard the energy of Incredible Bongo Band’s virtuoso cover of the Shadows’ Apache and quickly secured its legend as the genre’s most often sampled record, once again enlivening the DJ’s reputation as cultural signifier. Then, in 1987, while the rock and roll era was just beginning its catastrophic crumbling from within, Morrissey, with his former band the Smiths, sang, “Hang the DJ!” and today we’re still wondering if the lyric was an over- or underreaction. If playing records is a form of mind control, inducing a state of sensory suspension during which the listener is made to undergo a trance state that triggers either a memory or a fantasy to develop, then DJing may be said to be a form of soft fascism, and I am, and always have been, here for it. The bloodless, anti-heroic tyranny of playing records is the only power I’m interested in accumulating for myself, and even then I practice it mostly when alone. 

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