How The Tables Turn
A personal tidbit on what it means for me to be a DJ
My playlist for this piece reeks of self-indulgence. Not because of the songs I’ve selected, but because I’m presenting it to you in the form of a DJ set I played in Hyderabad in March.
I would have recorded a new set for the purpose of this piece, but I’ve been moving plenty recently (more on that at the very end) and was only able to unpack my console a week ago. I’ve been writing this piece at orderless intervals, whenever I found time. But I hope that by the end of the piece, the set a) gets you dancing and b) makes sense to you.
And hi, it’s been a while :)
As a kid, I used to learn Hindustani classical music.
I was pretty good at it. I had a grade of approval from one of those places of learning (I don’t remember which one) and was asked repeatedly to sing at society functions. My teacher was also our neighbor with who we continue to share strong camaraderie as a family. She lives on the 7th floor, while we live in the 3rd, to this date. I would find myself taking the elevator to go to class every other day, right after school and before cricket with the boys.
In all honesty, I found ragas boring. I found little reason to exert my vocal cords to pitch levels that only made sense to make if I were dying. Bhairon, Bhairav, they all sounded the same to me. I don’t mean disrespect to the craft or to my sweet neighbor. But I wanted to get out of her house to go play outside as soon as possible. I was good at it, but that didn’t mean I wanted to do it forever.
My parents tell me that my first words in kindergarten were actually lyrics. My KG teacher had a hard time talking to me, seeing as how I mostly spoke in songs. I was potty-trained to the B4U Music channel, because I was too stubborn to learn another way. It wasn’t eating and watching TV that was my bad habit — in fact, it was exactly the inverse activity of eating.
But I suppose my parents figured out that I loved music, and they would do everything to nurture a sense of ambition in that direction. Of course, I got sent to learn the most obvious hobby someone with a sweet, moldable voice could pick up in India. I don’t remember what specifically led me to quitting music classes. My parents, especially my father, would try to inculcate in me an appreciation for our national traditional arts. As a teen, he was involved in the Hyderabad chapter of SPICMACAY. But I could not care less than I already did about the ustads of the world. Sorry, Pa.
Instead, what did pique my interest was all the other music that was out there in the world. It was the “Life In A Metro” soundtrack, that me and my parents would find every opportunity to sing-along with. “O Meri Jaan” was a favorite to play in the car. I would skip “Alvida” because it sounded too sad, much to my mom’s chagrin.
There was tons and tons of Bryan Adams — I was a huge fan of Heaven. When I first heard “With Or Without You” by U2, I knew this song would stay with me forever. We had no pause button when it came to Eagles and Hotel California. For many years, I had no idea that the version of Hotel California I kept hearing at home was not the original — it was the Hell Freezes Overr version. But neither of these versions is the best. That, I owe to The Big Lebowski.
Because The Internet
I may not fully know why I lost touch with my Indian roots, but I do recall clearly the moment I discovered a world of music that I thought my parents might secretly disapprove of.
I was at the house of one of the guys who I played cricket with. He was a bit of an asshole, a classic older dude who used the privilege of being older than us to bully us fairly often. None of the moms in the neighborhood liked him, and we were always warned of hanging out around him. However, one day at his house, he played this foreign-sounding tune. It was a Japanese-seeming guy rapping over a piano instrumental, and one other white guy doing the singing.
The song was called “In The End”.
I’d found God, and it was a collective called Linkin Park. I proceeded to remember every single song on their debut album, Hybrid Theory, be it a blood-curling hit like Crawling, or some deep cut like A Place For My Head. I read up on their history, mugged up the lyrics to Meteora, and waited for every new release. Linkin Park, and Green Day soon after, were all I wanted to hear. The Eagles of the world could now fly away from this nest of mine as far as I was concerned.
This was also my introduction to YouTube, which was barely 2-3 years old at the time. I had no idea how it would revolutionize my future digital consumption and learning. I also learned how to dig into torrents and why seeding was so important. Unfortunately, my internet connection was supplied by BSNL.
By this time, my parents put me in synthesizer classes. I really enjoyed them, because I now had the chance to re-create songs I loved, like the “In The End” instrumental. In my free time, I’d load up my small Casio keyboard and practice a sequence of keys that I thought would lead me to the desired result. I couldn’t get enough of it.
Unfortunately, my synth teacher was pretty hell bent on getting me to just learn the keys to “Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh” and “Pehla Nasha”, and not much else. It was a struggle to get him to open his ears to a different world of sound.
My cousins from Hyderabad would sometimes come over and introduce me to more music. That’s how I heard tracks like “Like A G6”, a bunch of Pitbull, a bunch of Enrique, lots of Akon, and among all the pop hits of the 2000s, “Stronger” and “Empire State of Mind” stood out.
The elder cousin was a die-hard fan of Eminem. He had pirated every album Slim Shady had ever made. To my parents, Kanye West and Slim Shady represented creative destruction — both in the sense of the new replacing the old (and their discomfort with that), and a threat to their perceptions of what makes the “wholeness” of music. To be honest, if I were a dad and heard my kid bopping to “You could be my black Kate Moss tonight” I’d feel like censoring it out too.
I didn’t care. I felt like I perceived music in a whole new fashion that I couldn’t explain it at the time. I knew music was meant to be fused, tried, experimented on. I could be anything as long as there was melody involved. If Mike Shinoda rapped over one of these ragas, I’d probably have benefited from that approach a lot more than what my dad would have invented. We aren’t there yet, but we’re close.
But my parents were always supportive no matter the musical style. My dad bought an iPod classic when he went to the US on a work trip. In the beginning, I had to ask him to load songs onto iTunes, because I didn’t know how downloading things online worked. That iPod saw me through some key phases of my pre-teens — be it the time “American Idiot” was on replay every day, or when I openly advocated for Limp Bizkit’s twisted musical supremacy (I still do, albeit discreetly). Or the time I had “Love Story” on loop while vacationing in Munnar, Kerala — yes, I had a small Fearless phase.
Only much later—combined with the powers of piracy and an upgraded computer—did I realize that I could load a ton of songs into my pocket. When my younger brother threw down the iPod with some disgust a couple of years later, I had the strong urge to indulge in a little human trafficking. In other words, I felt like every other slighted elder sibling in the world.
I used to get what’s new in the world of music from VH1. I’d look forward to checking out their Top Ten Hits every other day. When I’d tune into Top Ten, I’d always wonder what the background music behind the program was. Only nearly a decade later did I conclude that Daft Punk’s Robot Rock sounded exactly like it. Through VH1, I learnt about David Guetta, Usher, Alanis Morrissette, Kelly Clarkson, LMFAO, pretty much all of the early 2010s. Party rock was in the house every night with me.
I never got the hype around Bangarang, back when Skrillex the world’s most infamous musician. And I truly, madly, deeply hated “Get Lucky”. I hated that it was so infectiously recall-worthy, even if I didn’t take to the melody. It took me a long while to admit to myself that I really enjoyed it. I had absolutely no idea how important Daft Punk would be to me a few years later when I would listen to “Random Access Memories” in its entirety. I had no idea how important Skrillex would be to me in a few years’ time when I would re-discover his later work.
And for me, the news of the death of rock was greatly exaggerated. VH1 introduced me to Foo Fighters in 2011. I had no idea what their legacy was back then, but I was aware that they had a new album called “Wasting Light”. I heard Rope and Walk and knew that I had to be a rockstar in life like Dave Grohl. I did not know how important the release of this album was at the time for rock as a whole. For me, the U2s and Linkin Parks of the world were still as relevant as ever.
I was fully tuned into Western pop. I enjoyed Macklemore and never understood the hate he got; Imagine Dragons were obviously a thing (“It’s Time” > Radioactive), Katy Perry was still a hitmaker bar none, Adele was the world’s best singer. Royals was a bop. If I liked what I was hearing, it went on my iPod. For some reason, I was also into Muse. The drone of Uprising was very fascinating to hear every time a VH1 ad played it. It took me months to find out what song it was, and that too because I chanced upon the music video randomly. If only I had Shazam back then.
When I first heard Animals by Martin Garrix, I felt I’d entered a brave new world — one that broke every rule of music I was taught. None of the sounds seemed to come from strings or conventional instruments. It sounded space-y, and the EDM artists seemed to be very self-aware about this trait of their genre. This was the era of big room house.
In this while. I moved more and more away from Bollywood. I used to shun all Hindi music, actively believing the genre to be vastly inferior to the production quality I was hearing elsewhere.
As you could probably tell by now, I was a finicky-as-fuck listener of music. If it didn’t click in the first 30 seconds, I dropped the song. Never mind warnings of the attention economy and deficit today, I was already functioning on a short-term span of focus before Instagram became a thing. I have corrected my ways since then but I also didn’t search for The Weeknd’s work beyond “The Hills” for a short-yet-shameful amount of time. A hit was a hit, and unless the artist was truly exceptional and revolutionary (like Linkin Park was), I wasn’t compelled to be more curious about their broader discography.
This might be probably why by the tenth grade, I’d created my own perceptions of what music was to me, effectively erring the same way my music teachers or my parents did. I didn’t realize that I was succumbing to the same syndrome without understanding that everything I was hearing had rules, too. They were just more fashionable. I’d made the rules to seemingly appear “cool”.
But pop music thrived on repetitive patterns, had the same song structure and synth lines, and it didn’t go beyond the same 4-5 moods. Sometimes just straight up a copy of a popular Y2K song. New rules.
While what I found lacking in Bollywood music is still fairly relevant, such criticisms could really apply to any new genre I was hooked on to at any given time. Big room house just became more of the same beat drop, and the rest of the song didn’t seem to matter to anyone. If the drop sucked, so did the song, and that isn’t good song structure by any means. That was where EDM seemed to be headed.
At around the same time, some weird phenomenon called “mumble rap” had surfaced on the internet. I, an easily impressionable teenager, went along with the usual “this isn’t real rap” narrative everyone else was driving. I was a bit too bound by my rules to realize that I actually quite liked what it had to offer. It defied purist notions of music while still sounding coherent.
After the smashing of the iPod classic, with some appeasement, a Nano 6th Generation was purchased on the event of my 12th birthday. I was pretty pissed that I couldn’t fit any games onto that device. I wore the Nano like a watch once I got a band for it from Dubai. It was cool, but I had no idea it would become a mere collector’s item due to the advent of smartphones.
In 8th grade, my parents had gifted me a smartphone — a cheaper variant of the Sony Xperia line. It was far easier to rip music and load it onto your phone than have a middleman software like iTunes do the job. It still took me a while to graduate from the iPod, I was really attached to it.
Learning Curve
Come 2017. I was in 12th grade, and my biggest motivation by then was to get into the hallows of Delhi University’s North Campus. I’d set my sights on ripping apart the CBSE syllabus, which required a lot of motivational music. 2017 was the year I dove into hip-hop. Most importantly, I discovered an artist with two first names, who had released a music video with Don Cheadle. It was called “DNA”.
I don’t think my YouTube had ever seen such an abuse of the replay button before. I would roll back the seek nonstop to the point where the beat switch takes place. That was the first time I experienced a beat switch in any shape or form. I was hearing a vocal sample that sounded like a news bite (it was). It wasn’t like any other rap song I’d heard earlier. It switched flows seamlessly between two different beats while continuing to sound cohesive. I had decided that this Kendrick Lamar needs to be studied more. He was breaking rules that I thought would apply to music forever.
I heard everything he had to offer. I heard his singles, “To Pimp A Butterfly”, “Good Kid m.A.A.d City”, all in the time I was prepping for my boards. I saw the trailer for Black Panther, which was soundtracked by “Legend Has It”. That was my formal introduction to Run The Jewels, even though I had no idea who Killer Mike was and how important he was to American hip-hop. Closer to release date, I was more hyped for the album accompanying the movie than the movie itself. The album curation and production was led by Kendrick Lamar, after all.
I watched Straight Outta Compton some 10-15 times after it was first released. As a kid, I’d keep an eye out for Oscar season and the films that made the lists. Films around music were my favorite. After Whiplash came out, I fell in love with the soundtrack. But if you asked me a thing about Miles Davis or Charlie Parker beyond what was said in the movie, I’d have nothing. I love movie soundtracks.
I couldn’t tell you who the Nine Inch Nails were, but I could recite you every musical note ever pronounced in The Social Network. Not only do I owe my discovery of Trent Reznor to this movie, but also my love for the legendary White Stripes. They are my favorite rock band/duo of all time simply because I heard Ball and Biscuit in the iconic opening scene. I knew who Jack White was as a kid, because his solo career was being massively advertise on VH1 in 2014. I did not put 2 and 2 together right then to realize he’s the same guy in Seven Nation Army.
But what really convinced me that they were among the best of their peers was listening to their cover of Jolene.
The Big Short was why I tried my hand at metal. I wasn’t too gung-ho on Metallica and had only heard snippets of their work, but listening to Master of Puppets while seeing Michael Burry’s premiums on his mortgage-backed securities rise without reason did something to me. Or when he was casually just drawing down the overall return on his investment on the whiteboard every passing day while some destructive screaming played behind him. The Big Short was my gateway into Pantera. God bless Pantera, they deserved to have a longer career.
8 Mile left a deep impression on me. The movie was really good, and of course it has Lose Yourself. But it was the battle rap at the end that I was awestruck by. One of the greatest double entenderes that I’ve heard to this date comes from Eminem / Rabbit’s 2nd round battle with Lotto:
“My motto, fuck Lotto, I’ll get the 7 digits from your mother for a dollar tomorrow.”
Rabbit’s mother was inconsistently employed and was heavily dependent on monthly lottery tickets to change her fortunes and get out of the abusive relationship she was in with his step-dad. Rabbit uses that lived experience (and those of his peers) to diss Lotto and say that he’ll get the winning numbers for the local tambola from his mom for cheap. However, by “getting digits”, he also means that he’ll get her phone number from a pimp for sex instead of from Lotto.
For the budding writer in me, this vulgarity opened up a whole world of possibilities that went beyond the drab Shakespeare I was reading in class — we had “The Merchant of Venice”. I deeply enjoyed that battle rap was highly competitive to the point that it could be humiliating for the loser.
Inspired by such excellent lyricism, I tried my hand at poetry. My teenage poetry was just a series of attempts to make pun after pun and rhyme after rhyme. It is deeply embarrassing to look back at it now, especially since my teen self took pride in such writing.
But I wrote a lot in 2017, the same year I started coursing through the rap encyclopedia. In the span of the last week of May that year, I wrote 2 short pieces on my seemingly groundbreaking thoughts on music. I wrote about my love for “DNA” and modified the lyrics to give it a more Indian feel — it is terrible and I’m never sharing that with the rest of the world.
6 days after that, I wrote a short tidbit on how much I disliked Attention by Charlie Puth, even though I didn’t realize that while I found the vocals annoying, I enjoyed the anti-drop. This fact will be important towards the end of the story.
Now that rap was cool, pop wasn’t. I had become a devotee of Kanye West, the man who made that bitch famous. I could not hide my disdain for modern pop and its shitty rules and how bland it sounded. Like, I had become “Taylor Swift sucks and she did not deserve to win the Grammy over To Pimp A Butterfly in 2015” levels of annoying. The new cool kids on the Pranav Manie playlist block were Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Run The Jewels, Migos, and just about whoever was popular in rap.
Until now, if you suspected that rap was also going to be a passing phase for the low-attention span person like me, I would not blame you. But it has stuck with me since. I update my hip-hop omnibus playlist on Spotify to this day with new hip-hop tracks. The playlist is 104 hours long.
One of my foundational hip-hop albums was Pusha-T’s Daytona. The only real reason I knew it existed is because 2018 was the year we saw Kanye enter his “dragon energy”, brewing controversy on the daily and telling us that he hates being bipolar, it’s awesome. He also produced 4 albums (including his own, Ye) successively in a long stretch, now known collectively as his Wyoming Sessions. Daytona was one of them.
The beats on it ranged from bleak and sparse to luxurious and lush with piano. And what album is only 7 songs long? Why is this artist spending all of his 7 songs to rap about cocaine? But those questions didn’t matter by the time I finished listening to all of them. The fact that he could rap about cocaine in so many different ways with so many different wordplay schemes put shame to the permutations & combinations chapter in my Maths book. And Pusha gave us a life-ending, filthy diss track in its aftermath. I spent a lot of time dissecting the Drake diss bars.
School’s Out Forever
I entered college in 2018. All I heard in that first year was rap. I was the go-to guy in my quizzing and debating clubs for all things hip-hop. It was frustratingly obvious to everyone that I listened to hardly anything else. I was a fairly standard listener and watcher of most American culture and did not pay much heed to anything desi.
But living in Delhi is a wonderful experience as a music listener. College was my first whirlwind of emotions, especially for a homebody like me. Living alone, stumbling as an almost-adult, navigating student life and finding my tribe, figuring out what I like doing and how to sustain it, and doing all of that in a city I’ve always wanted to be in. All of this required a soundtrack to help me out.
College is also a time you break perceptions of the world, form new ones, and start to get challenged about what you think you know. It’s probably not a coincidence, then, that as college progressed, I felt more and more similarly about music. That it was not supposed to have rules.
I found myself uncontrollably breaking into dance whenever and wherever “Emosanal Attyachaar” was played. “Wake Up Sid” was required watching because I realized I didn’t know how to make eggs either — currently, I can make you a killer grilled cheese egg bacon sandwich. This meant that Iktara was required listening. My seniors made me watch Khosla Ka Ghosla in the middle of the night as a fresher and I could not be more grateful that I did not sleep then. I was finding out what it means to enjoy culture without pre-conceptions, to quote the great Giorgio Moroder.
Speaking of who — I heard Random Access Memories for the first time in this phase of life which led to me going through Daft Punk’s entire catalog. I let music make me tear up when it had to — the way Giorgio By Moroder did when I heard it first — or make me feel high without a drug. There was a song for every moment and every phase of life. I didn’t really sing or play an instrument any longer, but I was never more attuned to what the music was trying to tell me.
When CoVID disrupted my final year, I didn’t have much to rely on except music. But I never consumed music in escapist defiance. On the contrary, I use it to integrate myself with my surroundings. The song that I’m playing at any given moment has to resonate with how I’m interacting with the rest of the world.
And at the time, I was mentally in the gutter. Some of the top songs on my Spotify Wrapped that year — “Present Tense” by Pearl Jam, “Motion Sickness” by Phoebe Bridgers, “Karma Police” by Radiohead, “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” by Bob Dylan. Holy quartet of overthinking and anxiety.
A lot of songs came from the soundtrack of The Sopranos. I watched a lot of golden age TV in that period, and that also informed my playlists — like Mazzy Star’s “Look On Down From The Bridge”. Plenty of rap and rock to keep me afloat — Run The Jewels, Denzel Curry and Riz Ahmed took out new albums that year, and Queens of the Stone Age, Nirvana and pre-Stadium Arcadium-era RHCP were repeat customers. Of course, there was always hype music for the times I needed it.
As the wave slowly but surely simmered down, the sounds in my ears became more joyful, energetic. I was reconnecting with friends, especially those who lived close to me. Moments like those would have me playing Real Friends by Kanye West, or warm Elliott Smith that would make me feel nice. I heard a lot of new hopeful, optimistic music in the year that I would keep with me forever. It got me to writing one of the first pieces on Medium (here) that would pave the path towards this newsletter.
For the first time in 2021, I was also exposed to desi hip-hop. This was around the time college was supposed to end for me, but our (remote) exams had been postponed. My introduction to the niche was Seedhe Maut — I felt like personally dapping them up when I heard Namastute for the first time. It was what I’d been waiting for all my life. It was Hindi rap that sounded ferocious.
My 2021 Spotify Wrapped stood in walking contradiction to 2020. Desi headbanger after desi headbanger, male rapper after male rapper, interspersed with all-male rock bands, giving a little way to some introspective tracks — particularly, Father John Misty’s Leaving LA was medicine to cope with college ending — but then back to male rappers, especially Kanye with the release of Donda.
I was also extremely restless in 2021. I wanted to move out of home and experience the outside world, especially now that I had a job. I was done living in a nuclear fallout shelter-like situation. When I did get out there, I wanted to maximize for life experiences within the means of my budget constraint. I hadn’t really been to gigs while in college, an attitude that I decisively changed starting with Seedhe Maut’s first show of their tour that year.
Living in Delhi-NCR as someone with a job has been far more liberating for me than living as a student. Besides the 9-5, everyday seemed like something new was waiting to unfold. This was aided by my ever-deeper dive into Delhi’s burgeoning hip-hop scene, and the unfortunate peak of the side of me that enjoys Drake. There were new albums from Kendrick Lamar, Pusha-T and J.I.D that were on rotation — all 3 albums were in my top 5 that year. I went to more hip-hop gigs that blew my mind.
But most importantly, I started to take this newsletter seriously.
While I do write what classifies as purely non-fiction, I try to imagine scenes from a movie when I do so. Alcoholics Autonomous was viewed as characterizing the metaphorical lifeblood of a manufactured city in Gurgaon that doesn’t have much else to offer by way of being a city. One of the things that worked for the piece was backing it with a song — specifically, Miss Alissa by Eagles of Death Metal.
My pieces on Delhi hip-hop were an exercise in structure, because what you’re listening to exemplifies the geography of Delhi that the song (or the artist) represents and embodies. There was no point writing a Delhi hip-hop piece that stuck to any one section of Delhi. This was a belief I internalized after realizing that living in Gurgaon had made me some version of that meme about corporate employees typing up banal stuff while listening to the most disgusting metal.
My writing and my music share a symbiotic relationship that influence one another. I enjoy having them interact the way they do. What that also meant was that I would just often write about music. In retrospect, this was a pattern that existed throughout my life, but I never considered it seriously. I assume it was because I was focused on chasing paths that were well-trodden.
However, music and writing were looking increasingly more viable as something I could give significant time.
Toh Mere Sang Naacho Gao
The first sign of my mixing ability was not obvious to me. In 2022, AP Dhillon released Summer High — surely enough, summer was well over by then and it was pouring cats and dogs in Gurgaon. The song was extremely catchy and a welcome turn in sonics for APD. But what stood out to me the most was how similar it sounded to one Tame Impala song.
On the surface, I’ve always wondered what other song can go well with the one I’m listening to at a given moment. As my music library expanded, this task became easier and honestly more fun. Just random bulb switches in my head that would say, “What if this guitar solo had a verse?” It also helped that some of the new music I was listening to was extremely difficult to bucket into one genre.
But with finding out that Summer High and The Less I Know The Better were likely non-identical sonic twins, I thought I hit a jackpot that nobody did. A very naive thought, but I could potentially beat whoever else thought of it by actually proving that those two songs went together like butter. While I knew nothing about being a DJ at the time, I did employ some jugaad. I got a ripped version of a DJ software for Android, loaded the two tracks, equalized their tempos, and let it rip. Not that it should have been shocking, but the result sounded like magic. I put it up on my socials, expecting it to blow up. It didn’t, but people did notice.
It hadn’t crossed my mind that I could be involved in this music thing directly. I was happy watching from the sidelines, cheering on for my favorite new artists, writing and tweeting about them. But the adrenaline rush that I got from mixing was undeniable. It was the start of me looking for greener, more exciting pastures in life.
What tipped me over to the dark side was watching Boiler Room sets on YouTube.
It was only in the last couple of years that I was exposed to the idea of a Boiler Room. I wasn’t immediately attracted to them because they didn’t really seem to play a lot of music that I had taste for. Of course, I had no idea that Boiler Room did go beyond house and techno. But there was one Boiler Room in particular that seeded in my head the idea that I might just want to pick up a console.
I knew Kenny Beats from his wacky livestreams with rappers, and producing songs for them. His collaboration album with Denzel Curry soundtracked much of my lockdown. I didn’t know he was also a DJ. His Barcelona Boiler Room was a pure hip-hop set designed to get the crowd bumping. The set was so raucous that all that crowd jumping cracked the dance floor and forced the set to end far too early. Kenny Beats was playing my playlist in a way that it all sounded like one long insane track. The crowd was under his masterful thumb.
But even within the set, there was one blend that caught my attention more than any other. It was this transition from ROSALIA to A$AP Rocky, one that I knew I had to replicate first thing when I bought a DJ console.
(Click on it to watch the transition specifically, it links to the moment itself rather than from the start of the video)
I vowed to buy myself a console only if I wouldn’t stash it in some old dungeon somewhere after 3 months of trying and failing. I really wanted to give it a real shot and get good at it, even as a hobby. I wanted to be able to come up with my own blends on the go. I relished the idea that such blends can take audiences aback in a sense of “Wow, how did the DJ even think of this?” I knew that I wanted to mix hip-hop primarily, but in extremely creative ways.
After plenty of deliberation and a very hectic year afflicted with a bit of professional grief and a horrible bout of dengue, I was ready to turn the last quarter of 2023 around. I bought the cheapest console I could get — the Numark Party Mix II, with a set of studio speakers that wouldn’t set me back massively but would also double for mini home theatre experiences.
I was immediately addicted to it like a moth to a flame. I would put up Instagram stories every other day of my mixing experiments. To Numark’s credit, the console was very beginner-friendly unlike modern-day club-level consoles, which are woefully intimidating to look at as a rookie, much less play. My console had limited capabilities but enough for what rookie me needed.
From October to December 2023, I spent post-work hours coming up with blend ideas like a bartender. Chhaiya Chhaiya with Still D.R.E, or Amplifier with Black and Yellow, I was determined to make them fun without worrying too much about what my eventual sound palette would be. It was time to brew enough new cocktails to be able to test them out in the open.
And test them out I did, far sooner than I ever thought I would. Within 2 months of buying the console, I felt prepared enough to host my first house party as a DJ (or even as a host, to be honest). It was the debut show of easymanie, a name I decided on way before I even picked up the console, in a moment of dreamy machination about what my name would be if I were ever a DJ or musician of any kind. The ifs and buts were out of the picture now.
A friend of mine made a killer red-hued poster titled “Gurgaon’s very own — The easymanie show” with a picture of me in black-tinted sunglasses. I invited around 25 friends to come see me flail around with music, but by then I had built some amount of confidence that I wasn’t particularly bad at it. These friends were fully willing to subject themselves to my rookie performance.
The party killed. People were there not just for the party (which was great), but also for the music and for me playing it. This whole thing going well was the strongest Jagermeister shot of confidence that I could get. I wanted more. So did my friends, who were very willing to host me at their houses and let me set the vibe for the night.
Not long after, at one such friend’s house, I met someone who was also playing that night right after me. He looked like he’d been mixing for a long time, he had amazing chops. We immediately struck out as friends and bonded over music. I had no idea that that friendship / partnership would lead me to some wonderful roads I hadn’t planned for in my life.
We exchanged the music we listened to — neither of us were necessarily always at home with the other’s preferred genres. He thrived in electronic music, be it house of any kind or bass music like dubstep. I did a lot of hip-hop and pop. But we built a deep mutual appreciation, while also realizing that we shared a love for bass, rap, and most importantly, their intersection.
That intersection was where we thrived the most as a duo. Our blends were high on energy, and the line between underground and mainstream didn’t matter much as long as it sounded knockout. We were more than comfortable with the idea that this was going to be a process of trial and error, but that was where the fun lay, more than in the outcome. But we also had some delicious outcomes.
Within 6 months of picking up a console, I wanted to play in a club. My friend hadn’t tested his blends out in a club either till now, despite having been mixing longer than me. My first gig was with him at a bar in CyberHub as part of a collective called Backdoor Parade.
The set wasn’t coherent at all, there was a technical fuckup, and the transition from playing at home to playing on a club console was jarring enough for us. But out of the 45 minutes allotted to us, we had 20 minutes of people dancing to what we were doing. We were mashing up lesser-known tech house with some of the most popular tracks known to desi Gen-Z audiences. We had people turn their heads and pay attention to us, even for a slight while.
Those 20 minutes were by no means perfect, but they changed my course for the rest of the year. I found myself tinkering with new tunes, new genres, fusing tunes that had no business being fused, discovering my style in the meantime, and scouting for places I could play all the time. But most importantly, I discovered what music meant to me, and how I felt about it. I was bitten by a bug that was always there but could never find a good, sweet spot to bite me.
What Goes Around Comes Around
My first gig was a year and 2 months ago. In that time, I’ve played a few great gigs, and I continue to hope to play more, albeit in a new city (I recently shifted base to Bangalore). But I wasn’t fully able to square what was it about this new hobby that revitalized my relationship with every type of music I’d heard in the 25 years I have continued to exist.
On the surface of it, being a DJ has made me more open to creative experimentation and fusion. But I wonder if this tendency always existed, given all the influences I’ve had since childhood. I didn’t really enjoy sticking to a lane, which naturally manifested in me eventually growing out of genres in which I was deeply invested. But more than nostalgia having me go back those tunes, it was some illuminating moment of discovery that made me realize that those genres I considered so disparate might have had quite a few things in common.
It’s also not a secret to anyone smart enough that desi producers constantly attempted to adapt to the globalizing nature of sound in the last 2 decades. Like, can’t you tell Vishal-Shekhar borrowed significantly from Daft Punk on Ghungroo? I started to see those similarities far more easily, even though they were out there in broad daylight. But I didn’t see them this as something to disparage — on the contrary, it was cool! Ghungroo is a lovely song with its own identity that I enjoy, but it opened my eyes to the idea that music producers were just as attuned to that globalizing sound as I thought I was — most likely more.
What was more impactful to me was seeing this relationship the other way round in hip-hop. Sampling is quintessential to the genre, and hip-hop is shameless about where the foundation of the instrumental comes from. I was hooked to digging for samples to my favorite hip-hop songs while in my late teens — I would watch YouTube videos devoted to finding samples nonstop. Imagine my surprise when I found that so many of those samples came from Bollywood.
Every person has a different perspective on music. My near and dear ones couldn’t have more divergent perspectives on what music means to them. I learnt plenty from them. Writing on music has ensured that I was exposed to various (sometimes mind-blowing) viewpoints, some of which I’ve used to confirm my hypotheses / biases. These viewpoints were personal, social, political, industrial/commercial, technical, and mostly a fusion of some or all of them.
As a DJ, you begin to appreciate the technical aspects a lot more than usual. But what was notable that the technical perspectives on music that I received from people who didn’t study it didn’t belie any fundamentals of any form of classical, notated music theory. As a former student of music theory, I didn’t particularly enjoy the emphasis on theory (this is true of me in general). Now, I was far more convinced that you could do away with reading music.
Fuck theory.
The turning point on this came with a YouTube video by the Rolling Stone channel, where Charlie Puth broke down how he made Attention. I was dazzled by the simplicity of the breakdown. This was an uber-famous graduate of the world-class Berklee College of Music, saying that he had very little patience for notating his music. That his most famous song to-date is just a bunch of voice notes to himself.
Since then, the usual slate of pop has received far more respect from me. If you haven’t seen this video, you must, and I rarely make an imposition on my readers:
If you haven’t kept up with the times, bedroom producers are everywhere. The friend who I perform with often makes music on FLStudio without any reading music theory. Good music can come from anywhere, and nobody has an effective monopoly on making a hit any longer. What did matter was understanding that music has a history, and your future work is one of many interpretations of that history. It’s as true for the commercial bangers as it is for the underground favorite.
This is the philosophy that I’m now wedded to, that feels like a moment of tying up all of the various strands of my relationship with music. Music is inherently an adaptive and evolutionary good. It changes extremely quickly, and now that anyone can make it, the speed of change will only accelerate. It creates perceptions and rules that are meant to be eventually broken in ways that can’t be predicted.
This is not to say that I’m the most adaptive or forward-looking DJ or anything (I’d like to be one), but my enjoyment of music — as a listener, as a DJ, as a writer — has never been higher.
And the road to this realization was a long, winding coming-of-age story that I’m glad I got to experience in its wholeness.
Thank you to the following people for proofreading: Sarojini Sapru, Sunaina Bose, Ritwik Tripathy.
This is the first time in a long time that I’ve written a personal story on here. Usually, these stories of mine have been pretty raw and unedited. But I couldn’t ignore the fact that music has burrowed into every bit of my psyche. I never thought I’d be pursuing it in any capacity.
I have also shifted jobs and addresses—I am now based out of Bangalore. It has been a tearful goodbye to my second home in Delhi-NCR (and that’s a story for later).
I won’t be as frequent as I used to be, but the quality of stories should be the same/better, some might even be personal! I have a few drafts on the backburner—including a project that fuses my DJ skills with my writing. I should finish all of those drafts within the year, now that my life has stabilized a little from the nonstop flux of the last 6 months.
And if, by chance, you’re mildly interested in the rest of my journey as a DJ, here’s a playlist of my stuff, and here’s my Instagram :)