Had a long rap session with an valued peer. The kind of catch-up you have when one of your peoples passes away. Discussed the generational changes in DJing. By both of our experience, a huge difference is that we grew up with dancing as a primary context for socializing.

Our standard for spinning is how you create a musical narrative for a room full of dancers. It seems a generational shift happened where dancing dropped or altogether disappeared in social importance, so DJing concepts shifted accordingly.

When I check in on younger DJs and their events, I often find a troubling lack of basics like phrasing and pacing. But outside of those shortcomings, am I struggling to follow their narrative because there isn't one, or because it's not tuned to a dancer's frequency?

Song sequencing that's totally odd to me may make sense to folks who have no experience with social dancing as a formative experience and have been raised with fractured yet constant media consumption. Younger DJs play for digital native audiences with fractured attention spans.

These sets often sound like a streaming algorithm set to 'random'. But if that's how audiences are consuming their music as well... And at the party, the link between an individual, their body, the music, and people around them doesn't seem to be there. Everyone alone together.

The moments that bind are not kinetic, but shared affirmations. We're all shouting these lyrics together. Of course I can relate to that experience too, but does this generation relate to a mix of songs that get into your *body* and synchronizes its movements to other humans?

Eh, if this thread isn't ignored someone will call me washed and they'll be right. Just shouting into the void like everyone else because #cornteen. Lemme go make some music instead. Shoutout to @jazzrefreshed. We have to get on the horn more often.

That doesn't mean dancing disappeared, so please, no TikToks. But dancing as a social language may be disappearing. It wasn't until I reached college that I discovered people defined "partying" as drugs and booze. When I came up, a party was music, dancing, and meeting girls.