Does Anyone Actually Like DJ's?

Was out Saturday night with MBB and a local bar. Not a dance club mind you, just a regular bar. After about an hour or so of being there, a female DJ came in and set up shop. It seems increasingly commong for bars to have DJs on the weekend at a time when I would argue they are increasingly irrelevant. I understand having a DJ at a dance club. The idea is to get people dancing. The more they dance, the more they drink. The more girls dance, the more guys hang around to watch and the more they drink. You could argue that a DJ serves a reasonable purpose in a dance club. They take requests and, to a certain degree, should be good enough to gauge the tenor of the crowd and do what's needed to shape the atmosphere.

However, I simply can't understand the role of a DJ in a regular bar where people are generally sitting, drinking, and talking. Background music is okay and in most of today's bars they have satellite or internet radio feeds so they can get continuous music of a certain genre or eclectic mix. This seems perfectly reasonable. You get a great mix of music, no commercials, low cost, etc. It seems perfectly suited to a simply bar atmosphere.

To have a DJ at a place like this makes no sense to me. More aggravating is the fact that the work of a DJ in this situation seems mostly about affectation. There's a lot of posing and physical busy-work to imply that something requiring expertise is going on. First of all the DJ arrives with his/her platters of vinyl because, as any serious audiophile knows, vinyl is for purists (even if you are piping it through the bar's crappy PA system). They also all have this annoying habit of wearing headphones with one side resting above or behing their ear, ostensibly so they can hear requests or talk to the folks at the bar if need be. But I'm not sure why they need headphones at all. My guess is that they would say it's so they can fine tune the mix or hear the results of their little tricks like scratching the LP. But if they need headphones to hear this, then is it really even audible to the bar patrons? And if it is not noticeable to the supposed audience, then are these things done just for the personal amusement of the DJ?

It all just seems a little too self-important to me. On Saturday, the DJ was dancing behind the turntables. Apparently, she was quite moved by her selections, even if no one else in the bar seemed to notice. As MBB and I observed, with today's technology you could do everything she was doing using the shuffle mode on an iPod or creating a random mix on an external hard drive. Come in, plug in the iPod, and leave. There's just no need for a DJ anymore. And their affectations are annoying as hell.

I think the real need for DJs, especially in faux hipster areas like Tremont in Cleveland, or similar areas in other cities, is to give all these 20-somethings would like to think of themselves as creative something to do for a living. Otherwise, they'd be living with their parents. Areas like Tremont are full of people who call themselves "artists" for one reason or another, usually as a way to hang out, live a bohemian lifestyle, and make enough money to overpay for coffee. To each his own and if music is your life and you love listening to it and talking about it, that's great. But don't set up a couple of turntables in a bar and act all cool with yourself as if what you're doing takes some kind of special knowledge and you're really making or breaking the bar's success. Please. People are there to drink, talk, and flirt. A radio will suffice.