Why the hell do I want to do this?

 

 In this day and age, literally everyone and their mother is a DJ. I always used to joke that Denver was a city of 3 million people, and 4 million of em were DJs. I got jokes, ha.

Why do we do the creative thing? A lot of people would probably say that if your end goal isn't to get famous, there's no point. It's a lot of money, time, energy and other resources that tends to see very little return in the beginning. And most of the returns it gets are difficult to quantify- experiences, friendships, emotions- things of that nature.

But hey, maybe that's the point? Things like this tend to fall under the umbrella of "community" or "self development" - things we don't get in our usual day-to-day life, as they don't really benefit the capitalist system. Things everyone seems to lament the loss of since the Plague, which really feels like it was the turning point where the physical world was truly replaced by the digital.

 

Can we turn back time and bring back the physical world in the same way? Absolutely not. But in the same way that music changes formats from records to cassettes to CDs, we can change the delivery method for how music provides community, connection, fulfillment and development. 

A big part of why I'm in it is also because of the development I've seen in myself as an artist.  Looking back at my first tracks (I think 18 months was when I felt I was good enough to start posting my DJ mixes/remixes on Soundcloud, circa 2016) I feel like they're really cheesy and overproduced. But there's still a lot of my older songs that people listen to on repeat and tell me how much they love, even if they're not my favorite works I've ever done. 

But that's part of the contradiction of being an artist: Your favorite works and your audience's favorite works rarely line up. And that's okay! Great, even! Art is subjective and you should take pride in knowing your fanbase is able to come to their own conclusions on your oeuvre. Better to have a group of independent thinkers who can casually contradict you than to be a dictator to the easily manipulated. Dictators tend to be weak on staying power once their reign of terror is over.

 Above all else, an artist must be a walking contradiction: An idiot and a genius, a bodhisattva and a douche,  pure as the driven snow yet the filthiest of degenerates. Confused? Good. That's where the magic starts to happen.