COLUMN: Basement DJing

Well, it's official. I'm a celebrity. 

The guy who writes silly columns for the paper? Check. The dude who spins records for people half his age on the weekends? Check. The occasional fill-in clerk behind the counter at your favorite record store? You betcha. And now I can officially tack one more thing onto my resume: SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER EXTRAORDINAIRE.

That's right, at 7:05 p.m. on Monday night, I officially became one of the cool kids. I went live on TikTok for exactly seventeen minutes. And it was every bit as awkward and anti-climactic as you'd expect.

It all started during the COVID lockdowns. Nightclubs were closed and DJs were bored. Instead of taking extended vacations from the wheels of steel, many DJs instead turned to social media and streaming platforms. All it takes is a webcam and some streaming software, and you could suddenly be bringing the party into the homes of countless strangers tuning in. Watching online DJs helped keep me sane during the pandemic, and the fad hasn't stopped.

If you log on to TikTok right now, there's probably over a hundred different DJs broadcasting right now. For the past half hour, I've been watching a guy in Hawaii live-streaming from a beachfront DJ booth. A quick scroll and now it's a girl blaring house music from what I think is downtown Kuala Lumpur. Swipe up and now it's a guy playing records to himself in a musty basement. One more swipe and it's a kid spinning ear-shattering EDM music in a tiny bedroom equipped with about 3.7 nightclubs worth of DJ lighting and lasers.

Is it ridiculous? Absolutely. Is TikTok an app made for people half my age or younger? Definitely. Was I super jealous of all these streaming DJs and did I secretly want to be one? Most certainly. Look, I'm a realist. I have no fancy lighting. Lasers would traumatize my cats. Some of these DJs look like Swedish supermodels and I look more like a Swedish meatball twenty years past his prime. But I'm not half bad at mixing records together. And I quickly discovered there's a niche group of old DJs like me who stream vintage and classic jams from back in the day, and they get a decent audience of viewers. I think I wanna join this party.

I had that thought about a year and a half ago. That's how long it's taken me to slowly gather the necessary equipment to livestream. Remember above when I said "all it takes is a webcam and some streaming software"? I forgot to mention you also need a digital interface, about six different adapters, multiple computers, hard-wired ethernet, and a whole lot of patience. 

Thankfully, I never have a shortage of nerdy tech friends to help with this sort of thing, and they're used to receiving texts from me like, "Hey, do you have one of those thingamajigs that mounts an audio doohicky to your phone?" One of my friends got so sick of my many questions that he stopped by, dumped a box of gear at my door, said I owed him fifty bucks, and said, "you're all set." My basement now looks like a Fisher-Price version of Baby's First Television Studio. There are cables and lines running across the floor. There are multiple tripods. I even have one of those ridiculous ring lights down there for enhanced portraiture of my pretty face -- so if DJing doesn't work out, I have all the gear necessary to start filming makeup tutorials or showing off my graceful choreography skills.

And so it was that last night, after a year of thinking about it, watching WAY too many tutorial videos, and slowly assembling all the necessary equipment, I gave live-streaming a quick test run. I thought it'd be fun. It was mostly just nerve-wracking.

How do our children film themselves every day without a care in the world? As I sat there watching the timer count down to my first livestream, I had about EVERY care in the world. I HAD ALL OF THE CARES. "Whoa, lookit me on that screen. I'm super old and fat and ugly! Gross. Do my arms look weird? How am I supposed to hold my arms? Are arms supposed to bend like that? Does this look too casual? Not casual enough? Is it too loud? Too quiet? AM I FORGETTING TO BREATHE?"

It was all just a bit much. I now understand why younger generations seem prone to anxiety issues. Those were seventeen of the most anxious minutes of my life. To get over my crippling insecurities, I ended up positioning the camera so that the only things visible were my hands and the DJ controller, and I STILL felt self-conscious.

The internet is SUCH a weird place. Even though the only thing I aired was 17 minutes of a pair of hands pushing some buttons on a DJ controller, 283 strangers tuned in. They can't ALL be the Chinese government spying on me, right? Over 75 of them "liked" my livestream. One person followed me. Clearly, my hands are well on their way to becoming viral sensations. Maybe I'll score a lucrative sponsorship deal with Isotoner or something.

I'm still not sure how often I'm going to livestream, what I'll even do with it, or if I'll ever show my face. Maybe I'll try a weekly mix of vintage 80's new wave. Maybe I'll just livestream my practice sessions and play whatever I fancy. Maybe if I keep the camera pointed at my hands, I can play new jams and the kids won't realize their DJ is old enough to be their grandpa. Or maybe I'll find something more fun to do and give up my dreams of becoming a basement celebrity. Who knows for certain? I mean, other than the Chinese government, who know everything about all of us thanks to TikTok. Here's hoping they're big fans of Depeche Mode.