Givin’ You More of
What You’re Funkin’ For:
DJs and the Internet
Elizabeth F. Churchill
Yahoo! Research | churchill@acm.org
What do British neurologist
Oliver Sacks and George Clinton,
one of the godfathers of funk,
have in common?
They both believe in the fundamental importance of music
to humans.
Sacks believes that humans
are neurologically wired for
sound and tells us that music
occupies more areas of our brain
than language does. In other
words, humans are a musical
species. Movement to a beat is
apparently exclusively human;
despite their complex communicative abilities and rich social
organization, apes and chimps
are not going to set up discos
anytime soon.
George Clinton is associated
with the force of funk and its
potential for cultural healing. In
1970 he and Funkadelic released
a vinyl masterpiece that calls for
“One Nation Under a Groove.”
That said, I have been known
to wish harm and maiming upon
neighbors who play death metal
at three in the morning.
Designers, filmmakers, and
marketers know all about the
emotional power of music. Music
sets the psychological and affective tone for scenes in films.
Music can motivate and deflate.
It can get you running faster on
a treadmill, and when combined
with monitoring technologies
(as with the brilliant Nike shoes
plus iPod combination), it can literally change the way you relate
to your body. Equally, a dirge can
suck the life out of you. Music
can make you cry when a long-forgotten bittersweet memory is
pricked. Given we are wired for
music, it is not surprising that
tiny children bop around to anything with a beat.
Interior designers routinely
employ music for social-engi-neering purposes: to make us
hurry up a meal, shop longer in
the mall, or pump more iron.
Most dramatically, the playing
of classical music apparently
correlates with a reduction of
hooliganism in railway stations
and bus terminals—although
at the other end of the spectrum, Stanley Kubrick’s film “A
Clockwork Orange,” famously
coupled Beethoven with scenes
of ultra-violence.
The effect of music is not
all unconscious, visceral, or
neurological. Like Clinton, cultural theorist Theodor Adorno
believed that music can foster
critical and political consciousness because it can challenge
assumptions and normal ways
of thinking (clearly Adorno did
not listen to most pop lyrics,
which are anything but revo-
lutionary). For adolescents and
for “grups,” those grown-ups
who can’t quite admit they are
no longer 18, or as the New York
Times described this demographic, “hipsters who breed,” the
music you like is a sign of cool—
a sign that you have a finger on
the cultural pulse.
Perhaps the people who know
most about music and its cultural and social power are DJs. The
craft of the DJ as human jukebox
has evolved over the course of
decades. DJs have been selecting and playing music for mood
since the beginning of radio, but
they’ve evolved into musicians
and performers who create new
genres of music and new forms
of musical performance.
According to the DJ History
website ( www.djhistory.co.uk),
the first in-person, live, at-the-venue DJs were folks who
entertained the troops in W WII.
Although perhaps some were
known for their personalities,
these DJs were not stars like the
DJs we know today—DJ Shadow,
Chris Cox, Sasha and John
Digweed, Armin van Buuren, or
Tiësto. In terms of these modern
DJs, consensus has it that the
cult of the DJ as artist-performer
started in the 1970s with a guy
called Francis Grasso. Grasso
was the first to use headphones,