I was reading a post recently on social media where the author confidently proclaimed that there are exactly two types of DJs in the world: the ego-driven, and the music-driven.
It was presented as a profound revelation. A nice, clean, binary way to categorise why people stand in front of a crowd and play records.
It is also entirely reductionist.
People are just people, and some of those people happen to DJ. The reasons they do it are as varied, complex, and contradictory as human personalities themselves. But we live in an era that is absolutely obsessed with labels. We have an overwhelming, desperate need to put everything into a neat little box so we don’t have to think too hard about the nuance.
Somewhere along the line, the electronic music scene forgot that “DJing” is a verb. It is an action. It is something you do. Instead, society turned it into a noun. It became an identity. You no longer mix tracks together; you are a DJ.
And once you let an action become your identity, you have walked right into a psychological trap.
The Action Came First
Long before I ever knew what the label meant, I was just the teenager who would turn up to a party with a massive box of CDs and immediately take over the stereo.
I did this for years. I was constantly looking for ways to speed up the cumbersome process of going from one track to another, desperately trying to keep the energy in the room alive. Eventually, I discovered the mixer. And eventually, I realised that what I was doing actually had a name. It was called DJing.
I never ‘wanted’ to be a DJ. I simply enjoyed mixing and sharing music, and the noun was just assigned to me after the fact.
Now, I am sure there are people getting into it today who desperately want the identity first, and the music comes second. When I used to work in a music store, I would regularly have kids come in to buy decks and ask me, “What kind of music should I play?”
To my mind, that should be completely self-evident. If you don’t have music you are desperate to share, why are you buying the gear? But I also have to acknowledge that people get into this scene for entirely different reasons, and being baffled by that is just me projecting my own values onto them. People are complex, and their motivations rarely fit into a neat, binary social media post.
The Beard Appreciation Society
I know exactly how this identity trap works because I have fallen into it multiple times outside of music.
Years ago, I ran a group called the ‘Beard Appreciation Society’. The origins of how and why that group started are a whole other story for another day, but it grew quickly.
One day, it hit me. I had undergone a subtle but massive linguistic shift. I had gone from being “a guy who happens to have a beard” to being “a bearded man.” Eventually, I was just “the beard guy.”
People actually started telling me that I would never be able to shave it off, because the beard was what I was known for. It was my brand. It was my identity. If I picked up a razor, I would somehow be betraying the core of who I was.
Ironically, in that exact same way, you could have called me the “gun guy” at one point. You could have called me the “turntable guy” because I was regularly servicing and repairing Technics 1200s for a while. You could have called me the “Land Rover guy” because I proudly owned and wrenched on a Defender.
But all of those things were just activities I engaged in, or objects I owned. None of them defined who I was as an individual. When you allow a hobby, a profession, or an aesthetic to define your entire persona, you strip away your own complexity.
Blaming the Noun
This brings us back to the DJ booth, and that social media post desperately trying to divide the scene into “ego” and “music” camps.
When you see a guy standing on top of the CDJs, waving his hands in the air, stopping the music to scream into a microphone, and demanding the crowd look at him, he isn’t doing that simply because “DJs are performative.”
He might be doing that because he is an egotistical person. He might be narcissistic. He might be desperately trying to compensate for a lack of love from his parents. Or, conversely, he might genuinely be so driven to share his love of music that he mistakenly thinks he needs to “act” a certain way just to draw people in.
How would we know without knowing the actual person behind what we see in the booth?
By categorising this as a “type of DJ,” we are giving the individual a free pass. We are blaming the noun. We attribute the obnoxious behaviour to the label, rather than holding the actual human being accountable for acting like an idiot.
Instead of saying, “All these modern DJs are so performative and doing it for the ego,” why don’t we just say, “That specific individual seems to be highly egotistical”?
Are we afraid of naming names? Do we hide behind sweeping generalisations about the culture because we are too cowardly to call out the specific person standing in front of us?
The Panic of “What Remains?”
If you want to survive a long time in any creative industry, you have to protect your baseline identity.
I know how terrifying this trap is because it took me four years of weekly therapy to realise I was caught in it. I was so tightly woven into the persona I had built around myself that when it was first suggested that the persona wasn’t the ‘real’ me, I panicked.
If that wasn’t me, then who was I? If I am not what I do, what remains?
I fully acknowledge that for many people, DJing isn’t just a weekend hobby; it is a legitimate, full-time profession. It pays the mortgage. But that reality actually makes the identity trap even more dangerous.
If you define your entire self-worth by the noun—if you are a DJ, or you are a Producer—what happens when the gigs dry up? What happens when the industry shifts, or your ears need a break and you don’t step into the studio for six months? If your identity is tied entirely to your professional output, a creative dry spell doesn’t just feel like a loss of income; it feels like an existential crisis. You feel like you are ceasing to exist.
I make music. I mix records. I plug patch cables into modular synthesisers. I enjoy doing all of those things. But they are just verbs. They are actions I choose to take when I walk into the room, and actions I leave behind when I walk out.
The moment you realise you are just a person who occasionally engages in an action—whether for a paycheck or for fun—the pressure vanishes. You don’t have to conform to a specific “type.” You can just play the music.