DJ Reborn
Interviewed for Riffin' by Webjockey Heidi Patalano
Check out DJ Reborn’s Rifflist: Timeless
DJ Reborn takes her chosen DJ moniker seriously. Whether reinventing her DJ sets opening for the likes of Common and India Arie. or DJing for Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam, or acting as the musical director for the hit play "Flow" or teaching kids how to DJ at New York City's Dubspot, DJ Reborn has taken her career from one height to the next in consistently unique reincarnations. Riffin' chats with DJ Reborn on her life's work and why she won't be playing "Jingle Bells" at the Donna Karan Christmas party.
Riffin': So you've just come from a DJ class that you're teaching. How did it go?
DJ Reborn: It went pretty well. I teach at a DJing and music production school called Dubspot. There was a group of twelve kids coming in this morning to do a basic DJing thing. It was cool. It can be a little bit hectic when you're working with that many young people at once and everybody's scratching their little hearts out and it sounds like a cacophonous symphony of epic proportions that's too much at 10 AM but fine, too.
Riffin': You're teaching them the basics, starting from scratch (pun kind of intended)?
DJ Reborn: I love puns. You'll probably hear at least four of them in this conversation. In this setting, we start people off with getting them familiar with the equipment, where their hands should be on the record, giving them the basics.
Riffin': What do you think is one of the hardest things for your students to get when you're teaching them about DJing?
DJ Reborn: It's interesting because every student is different. For some people, a lot of the components of DJing come very naturally. For some people it's something as seemingly simple as where their hands should be on the record. For other people, it's how to count. For others it's dropping on the one and making sure the beats are matching up.
It's like any learning environment where you have varying degrees of how people are grasping the information that you're giving and you're hoping that for the most part everyone is on the same page. There are so many things that could make people feel like it's not doable when actually it's pretty simple. It's great to be able to impart foundational information that I wish would've been given to me when I first started. What we're able to give them in four weeks took me two years to learn on my own.
Riffin': How did you get into DJing?
DJ Reborn: I became fascinated with how DJs were able to transform spaces with what they did sonically. I was like, that's really fresh. I can't believe that they can mix this song into that song and make people respond in a really visceral way to what they were doing. I always think of DJing as you're working with sound objects, found art and you're collaging it in your own way. I always call it sonic architecture. I got interested in that. I thought they way they did it was so beautiful. I had no idea that it would become my life's work.
Riffin': You're also involved in Ubiquita, a DJ collective dedicated to spinning eclectic urban dance. Since Ubiquita is a collective of three female DJ's including you and DJs Selly and Moni, I'm wondering if this is reaction to a male-dominated field.
DJ Reborn: Kim Knoxx and DeShawn Maxwell are the promoters and the founders of Ubiquita. I don't know how much of a reaction it was to anything. I think they initially wanted to have female DJs because it was a great concept. They knew enough women that they felt could hold down a residency. There are actually thousands of female DJs. There's a web site called shejay.net It lists thousands and thousands of female DJs from all around the globe, the kind of music they play. It's a great resource and brings into focus how omnipresent we are even though it seems like we're so marginalized.
Riffin': You've DJed for parties and opening performances for the likes of The Roots, Lauryn Hill and Talib Kweli. How do you go about choosing your set list for each of these performances?
DJ Reborn: I definitely think about the artist first. I haven't opened anybody in terms of a show since we did John Legend. I think about the artist and who I believe their audience to be. [Opening for] The Roots was the first really big thing for me, when I got asked to open before their show - for me it was a really huge deal. They were one of my favorite groups. I try to think of them in terms of their influences and the fact that they are heavy on the live instrumentation in addition to it being hip-hop based. Plus, my own love of whatever I'm listening to at the time. Whatever I think that people wouldn't expect to hear. All of those things get thrown into the pot.
Earlier in my career I wasn't as meticulous in my planning. I believe in there being an organic element to what you're doing. You can never know exactly what you're going to play, song for song, until you get there. Tomorrow I'm spinning for Donna Karan and maybe it's not the most eclectic crowd in the world but there will be some savvy people there and my goal is to play a little bit of everything. I was planning part of it since last week and then the other 50 percent I'll take their cues.
That's one of the hardest responsibilities as a DJ — being humble enough to take yourself out of it and not just be a DJ that plays only what you love. There's a fine line between the integrity of you as a musical performer and being able to read your crowd and being sensitive to what they're feeling in that moment. You have to be flexible enough to adjust yourself.
Riffin': So this is a Donna Karan Christmas party. Will you be playing Christmas tunes?
DJ Reborn: I have some prepared and if I feel that there's a way to fit it in - some Christmas songs are fin to play. There's the Run DMC's "Christmas in Hollis" which is a cute, funny, kitschy holiday song. I try to play Christmas songs that are good or soulful but not necessarily any old Christmas song. To me, that's not as important as playing good music all night long.
Riffin': Where do you find new music?
DJ Reborn: Having other DJ friends is really invaluable because they're great resources. Myspace is a really great source for finding artists I might not have heard of. There's a great radio show that I love that's actually in L.A. called "Chocolate City" with Trinidad. He's awesome. I love what he puts on his shows. I just search around the Internet. I listen to what my peers are playing. Living in New York, there's such a vast array of seriously talented musical artists that are local. It can be a challenge to keep it fresh. It's like my name. How can I keep this fresh? How can I feel this sense of constant renewal?
Riffin': I heard you use a Serato, which can allow you to scratch and mix digital files. How has that technology changed the game?
DJ Reborn: With Serato, I still use turntables. I don't have to but I prefer it. One of the things that makes Serato appealing for someone like me, as a vinyl purist, is that you still are using vinyl but the technology allows you to access everything on your iTunes and your hard drive. The manipulation is exactly the same. You can still scratch and mix and cut with vinyl, except that there's a visual component to it and there's all sorts of visual cues that make my life easier. If you're a technically proficient DJ, then Serato just expands your ability in terms of being able to do instant looping on the track at any given point. Also, you're not limited to what you're carrying, literally.
Riffin': How do you think the club and bar scene has changed in New York in the last ten years?
DJ Reborn: I'm sure you've been a part of these conversations too, where people feel like the energy of New York has been diminished so greatly over the last decade especially in terms of club settings and accessibility to different kinds of music. I've lived in New York for eight years now but before I moved here, I came out to DJ a few times.
One of the things that made me want to move to New York was being inspired by feeling like there were no limits to what I could play as a DJ and what people would respond to. Over the course of the last eight years that I've lived here, I've really felt that switch up. Everywhere you go in the country, it's so mainstream. The ability for people be open enough to listen to a whole DJ set, has been diminished to "Can I hear that new Snoop song?" Part of the reason why I came to pursue DJing full time was that it this was a wide open canvas of possibility. As a DJ that's exciting because if your audience trusts you enough, you can go everywhere musically because they trust your choices. I feel like people are a lot more shut down.
As far as club culture in New York City and people's ears, I feel people's ability to hear different things is so narrow now. One of the things that's happened in the last decade is the whole thing with conglomerates owning radio stations. No matter what city you go to in the country, it's Power this, Hot this, the place where hip hop lives. It literally doesn't matter where you are. It didn't used to be like that.
Now that you have a music industry that's pushing major artists and you hear the same ten songs on the radio every day for months, that has really dumbed people down to a certain degree. After a while, everyone's on the same page but that page isn't turning. It's something that's happening across the country but New York is supposed to be setting the curve for what's going on and I feel like New York is in a phase of following and not leading.
Riffin': Are you working on any projects now?
DJ Reborn: 2007 was a great year but it was a bit distracting. I've been saying that there are a few things that I absolutely have to do - in addition to teaching at Dubspot, I have a class specifically and I'm going to continue to do those things. I have a goal of writing a play about female DJs whose stories are woven together through the DJing. There's a coffee table book I want to do about female DJs in their environment and a documentary.
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