The time between the end of the previous college basketball season and the start of the new season is always an adjustment for me. Due to the tournament format we all enjoy, the end is nearly always abrupt; usually sooner than we hope (2021) but occasionally later than we desire (2017). There can be mitigating factors that provide a longer transition - say, a coaching change - but usually the season is there until it very much isn’t. From a writing standpoint, it’s akin to applying the parking brake on the highway; my brain goes from being consumed by a thing to not having a thing at all, and like somebody opening a submarine hatch at 100m the brain goes searching for things to flood this void where I once parked every semi-random thought/desire/anxiety from September to March. This year, it was Twitch.
Since the pandemic hit and forced a lot of us to live like the world is lava, I have been working out at home. This is far from a unique phenomenon; any of you who have tried to buy exercise equipment in the prior 15 months are keenly aware of the uptick in people buying home exercise equipment. My workout of choice has been the bike trainer, in part because I like to ride bikes and in part because it was already setup so I wasn’t forced to meet a Craigslist stranger in a Plano Target parking lot to pay cocaine prices for 15 lb dumbbells that were made sometime in the early 80s. I use a program called Rouvy, which uses Bluetooth to connect to my bike trainer and control the resistance to simulate riding on open roads; it feels pretty close to the real thing with the added benefit that I’m exceedingly unlikely to be flattened by an inattentive Frisco soccer mom driving her Range Rover to Starbucks so she can yell at a beleaguered, masked barista for not using enough Splenda. It is ‘fun’, or at least as much fun as riding an outdoor bike indoors can be. Anyone familiar with Zwift, Sufferfest, or TrainerRoad programs will be familiar with this basic concept. Rouvy has a ‘career’ mode, where every October 1st they reset all their users to the bottom level and it’s up to you to progress as far as you can by September 30th of the following year. The final level is ‘legend’ which a small fraction of their users make each year, in no small part because it takes a lot of time in the saddle to get there. They have ~37,000 users and with ~3.5 months left, 0.09% have attained the level this season. I’m on track to make it with a couple of weeks to spare, not because I’m a beast but because I’ve been on the bike six days a week since roughly December. I’m well over 300 hours into this idiocy; this means I have a lot of time to kill watching TV. I’ve blitzed through entire shows (Westworld, Star Wars: Clone Wars, Mandalorian, Hip-Hop Evolution, Solar Opposites, most of Schitt’s Creek & Castlevania, the list goes on) and ponied up for streaming apps like GCN+ so I can watch other cyclists cycle much faster than me. I am an enormous maw, hoovering up content in the quest to not think about the hundreds of hours I’ve devoted to an achievement that means literally nothing to anyone other than myself. (The fiancee feigns interest because she loves me but I’m pretty sure she’s ready for me to finish this dumb goal more than I am so she doesn’t have to hear about Training Stress Scores or what fake mountain I just fake rode up on my fake bike.) At this point I’ll watch just about anything to kill time over the next 3+ months, even the 18-hour Zack Snyder Justice League movie. Which I did. It was not good.
Enter Twitch.
For those who are unaware - mostly people over the age of 40, which is probably my core demographic if I were up to the task of cataloging who reads my posts - Twitch is a video streaming platform owned by Amazon. It is similar to Youtube but places a higher priority on livestreaming than building a library of clips the size of the Andromeda galaxy. It is very popular among gamers & the Gen Z crowd but has been steadily growing out options for a litany of other niches (like people streaming from hot tubs, which is one-half thirsty women in bikinis and one-half thirsty people satirizing thirsty women in bikinis) but one niche in particular exploded when the pandemic shut down the world: DJs. What was once a place mostly for smaller DJs became home to some of the biggest names on the planet looking for ways to fill in income gaps brought about by a virus which wiped out international travel, night clubs, and everything else that makes their livelihood viable. Suddenly, world-famous DJs who you might be lucky to see once every couple of years were playing in your living room 2-4 times a week and at all hours of the day. This worked in its makeshift way; fans could subscribe and tip their favorite DJs and the DJs could continue to eat. Some of them are clearly making a decent amount of money as they’re still streaming while the world opens up for gigs again. The big names aren’t who I am focused on though.
There is a record label based out of Florida which is well-known in its subgenre of dance music but probably not that well-known outside of it; it is run by a guy who has been making tracks for decades and is also fairly well-known in his genre but not what you would call a household name among DJs & producers. He’s a solid producer - I own several of his tracks - but the more relevant point is that he is incredibly prodigious; a quick scan of Beatport shows he has over 700 tracks & remixes to his name and that’s just what he’s released. He also makes bootlegs which show up on his own site, I feel fairly comfortable saying he’s made or remixed at least 1,000 tracks. He is a machine. I am not mentioning his name for reasons that will become clear shortly. In fact, going forward there are going to be a lot of people I won’t be naming; I promise it will make sense. Let’s call this guy Label Owner (LO); LO has a Twitch channel with a following that makes sense for his level of fame, and the stream is on 2-3 days a week for a few hours at a time. LO is a primary character on the stream; he is generally friendly in chat and plays a variety of tracks from a variety of people including himself, it’s pretty standard DJ fare. He has friends who also show up on the channel regularly, most (if not all) also Florida residents. One of those friends is a relatively recent addition to the DJ rotation, we will call him DJ M.
I am obsessed with DJ M.
DJ M is a normal-looking guy, he dresses like a former b-boy who got a real job and has a mortgage but still loves the wristbands, and he can probably pop & lock better than 95% of the 40-somethings in the US. He exudes the energy of a Peloton instructor when he DJs, dancing along and singing to the lyrics like a guy 20 years his junior. The energy is infectious, I am 1000% sure he is more popular at every party than I have been at any party. I’d rather hang out with him than me if I were anyone else or me; he seems fun! None of this is super-unique, even if he does push the personal energy to 11 from the first beat to the last. The abnormality is something else entirely.
I have been in and around the DJ scene for (dear god) about 23 years now; I have watched & listened to DJs play tunes for countless hours over the years, and when I work there’s usually a mix on in the background. It is a constant in my life, and as such I’ve become accustomed to the various rythms and cadences of DJing. There are variations by genre and DJ, but overall there is a flow to things that is recognizable and expected, and when something comes along that is out of sync with that flow you notice…that is where DJ M comes in. See the thing is not that he’s a bad DJ (he’s pretty good!) or that he’s doing something from a technical standpoint that’s way out of the norm; it’s that he plays tunes by LO.
Only tunes by LO.
Ever.
I’ve been trying to come up with an analogy that explains just how specifically weird this is to the outside world and this is the best I can do: imagine you’re a person who goes out to bars with live bands a ton and you hear live music enough that they blur together a bit after awhile. Now imagine you walk into a bar one night and hear a local band playing “Susie Q” by the Rolling Stones. You like the tune well enough, nod along, and grab a beer. By the time you get your drink this local band is onto “Under My Thumb” by the Rolling Stones, which is fine. You talk to your date for a few minutes and during that time the band plays “Ruby Tuesday”, “Sympathy for the Devil”, and is nearly through “Sister Morphine”. They’re not a cover band, you’ve seen their name around town…so it’s a little weird but they play the songs well so you go along with it. The band launches into “Don’t You Lie to Me” and you start looking around to see if you’re the only one who notices what’s going on. The posters on the wall make no mention of tonight being a Rolling Stones tribute night, the band isn’t dressed up like the Stones, their band name isn’t a Rolling Stones pun. Nothing about this appears to be intentional, they just keep playing Rolling Stones songs back to back to back. Now imagine you see this band out 3-4 times in a row and it’s the same thing each time, but neither they nor the bars say they’re a Stones cover band and nobody in the crowd thinks anything of it. Nobody is wearing Stones gear or making Mick Jagger lips, nothing. At a certain point, you start wanting to drop in on their upcoming shows to see if they’re playing a Stones song when you walk in, right? WELCOME TO MY REALITY.
I have watched DJ M play at least 4 sets over the course in the last 5 weeks for a sum total of probably 5 hours and every. single. track. is a LO track, bootleg, or remix. I have watched him play at least - at least - 70 tracks and it never fails. His screen shows both the track name and the waveform of the MP3s he’s playing so I can see the tunes he’s loading before they come on and he doesn’t even hesitate, it’s another LO track. Even LO does not do this, and to the best of my knowledge DJ M is neither related to or an indentured servant of LO. DJ M hasn’t so much as sniffed a track by another producer. I’ve tried tuning in at different times, watching an hour at a time, randomly checking in later in the set between Netflix shows, he’s as consistent as the atomic clock. I wish I could program a bot to catalog his track selections so I could keep a running tally.
This is every set with DJ M, and I cannot stop thinking about it. Is this a bit? Is LO in on it? Are they trying to set some obscure Guiness World Record I’m unaware of? Am I the only person who knows what’s happening? Do all of the channel regulars know that this is his thing, that he’s been this way for years and they’re just used to it? I need answers and I’m fascinated by this, to the point I don’t want to tell anyone who he is because I don’t want to risk word getting back to him and he starts playing other producers due to some externally-derived shame he has not earned simply because he’s playing tracks he loves. This is why he and everyone involved aren’t being named, it’s a science experiment and it needs to remain pure. I have told two people about this and I may cut off all contact with them if they fuck this up for me, which will be awkward because I’m marrying one of them but I’m more invested in this situation than I can possibly explain. I have rearranged workouts to watch this guy, I will linger near the bike trainer I’ve sat on for 300+ hours for an extra 20 minutes each set just reading the track titles and cackling like an insane person. The fiancee will hear me laughing my head off from two rooms away and not even need to ask, she knows how much this means to me. I am descending into madness but it’s a benign madness, the electricity bill is still getting paid.
I don’t know how long this experiment will run but I know I’ll be watching every week until either he plays a track by somebody else or I get sent off to live somewhere with no internet access. What I do know is every time he plays another LO track I celebrate like baseball fans watching a pitcher get another out in the 9th inning of a perfect game. If he ever plays a track by somebody else, I’m not sure how I’ll react. Part of me never wants to find out.
But I will tell you who he is.
Hey—it’s the next evolution from lawn tractor racing. ;)