Underground Ethics: Honesty and Integrity in Musical Curation

How can I use this medium for "truth-telling", and who can assist me in that process?

At the second Work Ethic, I sat down on the windowsill of my bar manager Emma’s apartment, next to Erica Kane. She was thirty minutes out from playing, and I was worried because the room felt empty. “I’m excited for you to play… I think it’ll fill out soon. I want you to play to a full room.” Erica did not share my neuroses. “Doesn’t matter to me. I’m just here to play my records.” She said it not with disinterest, but with total earnestness. She was here to play records. She was here to do the same thing she might do in her own apartment at the end of the day, except tonight she was doing it in front of people, and for money.
Watching Erica, I was struck by her consistency, how little she seemed affected by the comings and goings of the dance floor. She played record after record, almost like she was playing just for herself. I wanted to play that way.
Soon after that night, I played out in a bar environment, and hoped I could employ what I had learned from Erica. I was given the opportunity in the form of an incredibly stubborn crowd. “Don’t ask god for patience, because then he’ll test your patience,”
I remembered my sponsor saying to me in my first couple months of sobriety. God and the good people of the North West Side tested my patience that night. I played cuts. I played dope fucking records and nobody was moving. I texted Thomas, panicking.
“Why the fuck is nobody moving?”
“I’m sure they will. Follow the music, not the crowd.”
They did not. Not really. I think I made ten people dance that night. But I followed the music that night, and didn’t think once about the crowd, and I played great. I got to go home with some cash in my pocket and the peace of knowing I had played with consistency and steadfastness.

When I first started DJing, I learned, as many do, about the concept of “reading the room”: the idea that as a DJ, you should be constantly observing the crowd, taking their pulse, and adjusting accordingly. But it resulted in me developing a neuroses around the music around the music I played, and resulted in me starting to think of my records in relation to how other people felt about them, and not how they related to each other musically.
A script developed in my head: When people leave the dance floor, I panic. When they come back, I do everything I can to get them to stay. I become needy and desperate, like a fearful lover who believes separation could come at the drop of a pin. And guess what: they could hear it. They may not have registered it consciously, but their basic human instinct clocked me for what I was doing: people-pleasing. I may have been well-intentioned—I often told myself, but it’s my job to help people have a good time! But I was fixated on playing what I think people want to hear, and in the process I denied myself from the pleasure of letting my records guide me. Music, like God, knows better than I ever have.

Underground music requires me to surpass my own neediness and neuroses. Organizing and playing in this environment has almost entirely flipped my approach to this craft, all in the effort of upholding what I believe to be a “covenant” between dancer and disc jock formed in underground spaces.
The agreement is as follows:
You (the dancer) show up, you pay money, you lend your time, your attention, and your body to this effort. There is real vulnerability and risk in all of this. Your time on this earth is limited. I know this intimately, because I have gone home from shitty parties pissed. I have had my entire week ruined by a couple bad hours. I understand that you are trusting me with your time, attention, and body.
In return, I tell you about myself. I tell you about where I come from. Who raised me. Where I stand with them now. I tell you about the person I love most in the world, and about the worst heartbreak I've endured. I tell you about my obsessiveness, about my anger, about my grief. I tell you about the things that bring me joy, and the things that lend me peace. You move your body in agreement. I understand, you say. For a moment, we come to know each other. We are being moved by the same record—we must share something, some point of contact, some frame of reference. And maybe we will see each other in the street the next day and simply smile and nod. Maybe that will be the end of it. But I told you something, and you listened. You told me something, and I listened. We have given each other that gift. I know you, and you know me, just a little bit. But just enough.

The decision to use this medium as an opportunity to share parts of yourself with others can give you something very different than when you “play for the room”. There is risk, of course, because there may be nights where it feels like no one is listening. But the wonderful thing about the underground is that people are showing up with the explicit intention of listening. They get to feel part of something, and you get to share a part of yourself. We do this and we show up for each because we have a mutual need for it. I have many reasons for putting on parties, but far above any other is the fact that if I do not share my life with others, my world becomes very cold and small. I cannot live like that. I need to do this to feel like a whole person. I do not know your reasons, but I have come to sense that you are like me. You need this to feel whole, like some people need church on Sunday. People need church because they need other people and something to give their life to. I need that, and you need that. We can have that, together, between those speakers.

When I ask someone to come play my party, I would like for them to feel as if they have been invited to share a part of themselves. I would like them to be radically unconcerned about how this vulnerability will be received, because both they and I should trust that the audience will receive honesty with open and loving arms.
I serve in this position as matchmaker, and the success of this marriage is as much my responsibility as it is the participants'. I am meticulous and near obsessive about the environment I’m creating, because it matters. When you do things right, you create an environment conducive to honesty, where people’s walls go down and you have the ability to speak directly to them. I make the effort of finding someone who has something to say to my audience, and in turn work to make sure my audience is full of people who want to listen. I make you text me for the address as a simple litmus test: are you willing to be vulnerable and ask someone for something? In return, I am vulnerable and trust you with a secret, and in the process, we form a small but meaningful contract of trust. It’s enough to reassure me that you want to listen, that you’ve decided to go out of your way, despite the fact that you could easily go to one of the many parties in this city with a publicly listed address. You trust me like I trust you.