Music

David Guetta essentially admitted he's a fake DJ

by Mark Teo

EDM’s naysayers—and there’s a lot of ’em out there—have often questioned the musicality of the genre. “They just get on stage and press a button,” shout the Internet’s enraged, ZOSO-tattooed rockists. “They don’t RESPECT ARTISTRY.” We usually don’t take such criticisms seriously: EDM is a dominant pop-cultural phenomenon, and its top-grossing performers take home tens of millions annually. But maybe it’s time that we should, as David Guetta—one of EDM’s biggest stars—has essentially admitted that his entire set is run off a playlist.

Or, put it this way: The French DJ does, in fact, get up on stage and press play.

In an interview with Beatport, Guetta, the world’s fourth-highest grossing DJ, explained that he narrowly skirted disaster at Coachella. After his laptop crashed, he lost his set’s playlist, meaning he had to manually select songs for his set—y’know, just like every other DJ.

“Something crazy happened to me on the [first weekend of Coachella],” says Guetta. “I’m using Rekordbox and Pioneer to play, and before I saved my playlist to my SD card, my computer crashed.”

The horror. Guetta was so disoriented by selecting, mixing, and beatmatching tracks that his set nearly had another disaster: When the Black Eyed Peas joined him onstage, he realized he didn’t have “I Gotta Feeling.” So again, he had to kick it old-school: He had to go into iTunes mid-set to download the track.

iTunes? Downloading? Guy, what century are you even living in?

“When Fergie decided to come last minute, it was like, OK, but I don’t have ‘I Gotta Feeling,’ because I don’t play it any more,” he continues. “I called my stage manager to go download ‘I Gotta Feeling’ on iTunes so I could play it. It was just completely crazy, but I loved it.”

Now that’s what we call an adrenaline rush. [H/T Consequence of Sound]