Whether you've realized it or not, many of the disc jockeys at the dance parties, formals and other social events who have been helping you get your groove on are actually Dartmouth students who have invested time and money into the art and equipment of DJing. Many fraternities have house DJs -- brothers in the house who pay their social dues by DJing for their parties.
Some Dartmouth DJs arrived on campus with no training and fell into the DJ profession head first with no safety net to catch them. Abdallah Chammas '07, known as DJ Boots, is a student at the Thayer School of Engineering and brother at Trikap. He recalls his first night DJing for the frat when the brothers merely gave him the necessary equipment and wished the then-inexperienced sophomore luck.
"I think one of the best ways to learn is swimming in the deep end," said Chammas. "I was scared shitless my first party. That fear pushes you to learn and succeed."
Many students, however, came to Dartmouth with prior experience, having DJed in high school either casually or for small gigs.
"Even when I was looking at schools, I wanted one with a prevalent party scene," said Timothy Chingos '08, a.k.a DJ Liquid Courage, who started DJing in his sophomore year of high school for high school parties, house gigs and bowling alleys. Chingos is a brother at Tabard and often DJs for his house and Sigma Delt.
The relationship between the Greek life and DJs is obviously a symbiotic one, with Greek houses gaining just as much if not more from the hiring of on campus DJs.
"If you get a DJ that's popular on campus, people are going to come to solely see them," said Erin Leavitt '08, the social chair of Epsilon Kappa Theta, which has been hiring DJ Boots for the past few terms. "You also know what to expect."
However, not every Greek society needs a DJ to keep the party alive. Sig Nu only uses a DJ for its Martin Luther King Jr. party, which is run in collaboration with the Afro-American Society. While Kyle Lad '09, Sig Nu's social chair, admits that having a DJ "lends a more professional, classy" air to a party, he says Sig Nu has been doing fine without one.
"The deal is for most of our playlists...the music doesn't really change so it's really fine if we have a brother running DJ software," said Lad.
Sig Nu seems to be more the exception than the norm because on-campus DJs have found no shortage of opportunity to showcase their skills. Yet, being able to take advantage of those opportunities is a challenge in itself.
"My freshmen year, I only played at SAE once or twice because my UGA was in SAE, so he kind of hooked me up with their social chair, but it's harder when you don't know people in the frat scene," said Mike Selvin '07, a brother at Psi U.
Chris Bachand Parente '11 finds himself at that stage now, but DJ-ing at gigs like a dorm party for friends, the Class of 2011 sports-themed dance party and the Mr. and Mrs. Big Green competition has already helped him make a name for himself among his class.
"I've been completely surprised with what I've been able to do so far," said Bachand Parente, but he hopes to eventually move on to frat parties and bigger parties in general, which requires developing a relationship with the Greek houses.
Even though the "party like a rock star" attitude of many Dartmouth students does provide a consistent job supply for on campus DJs, the social environment is far from ideal and not exactly the jackpot one would think they have hit.
"At Dartmouth, you have to play just the most popular, top-40 hip-hop -- and not even the newest hip-hop stuff -- that's been out four to six months, and that's what people like," said Selvin. "If you try to play anything too different or obscure or new, people don't tend to respond so well to it."
The frat dance parties are more of bump 'n' grind scene than an actual music scene, preventing DJs from exploring and developing their talent in genres they're interested in, like house, techno, electronica and trance. Instead, DJs are restricted to playing suitable soundtracks for heavy petting and the act of having sex against a wall while fully clothed in a crowded room (often mistakenly believed to be a type of dancing).
Ruslan Tovbulatov '09, known as DJ Rush and the house DJ for Chi Gam, remembers speaking with Girl Talk, a famous music producer and DJ, when he came to Dartmouth last year about the College's scene. "He said if he went to any frat and tried to start DJing, everyone would basically just leave because people don't want to go to a dance party and have a ridiculous dance party with remixes they've never heard; it's just too much for them to handle," said Tovbulatov. "He's a DJ obviously all over the place, and when he said that, it was just so funny to me because that's exactly how it is at Dartmouth for me."
"It makes it tough to stay passionate about it [DJing] because you're just playing the same music," said Eric Bushlow '09, a brother at Alpha Chi whose stage name is DJ Irec. "It kills the movement of the music when you have to play something over and over and over."
"The DJs I tend to respect are the ones that stay true to their style," said Bushlow, who often DJs for for La Unidad Latina, Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, Native Americans at Dartmouth and other minority organizations.
"I think at a college in a city where there's a bit more cosmopolitan and bit more access or a bit more open-mindedness to different kinds of music with more of a city scene, I think I probably would have been able to develop the sound that I really want more there because I could have played that kind of stuff for people and tested it out more," said Selvin. "But just the quantity of parties at Dartmouth, you know there's one every weekend, helped in that it got me really comfortable playing in front of different kinds of crowds, different kinds of people."
There's a large difference between being responsible for keeping a party going and actually partying. The job requires moving equipment, setting up, playlist preparation and staying from the first song when the dance floor is void of human life to the last song in the early morning hours. DJs also have to deal with partygoers spilling drinks on expensive equipment and accidentally pulling out cords, as well as blown fuses and equipment failure.
"It's a tough job," says Chammas. "Everyone's wasted, having fun; you're putting in work."
Even if you can survive the mishaps, that doesn't necessarily promote you to the rank of a good DJ. According to Bushlow, you "need to have your own style, your own method if mixing music, and need to be unique in presenting your music."
"As a DJ, if you can minimize that awkward standing-around time, that's what I consider the definition of a good DJ," says Chingos.
"I think a large part of it is just having a huge music collection and every version of a song that's imaginable because you'll get requests for really random songs at times," says Tovbulatov. "Being the best DJ honestly at Dartmouth is having what people want and if they ask for a song, putting it on... That can also get very annoying. There are some very belligerent people that put in requests."
Requests are especially hard to satisfy when they can be as nonsensical as wanting to hear Springsteen at Tabard's Disco Inferno party, a request that Chingos wisely ignored, or European techno and Coldplay in the middle of a hip-hop dance party, which Bushlow unsurprisingly decided not to play.
Despite the difficulties, DJing can be a highly rewarding experience, and many find their best nights at Dartmouth are the ones on stage behind the turntables.
"I really have a great time up there," says Tovbulatov. "I love controlling the tempo of a party. I love just showing other people a good time."
Though the on-campus DJs express a profound love for the craft, none were certain about pursuing it as a career. Chammas cited responsibility to his family to make use of his Ivy League education and master's degree as a reason for not DJing as a career, and others talked of the difficulty of DJing professionally in a city setting.
"I don't think I could make a sustainable career out of it," said Bachand Parente. "It would be awesome if I could."
"When the music you spin dies, it's tough," says Chingos, who plans to go into marketing, sales or public relations. "It's one of those starving artist careers."
Selvin, however, who is already out of the Dartmouth bubble and in the working world, has been making mix tapes and sending them out while working at a music management agency. Living outside of New York City, he hopes to make contacts through work and get his music into clubs in the city soon.
Regardless of the difficulties of pursuing DJing professionally, many of the DJs plan to keep up with it at least on the side.
"Depending on what industry I'm in, I'm sure I'm always going to be doing it as a hobby," said Tovbulatov. "I love music. I'll probably be doing it in some form or another even if it is just as a hobby or for myself."
