Why It's Time to Stop Sneering at Celebrity DJ Sets

There you are, wiling away another dull day on earth, flicking between three tabs and repressing a desire to nip for another cigarette, praying that something, anything, is going to arouse your interest for even a second or two. Then it happens. You notice a celebrity—a proper, cheesy celebrity at that—is doing a DJ set at the weekend. You exhale with joy. "Boy," you say to yourself in the most affectedly monotone drawl imagine, "that's hilarious. That is really funny. It's really funny that Joe Swash is DJing at an under-18s night in Colchester at the weekend. That's hilarious."

But you're not laughing because deep down you're infuriated by it, disgusted at the thought that Anthony Costa makes more a year from DJing than Lena Willikens or Palms Trax. You're sat there, fuming, nigh on apoplectic with rage about the sheer fucking injustice of it all. "But," you stammer, tears rolling down your rosy red cheeks, "they aren't real DJs! This is a mockery of the artform!" It isn't. Because get this: celebrity DJ sets are actually…fine.

There's two kinds of celebrity DJ set: you've got your standard former-somebody playing a Ministry of Sound compilation in a club located next to a Greggs, and your Kendall Jenner's DJing at Coachella. In essence, both are the same, but strangely, it's the latter that seems to wind people up. In fact, the rumor Kylie Jenner was about to launch a DJ career caused so much outrage she took to Twitter to dispel the claims herself. Paris Hilton, a strangely likable presence, has DJ'd for a few years now, and while she's not playing the kind of sets you'd queue up for outside Sub Club on a dark and dismal night in Glasgow, she seems to be absolutely fine at what she does. Despite what this bloke seems to think:

Dance music is fucking shit now, for god sake fucking Paris Hilton pretends to be a DJ, she should just stick to porno or whatever she did.

— Айдан (@aidan_brame)October 24, 2015

That tweet represents the tip of a big, hairy, predictably white, male online iceberg that manages to view every set, be it Lindsay Lohan or Dick and Dom, with a sort of enraged suspicion, as if the event spells the end of club culture as we know it. Now, it'd be incredibly unwise for me to not point out that in the past I have found the idea of watching Dane Bowers DJing a night in Norwich called "Technix and Chill" inherently funny and worthy of writing about. Because it is. Like Del Boy falling through the bar, or Mr Chips having a wank on Catchphrase, the thought of watching Arg from TOWIE going B2B with Christine Hamilton in Bognor Regis, or Chris from Eggheads slamming through an all-vinyl jungle set in Rye Wax will always be funny. Yet, we'd all do well to remember that funny doesn't necessarily mean terrible.

It's very easy to see the Celebrity Fit Club contestant PA, or the half hour stint behind the decks courtesy of someone famous for getting wanked off under a duvet on TV a decade ago as symbolic of a decline in club culture. After all, there was a time when nightclubs primarily functioned as a space of societal leveling—a malleable, amorphous environment in which identity politics were explored just as much as hedonism. Which, admittedly, seems slightly at odds with watching Dale Winton blending "Seven Nation Army" into "House Every Weekend" to a bunch of horny freshers in Bangor at a night called #SLUTTY.

But what you're actually doing when you get performatively annoyed at the idea of the celebrity DJ set is denigrating an experience enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people each month up and down the country. You're denying the possibility of mass consumption culture having any merit. You're simultaneously a stuffy professor on In Our Time stubbornly pretending that cinema is worthless in comparison to canonical literature, and an arrogant teenager. Which is a combination as rancid as peanut butter and Lurpak.

The celebrity DJ set is a perfectly acceptable part of nightlife's rich tapestry, as valid as the weekly resident's warm up set, or paying £32.50 for two double vodka and mixers in a central London nightspot. Fundamentally it serves a purpose—injecting a bit of telly-assisted glamour into an otherwise completely standard Saturday night in the kind of club where you're more likely to hear "Sex on Fire" than the latest Sex Tags Mania 12". Which there's absolutely nothing wrong with at all. The lucky celeb gets paid a handsome ransom for some very light work and the crowd get to hoot and holler at someone they recognize. Everyone leaves happy, right? The club owner's made enough money to stay afloat, Tim Lovejoy can afford a new shirt, and your mate from home's little brother's got a really good anecdote about having a piss next to Tim Lovejoy to boot.

While one could argue that this experience is somehow inauthentic, that the inflated fees and gross ticket prices are endemic of a side of the industry that could live incredibly happily without NAAFI or L.I.E.S, to do so would be to completely ignore the point of the celebrity DJ and what they do. Not every clubbing experience needs to be Zip in Panorama Bar, or falling asleep in a dingy basement while Raresh enters the 17th hour of his minimal house set. There's room for the kind of bold and brash fun that can only come with watching Gino D'ACampo fizzing up bottles of bubbly behind the decks in a club in Bracknell on a school night.

Let's abandon the pretentious and the piousness and revel in the gloriously low-rent rubbishness of it all. Dane Bowers doesn't make Jane Fitz obsolete. Young Marco isn't losing sleep over Big Keith from The Office's upcoming funk and soul night. Worlds can, quite comfortably, coexist. From time to time we could all do with wallowing in our own filth. After all, sometimes that's all we need to remember that we're alive, and what better way to remember than by watching Nick Knowles playing "So Freakin' Tight" by Tough Love to a horde of randy students.

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