Here's the Piece of DJ Equipment That Needs to Be Banned from Clubs Asap

Scenario one: The pool is wrapped in an emerald haze, turquoise cut with gold. The smell of foreign cigarettes curlicues around pine and heather, a scent that sings of quiet, understated, Rolex-wearing luxury. Late evening conversation vies for space with the distant thud of music in other rooms, in other spaces. You waltz through the throng, shoulder to shoulder with minor celebrities and people who look like they might spend their days in far-flung embassies. There is a drink in your hand and a smile on your face and you feel like you belong here amongst the palm trees and the expensive bottles of beer. You walk towards the thud and the thud becomes music and in the blink of an eye you're in front of a DJ and you look around the room with eyes wide open: everyone is dancing, everyone is smiling, everyone seems to exist on a plane you'd only ever dreamed of, and you are with them, you are here, you have made it. You turn to acknowledge the DJ, to wordlessly thank them for their work. You notice something wrong. Something really wrong. Something so wrong that you are only left with one option and that option sees you turning back on yourself, escaping into the dark blue of the night.

Scenario two: The pavement is a pointillist painting composed of discarded chewing gum and chicken bones. The stink of strong tobacco fills the air like the first bonfire of the year, clinging to all and sundry. Two men are leaning against drainpipes, talking loudly about the upcoming general election. Eyes glued to your phone, you push through the heavy doors of the pub and try and join the queue. You wait as patiently as possible for a pint, which is harder than it seems, because the queue is less of a queue and more of a heaving blob of limbs and screw-faced resentment. The pint arrives and you try and weave towards your friends. The music in here is too loud and you want to convey this to the DJ with a single scowl, so you look up from the foamy glass and cast your eyes up the selector. Oh, you think, for fuck's sake. No. No. No. You drop the pint, sending glass and lager everywhere, and you get out of there as quickly as you can.

What links those two scenes? The answer is easy. It's one of these:

Along with a flat cap, a rotary mixer, and a t-shirt emblazoned with the entire speech from "Can You Feel It," on the front, nothing screams I AM A SERIOUS DJ, PLEASE TAKE ME VERY SERIOUSLY more than the mono-headphone. To be totally frank, the handheld headphone, the dreaded instrument of ostentation, the harbinger of endless hours of boring, worthy jazzy house played by a beer-bellied nobody, is an abomination.

If I had any kind of gumption in me, I'd organise a petition to have each and every single one of the things melted and recast as something useful—a Heimlich Maneuver doll, or a batch of those dragon-dick shaped dildos, perhaps—but alas, I am but a feckless and lazy millennial, so I'll have to accept that I can't simply eradicate the fuckers. Much to my chagrin, I am resigned to a world in which the booths of bars throughout the globe are commandeered by balding blokes clinging onto dreams of being the next Baldelli.

Each of us stumbles through life carrying our own hessian sacks stuffed to the gills with individual irrationalities: fears, pleasures, and embarrassments. It is the latter that concerns us here. Take a moment out of the day for self-reflection, focusing as intently as possible on the tiny things that make you squirm out of your skin. Matte black cars, adding an 'S' to Chris Eubank's name, the phrase "trash AF"—whatever it is, all of us have them. They rob you of all proportion, all reason, all rationality. That is how I feel when I see a DJ clutching the lollipop-like object. Sadly, with the clanging inevitability of the aforementioned Serious DJ playing "Stop Bajon" at the biggest Balearic night in Blackburn, the root of the problem is the same thing that supports and strangles club culture at large: authenticity!

You see, the monophone acts as a very obvious signifier of something that doesn't need signifying. It screams "I know my history, I know my stuff, I know more than you, I don't even need to bother with actual headphones unlike you, you fucking moron" in a way that generates—within me at least—waves of secondhand shame. The shame stems from the simple fact that knowing more about dance music than someone else isn't something to necessarily be proud of. Unbelievably, the world still turns for people who don't know the catalogue number of "Disco Dancing" by the Rice and Beans Orchestra, or don't give the smallest of shits about Richard Long sound-systems.

One gets a sense that this kind of DJ sees themselves as operating within an educational context rather than entertaining one. In my, admittedly very limited, experience, the art of DJing—if we can deign to call it that with a totally straight face—is about communication. DJing should be a discursive experience as opposed to a monologic performance. You don't play records for yourself, because that is selfish and unappealing. The DJ should, in all honesty, be the least interesting thing about any night out. Any kind of self-regard becomes embarrassing, becomes a turn-off, becomes a symptom of the way in which we've elevated the whole thing to a point that's far beyond parody.

Effectively, watching someone play with a set-up like that is like catching a mate masturbating in front of the mirror. Wank in front of a mirror all you want, go wild, wank for days, cover your cheap mirror in scuzz and spunk to your heart's content, but for the love of god, don't leave the door unlocked. And that's the problem. In taking the monophone into the big bad world, you're unlocking the door and you're going to get caught eventually.

Now, obviously, anyone who finds themselves DJing, be it in the main room of a massive club or next to the billiards table at the Jolly Farmers in Purely, needs to do so with some level of seriousness, because if the whole thing is just a laugh then what's the point in it at all? There's a level of co-operation through, a relationship between the act and their crowd. Respect the audience, give them what they actually want just as much, if not more, than what you think they want. And for god's sake, get a proper pair of headphones.

Josh is on Twitter