The Dos and Dont's of DJ Selfies

The selfie's place in post late-capitalist cultural consciousness isn't surprising: since we crawled from the swamp and swapped fins for feet or got zapped into being by God or whatever happened, man has been a curious and narcissistic beast. The selfie, for all it's potential for deception by appearance, is an honest encapsulation for our rapacious desire to admire ourselves and in turn be admired by others. It cuts through the bullshit and blats the cold hard truth of humanity all over Instagram: all we really want is for strangers to think we're attractive.

Somewhere out there some media studies MA dullard is stuttering out half-formed thought fragments about the gamification of every facet of our lives - including the hope we all have that our next selfie will get more likes, more comments, more bald approval than the last - and how this is a 'bad' thing. That's tosh, absolute tosh. I mean, yes, it probably is having an inexorable affect on our cognitive development and our ability to truly connect with ourselves let alone approach the complexity of connecting with someone else, and, yes, it's made us a generation of infantile fuckwits incapable of even contemplating a proper adulthood. But doesn't your heart beat that much faster when the Instagram likes rack up? Don't you thrill to see that even famous people, rich people with private jets and platinum Tesco Clubcards, get as much joy from looking slightly away from their phone's camera as you and I do? Of course you do. This is how we live now.

DJs are people too so it's no surprise that they enjoy taking photos of themselves. I spent hours methodically trawling through your favourite electrohouse selector's Twitpic account in search of the images that define where we're at as a culture at the end of a year, as we nudge towards the middle of the decade that's seen us cast all modesty aside and wholeheartedly embrace selfie-love with one arm open and the other clutching a phone. Here's how to get it right when your set's down the Dog and Duck on a Friday night push you over that 300 follower mark.

DO: TRY AND ROPE YOUR FAMOUS DJ MATES IN

What's better than a slightly blurry photo taken too close of one DJ? The same photo but with TWO DJs.

Split this shot in half: you've either got a confused and frail looking Kenny Dixon Jr, aka Moodymann, looking like he's seriously having to retrace his steps and really think long and hard about whether the hob's still on, or it's Nina Kraviz looking like a coy exchange student caught trying on the host family's oldest son's jacket. Remove that imaginary divide and you've got a charming photo of two great DJs and producers.

Here's Nina doing it again:

Slapheaded grandad of techno Sven Vath showing us all that the strongest look of the year was 'Sweaty IT technician who accidentally sipped molly water while sorting out the server at Watergate and wandered into the main room in a state of panic, bumbled up to the booth by accident and was adopted for the evening by Nina Kraviz in the way girls sometimes adopt ugly dudes and use them as relationship counsellors'. Never stop that fist pumping, Sven.

DON'T: BE DIPLO

There's always been something faintly depressing about Diplo, something slightly cheap about him, as if he stumbles uninvited from studio to studio smelling faintly of mildew, sadness and desperation. He's the bloke laughing too hard at jokes in the pub, tears forever welling on the inside. His Instagram does nothing to dispel this: what's meant, presumably, to come across as knowing boasting about how great his life is and how much fun he has and look, isn't it great that people send him clips of themselves twerking to his tunes, is actually a hollow bleat into the void from the mouth of a soulless man.

Look at those sad, sad eyes. He's trying to project a sense of self-security to the rest of the world and he's failing miserably. He looks like he's just remembered that the world is an awful, barbaric, wrecked and ruined place, and that mankind is inherently selfish and self-serving, and that life is an essentially pointless trudge towards a lonely death. Not even a beenie hat that says 'CARBS' is going to change that.

DO: BE MOVE D

Move D's a lovely man to interview, he makes really lovely records, and his DJ sets are similarly lovely. He's also, happily, pretty much the best selfie taker out there, a man who puts heart and soul into every red wine soaked image of himself, a master of positioning and placement, a veritable Don McCullen of festival trench photography. I'm pretty sure that DJing is a quite fun job, and Move D's one of the few people out there who look like they actually enjoy themselves while they do it. Just look at the man:

Lord knows what happened in the seconds between those two shots were taken. Scroll up and down quite rapidly and it looks like he's shouting 'Four!' Which he may well be. You know they try and do anything to get punters in at these Eastern European dance festivals - the DJ's cricket 20/20 game is just out of shot.

Proving, again, that the sight of two DJs stood next to each other is as inordinately appealing to us as palm trees and cold soft drinks, here's Move D clearly having the time of his life with everyone's favourite perma-fucked Chilean DJ Ricardo Villalobos. There's something oddly touching the sight of the genuinely insectoid Ricky V managing to smile through the murk of whatever it is that he's taken that makes a smile look that unnatural alongside the ever-beaming face of Mr D. I'd normally make a sniffy comment about the latter being in dire need of a hairbrush and a bottle of Aussie conditioner, but in this instance it'd be like shouting at a three legged puppy on Christmas Day.

DON'T: PICK A SHIT LOCATION FOR YOUR SELFIE

This is Hardwell. Hardwell is DJ Mag's No.1 DJ of 2014. Hardwell plays Electronic Dance Music to incomprehensibly large crowds. Hardwell has earned over $13m this year. Why is Hardwell taking photos in what's clearly a student union bar toilet?

DO: CHOW DOWN LIKE RICHIE HAWTIN

He's Mr minimal techno himself, the Minus records main man, the bloke who currently holds the world record for most ill-advised haircuts ever placed on the same head. It seems that old Richie's nowhere near as austere as his music suggests - indeed, his Instagram account portrays him as a kind of Japanese robe wearing, sake sampling, smiling simpleton. The photo above is a textbook Hawtin-selfie (a hawtie?): the monstrously swooped, bleached fringe, the all black outfit, the clenched tension of an ecstatic face, it's all there. Y'know, part of the appeal of celebrity selfies is that slight remove they have from the concrete confinements of the reality that you and I exist within, and as such the enjoyment one derives from this photo stems from the way that Hawtin so casually teases his slice of toast laden with the finest truffles as if this was how he starts every morning. A photo of me pulling a similar face while huffing on an underdone slice of Warburton's covered in the last scrapings of a pot of Sun-Pat might not have the same effect.

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Our boy Richie again, this time tucking into a lobster roll with a henchman with a heart of gold from a mid-90s spy thriller and a bloke who looks like a really really meek Bill Callahan. Looking good, lads.

DON'T: REPEAT A SELFIESTANCE

Now that Facebook's nothing but a Buzzfeed quiz infested hovel that's been left to rot since the big boys from Twitter moved in next door and started playing music really loudly and smoking weed in the garden, we've had to begin the painful process of transferring that one perfect pose we all developed in case someone wanted to take our photo out and about and tag us there and then into something that'll work when taken by our own fine hand. As with most things in life, selfies require us to come up with coping mechanisms that we cling to time and time again for fear of stepping into the potentially unsuccessful unknown.

What we see below is former dubstep doyen and current house head Skream, having his hair cut. Now, I recently spent an enjoyable afternoon drinking Cointreau and Red Bull in a hotel bar with Skream and can confirm that he's got a really good haircut. It's sharp, precise, clean. Just a solid men's cut. I can understand that he's proud of it and wants to show it off the world at large. What I can't understand is why he felt it necessary to document two separate haircuts in two near-identically dull photos.

DO: UTILIZE TECHNOLOGY TO THE FULLEST

Guys, this might be the most meta selfie ever composed. Just looking at the layers of reality involved in the making of this is making my head hurt like it did when I tried to understand Heidegger at university. Are we looking at a photo of Tiesto Skyping someone who's taking a photo of himself Skyping with Tiesto while Tiesto takes a photo of that Skype call? That's how it should be done. It's too easy to stand up and hold a phone an unflattering distance from your visage while you fumble about hunting the 'take photo' portion of the touch screen down. No one's impressed by that. My grandparents can do that. Can they do this? I doubt it.

DONT: GET POLITICAL

Everyone at Thump loves our mate Seth Troxler but don't have quite the same amount of love for the kind of 6th form psued politics a photo like this espouses. Leave the quasi-hippy revolution shit to Russell Brand, Seth.