Crumbler

On Saturday I had the chance to DJ my brother’s wedding in Santa Barbara. It was my second-ever DJ gig; two years ago, when my friend Elizabeth got married, I handled the music. That first wedding was a smaller challenge, from the DJ’s perspective – less than an hour of dancing at the reception. When the wedding coordinator sent me the timeline for my brother’s wedding, I gulped a little. There would be more than four hours of open dancing.

My fear wasn’t that I couldn’t fill the time. It was that I couldn’t fill the dance floor. A wedding DJ rarely gets to leave his post, and the idea of spending several hours staring at an empty dance floor filled me with preemptive dread.

Certainly, I would have a built-in advantage over the traditional wedding DJ: at least half the wedding guests would be cherished relatives and family friends, predisposed to enjoying my company and doing what I said (“Dance!” - Casey Newton, repeatedly, 7/10/2010). From this familiarity came a secondary advantage: it would not be weird when I emerged from behind the wheels of steel to revel with my fellow wedding guests, and, in at least one case, lip-synch Mercedes’ vocal in the Glee soundtrack rendering of Queen’s “Somebody to Love.”

Still, it is never a given that people will dance at a wedding. I think of one I attended recently in which the DJ played a string of ’80s tracks so cheeseball in their nature that he might as well have taken a dump on the sweetheart table, for all the good it did in attracting people to the dance floor. Clearly, if my brother’s wedding was going to be the epic night he deserved, I was going to have to weed out all the horrid claptrap you hear at bad weddings and play only the best. My guiding mantra was “wall-to-wall bangers.”

A couple days after the fact, I can’t say that everything I played worked. But I can tell you that I spent five hours on a packed dance floor, watching insanely happy people gyrating themselves to the brink of personal injury. Of all the days in my life, never have I felt so godlike: Simply by touching the next track on my iPad, I could summon dozens of people to throw their arms in the air and scream. By the time of the grand finale –- about which more later –- nearly every person at the wedding had linked hands, dancing around in circles to a song that most of them had never heard. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.

Anyway, here’s what I learned:

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. As a general rule, wedding guests don’t want to hear a song for the first time. Or rather, they don’t want to dance to a song they’re hearing for the first time. This can feel limiting, but I embraced it. Poke around and you’ll find plenty of sample playlists on the Internet; I particularly liked this one, which ranked wedding-reception songs in order of popularity. Being an indie rock guy, it had not even occurred to me to play AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” — but thank God I did, because it absolutely killed. Ditto Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” and Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” These may be big, dumb songs, but they are big, dumb songs that everybody loves — and loves to sing along with. Which leads me to:

People like to dance, but they would rather sing. The biggest predictor of whether a song would get people on the dance floor was not whether it had a killer beat but whether it had a spectacular chorus. All three of the wedding mainstays I mentioned above fit that category. Then there’s “Shutterbug,” the new one from Big Boi, which has an awesome beat but a weak hook. My brother had requested it, but I had to ease out of it about halfway through. Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” on the other hand, has a generic beat and a so-so melody — but everyone rushes the dance floor just so they can sing, “Rah, rah, ah ah ah …” (The obvious exception to this rule is Madonna’s “Vogue.” People would rather dance to “Vogue” than sing to it. I am calling this the Iconic Video Exception.)

Lady Gaga is having a moment. Tom Ewing wrote perceptively a few months back about how Gaga has entered her “imperial phase,” threatening to make all of her peers sound irrelevant. “Pop,” a fellow DJ reportedly told Ewing, “is in a post-‘Bad Romance’” hangover. Nothing else sounds worth playing.” My solution to this was to play a lot of Gaga. “Bad Romance,” of course, then “Just Dance,” then “Poker Face,” then “Telephone,” then “Alejandro.” Of all of these, “Just Dance” surprised me by getting the biggest reaction — perhaps because, as Gaga’s first single, it is also her most familiar. “Alejandro” got the most anemic response, but even that one had people singing along with the “Ale-Alejandro, Ale-Alejandro” parts.

Surprise people. There’s no shame in going back to the classic-rock well for much of your playlist; at this point “Don’t Stop Believin’” exists primarily to be played at weddings. But I also wanted to take some risks. Of these, the most successful was probably NSync’s “Bye Bye Bye.” It’s a song that is hardly viewed as a classic these days, but you know what? Everybody remembers the dance from that video. I looked up during the chorus to see 30 or 40 people making the “bye bye bye” gesture while they danced, and I could not have been more pleased. For a different kind of surprise, I played a killer mash-up that puts the vocal from Wreckx-N-Effect’s “Rump Shaker” over MIA’s “Paper Planes.” It’s the kind of deliciously unexpected pairing that makes people go crazy, even if they’ve never heard it before. Because they’ve never heard it before.

Pander. I hate “Party in the USA.” You hate “Party in the USA.” You know what song pulled people onto the dance floor like a powerful tornado of suck sent by the devil himself? Party in the motherfucking USA. Weep for America later; any song that appeals simultaneously to the three G’s — grandma, grandkids and the gays — deserves a spot on your playlist.

Take requests. Your wedding guests’ suggestions will not (all) be terrible. My cousin Andrew came up to me at one point to tell me, abashedly, that his wife would like nothing more in the world than to hear Sisqo’s “The Thong Song.” As it so happened, I thought that was the greatest idea anyone had ever had, and even though I didn’t own the track, I was happy to download it over iTunes and queue it up next in the mix. And it slaughtered. I had been planning to use Montell Jordan’s “This is How We Do It” as a kind of hilarious retro jam, but “The Thong Song” performed so well in this category that I had no need to. Another thing you can do if you’re DJ’ing your brother’s wedding — announce who requested the song. An 11-year-old girl asked me to please play Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You,” and so I got on the mike and explained to everyone that Aliah would please like everyone to dance with her to a Kelly Clarkson song. You do the math.

Your favorite songs are not their favorite songs. I really hoped that my favorite song of last year — Phoenix’s “1901” — would wow them on the dance floor. But people responded with indifference, not being used to dancing to what they perceived as the extended dance remix of a Cadillac commercial. (You may now weep for America.)

Transitions matter. My mom and dad requested that I play a slow song for them, and I obliged with the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody.” It was a decent-sized hit; I had about 30 couples on the dance floor. As soon as it ended, I grabbed the mic and said “Enough of that bullshit,” and played Kanye’s “Gold Digger.” Place went apeshit.

Play them their new favorite song. I wanted to play Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” More than that, I wanted everyone at the wedding to love it and go download it immediately after they got home. So before I played it, I told them that I was about to play them their new favorite song. By this point in the evening, people were willing to give me a chance. So I played the slightly more accessible radio edit of the song, which is sweetened up with some synths, and people danced with enthusiasm. Better yet, several people asked me afterward to tell them the artist and title. (Best yet, one of those people was my mom.)

Crush the finale. With about 10 minutes to spare, I put on what I thought would be the last big dance song of the night — “I’ve Had the Time of My Life,” by Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes. My basic logic for that was, (1) I had exhausted every other banger on my list, and (2) what worked in Dirty Dancing will most likely work for your brother’s wedding. And it did — every generation with their arms in the air, dancing in circles, having the time of their lives. I had time for one last track, and I went with one that I assumed would send people running to the exits. I introduced it by thanking everyone for dancing with me all night, and told them that I wanted to play for them one more song — a song about how, at the end of the night, all anyone really wants to do is be with the people who love them. And then I put on LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” expecting people to go find their purses and drift into the night. Instead, people stuck right with it, and by the time James Murphy is shouting “If I could be with my friends tonight,” nearly every person still at the reception was on the dance floor spinning around and jumping in the air. I will never, ever forget this moment.

One last pro tip for your brother’s wedding, especially if you’re the best man: You may want to check to see that you have the rings before the wedding party starts processing down the aisle. Otherwise you may have to sprint across the grounds of the resort back to your room to get those rings, then sprint back to the ceremony faster than you have ever sprinted before, and that is just way too much stress for a guy who’s about to MC a reception for five hours.