Fatboy Slim disapproves of Simon Cowell’s developing Ultimate DJ competition
As the global EDM community waits with a collective cringe for Simon Cowell’s developing Ultimate DJ televised competition, one major dance industry legend has continued to voice his opposing opinions. Fatboy Slim famously turned down the opportunity to judge the X-Factor style DJ competition pleading, “Please don’t do it. It’ll ruin it for the rest of us.” Over this weekend, Fatboy added insight to his previous statements on the matter:
“Simon Cowell was talking about doing a show and … he kind of started approaching us, and we were like, ‘Fuck off. No – that’s a terrible idea!’ That’s the good thing about dance music; it grows organically through drunk people late at night coming up with stupid ideas. It’s not something that can be scripted or transported into a TV studio.”
Despite the living legend’s knowledgeable warnings and condemnations, Simon Cowell’s own Syco Entertainment and partner SFX seem to be all on board to make this concept a reality. As many of us understand, television does not always, if ever, do live dance music DJing justice. Fatboy Slim also admits that he’s been approached multiple times to be recruited to other celebrity reality shows and programs to “… perform for five minutes?” Of course, these kinds of proposals are preposterous seeing as the art of DJing at its most basic level is about stimulating certain moods and emotions that simply cannot be effectively done within few minutes.
“It’s not like you can go out there and sing your latest song… At the end of the day, it’s about taking a big bunch of high people and trying to get them higher, which you can’t do on TV”.
Though Fatboy Slim is the only one talking here, his explanations and criticisms speak more about the mainstream media’s skewed perception of EDM than anything. Simon Cowell’s Ultimate DJ competition serves as a trendy example of many mainstream executives’ utter lack of understanding of dance music culture.
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Categories: Music