Everyone is a DJ.

Everyone.

Whenever you decide to change the radio station in the car, or switch a CD at home, or skip to another track on your MP3 player, you are doing exactly what a DJ does.

A disc jockey carefully selects and plays music to suit a mood, event, venue, or audience.

Sometimes that audience may be no more than oneself. Of course, we don’t traditionally think of ourselves as DJs but we perform the same duties. Some of us are better than others at mixing and presentation. But at the basic level, we all select and play music at one point or another, usually on a daily basis for most people.

I have made several different mix tapes in my life. I started off just making hip-hop tapes. There was a time in my life where I was such a snob that I didn’t even want to hear any other genre of music. Does everyone go through a phase like this? Did you?

Tim McGraw comments on how we used to have more of a mix in what we used to listen to on the radio in one of his songs. In the song “Back When, he sings,

“I had my favorite stations
The ones that played them all
Country, soul and rock-and-roll
What happened to those times?”

This is a great question.

I remember the days Tim McGraw talks about. Before I got into hip-hop music, I used to listen to some of those stations. They seem to have all faded away though. Nowadays, radio stations tend to play only one type of music. I wonder why that is.

I still make tapes that blend genres like those old stations used to do. And I think a lot of us probably have a few different genres represented in our MP3 players or iPods as well. So, Tim, I think those days are back but they are limited to our computer hard drives or portable music devices. It seems that everyone has, indeed, become a DJ (except maybe the Type 1 listener)