All You Need Is a Headphone and a Pose

Paris Hilton made it look easy. You show up with an oversized headphone you don’t actually plug in anywhere, you press play on a pre-loaded MacBook, you tilt your head like you’re listening to something only you can hear, and you collect the check. That was the template, and once it was established, every failed pop star and reality television castoff with a publicist and a Saturday night to fill decided to become a DJ.

The tragedy isn’t that they did it. The tragedy is that it worked. Promoters paid for it. Venues booked it. Audiences turned up. The headphone-as-prop became shorthand for credibility you haven’t earned in the most visible way possible—and the actual DJs who spent years learning beatmatching and crate-digging watched it happen from the booth at clubs that could no longer afford to book them.

There’s a DJ name generator floating around the internet—just a button that spits out something random and vaguely plausible, like DJ Sundown or DJ Concrete or DJ Velvet Hammer. The joke is that it’s indistinguishable from the names real celebrity DJs have actually used. You click it, you get a name, and the distance between you and an Ibiza residency is theoretically nothing but a MacBook and the willingness to stand in front of people and pretend. The bar is a joke. The joke keeps clearing it.