Prince’s crucial piece of advice to DJs: “You have to fall in love with music”
Prince and Questlove are two artists who seem to share the same mind at times. Although, Questlove probably wouldn’t be offended by the suggestion that rather than this link being natural, it resulted from complete fandom and obsession. Regardless of the rationale, Prince’s influence on The Roots drummer contributed towards making a music obsessive, responsible not only for the creation of good music but the documentation and curation of it as well.
“I patterned everything in my life after Prince. I had older half-brothers, but Prince […] was a guide to me in every way,” said Questlove, “I studied his fashion, I studied his affect. I studied his taste in women — carefully. And he began to mentor me in musical matters, too. I wouldn’t have started listening to Joni Mitchell without him. And that led me to Jaco Pastorius, who led me to Wayne Shorter, who led me to Miles Davis. I had a simple rule: if Prince listened to it, I listened to it.”
As well as being a good musician, Questlove is an accomplished DJ, having been hired to curate playlists for A-list parties (such as Beyonce and Jay-Z’s Oscar afterparty), as well as putting together soundtracks for high-profile movies and regular club nights. Given that most of us reading won’t have had the privilege of being invited to such an affair, it’s difficult for us to tell whether the drummer followed Prince’s advice when making the perfect DJ set.
Making the perfect playlist as a DJ can be a complicated affair. It’s not just about throwing loads of songs together and waiting for the crowd to go wild; you need to have an in-depth knowledge of the tracks you’re playing so that you know what songs transition into which and, therefore, know what you can line up next. It’s also about being able to read a room and, thus, knowing what tracks you should draw from your arsenal depending on what people are responding to the most.
Questlove is one of the modern mentors in DJing, so much so that he has his own course on playlist curation. His main piece of advice is relatively straightforward: You have to love music and love making playlists.
“I think of that first rule that I tell people, which is, in order to be an effective DJ, you have to fall in love with music,” he said, “And it has to be a relationship and a commitment. Every song that you play, you should know five songs that blend in perfectly with that song. Your commitment to your craft will determine how far you go into this game of DJing.”
This seems like pretty good advice, although it differs from what Prince would tell people when he asked about the art of playlist curation. Despite being a complicated man filled with innovative ideas, his advice to any aspiring DJ was very straightforward. As a lover of all things funky and a huge fan of Earth Wind & Fire, he would always tell any DJ he spoke to one simple rule: Always end your sets with the song ‘September’. It feels a bit simple, but it’s a solid tip.
