Death of the Ego

ZAINAB — a DJ and producer in Brooklyn, fifteen years in — has written and recorded a long argument about what has gone wrong with the role, and she does not soften the framing: DJ culture needs an ego death.

Her case is that the job was always a service position and has been quietly converted into a starring one. The line that stayed with me is about what it used to be:

The DJ was once the healer and music was the DJ's medicine

Channel, not focal point

Her core claim is about purpose. The DJ was never supposed to be the centre of the evening. What sits at the centre is the music, the dancers and the floor, with the DJ working as a conduit — reading the exchange, pushing and pulling, carrying a collective shift in energy that belongs to the room rather than to the booth.

Turn that person into a product and the arithmetic changes on both sides. If the DJ is a product, the dancer is a consumer. And a consumer does not dance; a consumer watches, assesses and films.

This is her answer to a complaint you hear constantly, that nobody dances any more. She splits it in two and refuses to let either side off. DJs who centre themselves make the night into something to be watched. Crowds who document rather than participate accept the invitation. Both are required for the floor to go flat, and both are correctable by the people doing them.

The part that keeps it honest

She then does something that raises the whole piece above a complaint: she declines to blame DJs entirely.

Self-commodification is a survival tactic. What a booker checks now, she argues, is reach, following and clips — considerably before mixes, ticket history or whether the person can actually play. Feeding that system is how the rent gets paid, and she compares it to phone addiction, which is also not a personal failing so much as the designed output of something built to produce it.

That framing is generous and it is also correct, and it is the difference between an argument that can change behaviour and one that just assigns blame.

The wall is the thesis, in aluminium

Here is where I would add something she does not need to say, because you can watch it happening at any festival season.

The smaller, well-regarded festivals — the ones people travel for, the ones whose lineups get screenshotted — have been stripping their stages back. No LED wall. Minimal light. Sometimes a rig pointed at the crowd rather than at the booth, which tells you exactly where the organisers think the event is happening.

Meanwhile, acts who came out of exactly those rooms are touring with larger screens every year, and some of them will announce the dimensions from the stage.

The direction of travel is the interesting part. The people with the most credibility are removing the apparatus while the people trying to acquire credibility are adding it. Which suggests the screens were never a production decision. They are a status claim, and status claims are expensive precisely because they are visible.

None of this makes screens illegitimate, and the clearest proof of that is Moderat.

Their show has been audiovisual since the start, because Pfadfinderei — the Berlin design collective behind their artwork and videos — have effectively been the third member rather than a supplier hired for a tour. The images were authored alongside the music by people in the group, which is why they carry ideas rather than decoration: panoramic projection tied into the light rig, material studies of fabric, paper, wood and cement. The stated aim of that aesthetic is to slow a viewer's habits down.

Sit with that for a second. A stage design whose purpose is to decelerate attention is the exact inverse of a wall built to hold it. Same technology, opposite intent, and you can feel the difference in a field of ten thousand people.

So the distinction was never screen or no screen. It is whether somebody made something or bought something. A test you can apply from the floor: is the design doing work the music could not do alone, or is it answering the question of where to look?

Where the ego actually comes from

ZAINAB locates the cause in late-stage capitalism, hyper-individualism and egocentrism, and I think that is right as far as it goes. I would name the delivery mechanism more specifically, because it is more actionable than an economic era.

Social platforms are built around profiles. Not works, not records, not nights — people. A track cannot have followers. An account can. Every distribution system an artist now depends on takes the person as its primary object and treats the music as something the person posts.

Once that is the architecture, centring yourself stops being a character trait and becomes compliance with the file format. Ask an artist to build an audience in 2026 and you have asked them to build a persona, because the tooling has no slot for anything else. That is a design decision made by product teams, and it arrived with a speed no cultural shift could match. I wrote about the personality this now requires; the ego problem ZAINAB describes is the same machinery seen from the artist's side.

Where I part company with her

She raises recorded sets, and is careful about it — not all of them do damage. The ones she flags are those with no crowd present at all, which position the DJ as a figurehead rather than as a channel for something collective.

Half of that criticism lands here. This site publishes recorded mixes, made alone, on headphones, with no room in them and no exchange with anybody. If the argument is that a recording is not the same thing as a night, she is plainly right, and anyone treating a recorded set as the main event has accepted a substitution.

But I do not accept the rest of it, and streams with the DJ in frame seem to me straightforwardly fine.

A stream is a different format, not a diminished club. Nobody is displaced by it, because the room it happens in was never going to hold the people watching. It is the most accessible route into this music there has ever been — for people who live nowhere near a scene, who cannot afford a door price, who cannot stand for six hours, who have someone at home to look after, who are too young, or who live somewhere these rooms are not safe to be seen entering. That audience did not previously get a worse version of the experience. It got nothing.

And the camera has to point somewhere. In a room you can point it at the floor, which is usually the better choice. In a studio with nobody in it there is one subject available, and pointing the lens at the person doing the thing is not egotism, it is framing. Watching somebody's hands work a mixer for an hour is also how a very large number of people have taught themselves this, mine included.

The failure mode is real but it sits elsewhere. It arrives when stream logic travels back into the club — when the booth gets lit for the camera, when a set gets shaped around the twenty seconds that will travel, when a room is arranged so that it films well. That is the substitution worth resisting. The recording itself is just a recording, and this music has been carried by radio, tapes and mixes for forty years without anybody's soul being at stake.

The solution she offers

Community, which she cheerfully admits is a cliché, and then makes non-trivial by defining it as participation rather than sentiment. You do not observe a community. You show up, you are present, you engage.

For the DJ that means remembering the job is to amplify what is in the room rather than to shine. For the crowd she is blunter: stop filming the sets, stop putting a phone in a DJ's face, stop putting one in your friend's face, look at each other, dance. She insists this is a fifty-fifty equation, which is the fairest thing in the essay — the audience is given responsibility rather than treated as weather.

Her closing register is political, and it should be reported as hers rather than diluted. A dance floor called a safe space is not a marketing phrase to her, particularly for Black, brown, femme and queer people at a moment when those communities are under direct pressure. She describes the floor and the street as mirrors: the energy you build in one is what you carry into the other. Sometimes, she says, the most radical available act is to dance.

You can find that framing grand and still notice it is historically accurate. This music came out of rooms that functioned as sanctuary before they functioned as entertainment, and the parts of the culture that forgot this are the parts that now need a video wall to hold attention.

Source: ZAINAB (@_zainabnyc), video essay posted 14 May 2026, following a written piece on the same subject. She notes in the caption that the recording predates her name change and uses her former artist name at one point. The quoted line follows the video.