“DJing is all about playing music”

A clip has been going round. Laurent Garnier, sitting in a Soho Radio studio with Kate Hutchinson, says that a lot of DJs now care more about their social media than about music, and that he finds it sad — really sad, extremely sad. Then the line above, flat and unadorned. Music is the key to the whole thing, he says. If it isn't, don't do this job.

It should be an unremarkable sentence. A plumber saying plumbing is about pipes. The reason it travelled is that it has stopped being obvious, and the person saying it has been doing this for decades — which is to say he has nothing left to sell by saying it.

Part of it, not the point of it

The lazy reading is that this is an older DJ complaining about phones. It isn't, and taking it that way lets everyone off the hook.

I am not making the argument that you should delete your accounts. That is a luxury position, usually held by people who already have an agent. Social media is part of this work now — it is how a record finds the twelve people who will care about it, how a night fills, how somebody in another country hears a set they were never going to be in the room for. That is real, and it is worth doing well.

The word that matters is part. It sits underneath the music and exists to carry it further.

What goes wrong is the inversion — when the poster starts deciding what the show will be. And that inversion is not a character flaw, it is arithmetic. A set is judged by the room it happens in: forty people at 3am who will never post about it. A clip is judged by people who were not there, on mute, in three seconds, against everything else in the feed. Those are two different crafts and they reward opposite instincts. The room rewards patience, a long build, the risk that only pays off eight minutes later. The feed punishes all three.

So the DJ who gets good at the second craft is not lazy. They are responding rationally to what gets them booked. That is what makes it a trap rather than a failing: the incentive is real, and following it makes you worse at the thing you started for.

The platforms are not neutral pipes

There is a second criticism underneath the first, and it deserves saying out loud rather than being left as a vague unease about screens.

The media theorist Geert Lovink makes it in Platform Brutality (Valiz, 2025; published in German as Die Brutalität der Plattform, transcript, 2025). His argument is that social media have moved past the old complaint about distraction into something with teeth — algorithmic manipulation, exhaustion, a permanent low-grade injury — and he places it inside what is now called technofeudalism: the idea that a handful of platform owners have become landlords, extracting rent from everyone who has to build on their ground.

For a DJ that stops being theory very quickly. Your reach is not yours. It is lent to you by a company that can change the terms overnight and owes you no explanation, and every hour you spend feeding it is an hour of unpaid labour on land you will never own. Treating that as neutral infrastructure — as simply how things work now — is the part I would push back on hardest. Use it. Don't mistake it for a public square, and don't let it set the standard for what counts as good.

The other half, which travelled less

The part of the interview that got clipped less is the part I keep thinking about. Garnier describes people sending him demos with an apology attached — that they tried to release the track, but it didn't fit any label. His response, paraphrasing: if it's good music, it should fit. Be open minded.

That is the same argument pointed at a different target. A genre box is a feed in slower motion. It also rewards the legible version of a record over the true one, and it also gets into your head before the track is finished. Anyone who has sat on a demo because it was too slow, too long or too strange for anyone's A&R knows exactly what he means.

His own label, COD3 QR, puts the same thought in writing: that it wants to stay free of expectations and prejudice, because only the music counts.

Two opinions, and where they come from

None of this settles anything. It is two opinions, and opinions are cheap.

What makes these two worth putting next to each other is where they were formed. Garnier has been doing this for decades. I have spent more than eighteen years behind the decks, in rooms of forty and in rooms of four thousand. Neither of us is describing a theory of club culture; we are both describing a job, and we have arrived at the same place from opposite ends of it.

And it is not a private conclusion. It is more or less the value the underground has always claimed for itself: that the music comes first, that the room is the event, that you take a risk in front of people who might not thank you for it. The uncomfortable question is not whether the scene believes that. It is whether it still behaves as if it does, now that there is a counter next to everything.

I wrote in the floor is not a stage that when a booth faces the room like a stage, the room faces back — phones come up, and dancing becomes something performed at the front instead of something that happens between people. Hearing the same argument from someone who was making it before I ever stood behind a pair of decks did not change my mind. It made me trust it more, which is a different and better thing.

The job is the music. Everything else is a poster for it.

Which leaves one honest way to end a piece like this, and it isn't with another paragraph.

Source: Kate Hutchinson feat. Laurent Garnier, Soho Radio, broadcast 22 August 2025 — the full show is on sohoradio.com and on Mixcloud. The excerpt embedded above was posted by Soho Radio in September 2025; the quoted line follows that clip's own subtitles.