Every Great DJ Starts as a Curator

I’ve been on my farewell tour of SF. Part of that was a dinner with some friends this past Sunday at Side A in the Mission. They have a coffee pop-up from Coffee Movement in the mornings & then dinner in the evenings. The restaurant opened ~1.5 years ago & has been a hot spot to go to. I have been for coffee many times, but had never been for dinner.

The whole story behind it is that it is a husband & wife who own the place. Caroline & Parker Brown. Parker was a former Michelin star chef & Caroline has worked in music over the years (as a curator & vinyl DJ). After hearing their story, the place is such a love child of these two people. Both of them are from the Midwest (Chicago & Milwaukee) & they have intentionally made sure that shines through in the food. They have a vinyl DJ booth with music playing all day long. Behind the booth is a wall of vinyls. I was there one morning for coffee & I asked the barista, whose name also happened to be Connor, where they got all the vinyls from & he said that most were from Caroline’s personal collection. Then behind the bar, you have a picture of Mr. Anthony Bourdain, along with a shelf of curated books. Cook books & music-related books.

The first time I went to Side A for the Coffee Movement pop up, I had been in the middle of reading Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock And Out. I had looked up at the shelf & I noticed the book Night People by Mark Ronson up on the shelf. It had just been released & I remember listening to a podcast Mark Ronson was on right beforehand, which is why I even knew about the book. You can’t miss the cover of this book. It is bright pink. I thought it was quite fitting & added it to my list of ‘Things to Consume’.

A little over a month ago, I decided to finally pluck that book off my list. I am going to be quite candid… now that I am reading it, I am underwhelmed. But it has done something… it has sparked intrigue & thought from me. I kind of like the act of reading something that I don’t fully love now that I’ve harnessed my own storytelling abilities. I can think about why this doesn’t resonate with me or what would have made it better. I think this book would be a great film or tv show concept, but as a book, something about it you can’t fully feel or appreciate.

Mark really tries to explain the feeling of being in clubs & coming up as a DJ in NYC in the 90’s… this needs a whole hell of a lot of adjectives or descriptors to paint this picture. That is actually where things fall flat for me, I feel like the story is constantly interrupted with trying to explain the feeling or the imagery or the sound. I appreciate what he is trying to do, but it is really hard to translate those things from writing alone, especially when it involves so much feeling. I would love to see this in another format, where you could hear the songs he is referencing or you could actually see & hear the act of him fucking up & scratching his first vinyls. I would love to see the energy & clothing of the rooms he was in.

So this hasn’t been the smoothest read. I keep picking up & putting down the book rather than getting engulfed in it. Like I said, it has still sparked intrigue & thought from me, outside of just ways I think the flow or story could have been told better. It has also made me think about the roots of DJing.

I think the art of DJing is really interesting. It does feel the market of DJing has gotten so oversaturated & with that, there is a WIDE range of talent within it. My definition of a DJ is someone who performs & mixes existing tracks live. It really is an art & that is something that shines through about Mark Ronson. He loves the craft. You know that someone who was a vinyl DJ had to love the craft. They couldn’t just pop open their laptop & use some AI software to say they were a DJ. No… they had to search for vinyls, they had to carry the vinyls to every location & know just what to pull out at the right time. They had to master being able to use those vinyls to create a new sound.

To be a DJ, I feel like it usually means the person is deeply attuned to sound & other humans. You have to see others. You must first appreciate & be able to fully feel & interpret the music of other artists. You must be able to understand the energy of the room you are in & who your audience is. You are literally in control of the frequency of a room when behind a booth.

Fred again.. is a perfect example of this. The reason he has resonated with so many is because he understands humans. His earlier music was all based off of being able to provoke feeling & emotions through music he has sampled. He was able to capture life. He is also someone who is a DJ, but has so much craft underneath just being a DJ. When I was at Fred’s show last year, he understood the concept of being in charge of the frequency in the room. He had a living art installation above the room that would flow with the music. Music was specifically left on at the end of the show so people could decompress or ease out of the setting they were just in. I remember this one moment from seeing Fred where he took a break during the show & he played The Most Beautiful Girl in the World by Prince. I will never forget this moment & how I felt. It was the first time I had ever heard this song & I just watched Fred throughout it all. He was still behind the booth, drinking water & dancing to this song. The entire room was in it. He curated the perfect song for that break.

It almost feels like there are two pieces to being a DJ. At your foundation, you need to be a curator… but then you are also a creator. These two things are very distinct & special roles on their own already so to be able to combine them each is pretty dope.

I find that I personally sit in the curator bucket, but I do not sit in the creator bucket when it comes to music. I am able to listen to music, feel it deeply, provide it with context, appreciate the artistry, then be able to create a collection or recommendations of music for others or myself. It kind of feels like a blessing that I am not talented when it comes to creating music. My personal creation comes in the forms of storytelling & build technology to HELP the music industry.

Caroline, one of the owners of Side A, is a great example of someone who is not only a curator, but also a DJ. Like I said, she is a vinyl DJ herself who has played gigs all over the Bay. She was actually behind the DJ booth when I was at Side A for dinner the other night. I had also listened to a podcast where she shared more of her backstory & she had various jobs related to music. She had curated the playlists for the music that played in the Starbucks (back when that was a big thing). She also worked for the company, Superfly (the creators of Bonnaroo & Outside Lands), doing the creative direction for different projects. On this podcast, Caroline also had to pick 5 songs to share, it was a similar concept to Desert Island Discs, one song that she chose was 17 Days (Piano & a Microphone 1983 Version) by Prince. She gave context behind her love for Prince… while working at Superfly, she had been a part of putting on the Prince Immersive Experience from his estate. I believe she said she has also been able to find this on vinyl & it is very special to her.

In the midst of all of my thoughts from the book & Side A, I saw this video today where the person said “there are a lot of people trying to create or be in the music industry who don’t actually LOVE music. They think about what music could do for them, rather than what they could give to music.” DJing can get so ego-based, since music can feel synonymous for attention, being cool, celebrity, money, etc. I don’t fuck with that. I just wish other people would accept their limitations when it comes to music & appreciate the craft of others more, because it has to feel really discouraging for people who have the calling from a well-intentioned place or have been perfecting the craft for years. See with AI, this is where someone could end up thinking well… technology can just do that for me. DJs & producers have to feel like this is all a slap in the fucking face.

Ownership is a big topic of discussion in this wave of AI tooling in music & using songs for remixing music & DJing right now (as it should be). Sampling others music has deep-rooted history within the industry. What is happening right now, isn’t sampling concerns, it is the act of using loads of copyrighted music to train models. This is then the foundation for creation of new music with absolutely zero attribution back to the original creator. There are major open lawsuits that are essentially claiming that tools like Suno are doing unauthorized, uncredited sampling of music, just with mathematics as the engine to reproduce the music, rather than using the music files directly.

Vinyl DJ’s were some of the OG samplers of music. The entire foundation of hip-hop is based on the technique of sampling music. DJ’s had been using twin turntables to ensure continuous play of music, but it wasn’t until a party in the Bronx in 1973 where DJ Kool Herc decided to use these twin turntables to put the same exact record on each of the turn tables to extend the drum breaks for people to rap over that the “Merry-Go-Round” technique got created.

This is the defining moment where DJing went from pure curation to curation AND creation.

All of this to say, I find the craft of vinyl DJ’s to be fascinating. Night People is just okay to me… purely because I can’t feel the story or page as much as I would like to. It all just feels very abstract when written in this format & since it focuses on so much sensory, the story progression is slow. If you are in SF, Side A is worth the hype & the people behind it have a lovely story. I think the art of sampling is such a foundation for so much music creation, but it needs to be done in an ethical, credited manner.

I also mentioned two Prince songs in this piece. We all know Prince. Prince is Prince. In December 2025, I had gone to the Fred again.. show I mentioned & I had heard the podcast Caroline was on, within a two week span of each other. Not until these specific songs & these moments… did I understand the love for Prince. This sent me down the rabbit hole of watching Purple Rain & learning more about him as an artist. The right DJ’s & curators can completely change the context for which a person experiences music & the feeling that is invoked with it. They have this ability to amplify other’s art.

AND that is all folks.