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Anyone Surprised by the Video of David Guetta DJing Properly at Space is an Idiot

Can you believe it? David Guetta can DJ!

Late last week shocking footage emerged of a now-massive DJ playing records at a massive club when he was a bit younger than he is now. The video, which you can watch below, shows the disturbing sight of a young David Guetta playing out at Space in 1999.

The defensive discourse around dance music, focused as it is on this mythical notion of a kind of purity that can only be engendered the total seperation of the mainstream and the underground, suggests that a video like the one above should SHOCK and APPAL us because we, as real dance heads, must surely hate David Guetta and everything that David Guetta, with his shiny long hair and his immaculate beard, David Guetta with his millions in the bank, stands for. We are meant to watch David Guetta playing records at Space in 1999 and want to punch our laptop so hard that we de-core it's glowing apple, because we know that David Guetta is the worst thing ever, don't we? Isn't David Guetta gross? Look at him besmirching Space's good name! Rank! Aren't we all really clever for thinking that!

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David Guetta, lest we forget, is one of the biggest DJs on the planet. That's not debatable. He just is. He's massive. Huge. Gargantuan. David Guetta, also, clearly knows what people like and, let's be honest, most people prefer Kelly Rowland remixes to Kerri Chandler ones. David Guetta got where he is — 9 million album sales, 30 million singles sold — by exploiting our baser instincts and selling them back to us in easily swallowable packages. To begrudge Guetta, to take to YouTube and call him a sell out, to fire off a pithy tweet about him, is a total and utter waste of time. If you watched the video above and thought anything other than, "oh, cool, that's David Guetta playing at Space," then there's no hope for you.

This idea that someone like Guetta, or Avicii, or Swedish House Mafia or whoever else we're told is the antichrist this week, is devoid of any talent and lacks any kind of pedigree is pure, steaming bullshit. Sure, they might not have sweated out in shit club after shit club like the DJs we actually admire, but so what? What's so great about authenticity anyway? Being shocked that David Guetta, ONE OF THE BIGGEST DJS IN THE WORLD, has played at one of the BIGGEST CLUBS IN THE WORLD before he was ONE OF THE BIGGEST ARTISTS IN THE WORLD is like being shocked that, I don't know, you have to pay for milk even though cows roam around fields freely. Is it actually surprising that he can DJ? Are you genuinely taken aback that the man knows how to play records in a club even though his life's work has been playing records in clubs? Are you? Are you actually?

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