Two years ago, I witnessed legendary dance producer Giorgio Moroder play a comeback DJ set at a festival in Los Angeles. Onstage, the septuagenarian had a younger, more tech savvy assistant next to him, helping control the session like a driving instructor on a separate set of pedals. Right out the gate, the whole thing was a technical mess—a poorly mixed, wall-to-wall mashup of past glories. It was borderline embarrassing. To be fair, Moroder was never really a DJ to begin with, and the appearance was clearly a victory lap following his spoken word guest turn on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. Even so, it reinforced every ugly stereotype imaginable about what can happen when artists age out of a culture obsessed with youth.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. At that same festival, I saw Masters at Work—aka New York stalwarts Little Louie Vega and Kenny Dope Gonzalez, who’ve been active since the early ‘90s—serve the fresh-faced crowd with an effortless set of darker, harder house and garage. They weren’t trying to recover or keep up. There was no flop sweat, no geezer moments. Instead, they seamlessly shuffled through 30 years of dance music history in a way that made it look easy.
In fact, many club DJs that stick to music long enough actually tend to get better once they’ve entered the thick of middle-age—a generalization that does not hold up for artists working in the more overtly performative, and perhaps less forgiving, realms of rock, pop, or hip-hop. “Trust no DJ under 45” is an adage coined by an older, wiser DJ friend of mine and, as the years go by, its intrinsic truth has become more and more apparent.