New York house DJ David Morales is tired and it hasn’t much to do with his punishing schedule. Temporarily based in Spain because he plays in Europe a few times a week during the summer season, the New York native’s gripes are mainly to do with the music industry. Although he maintains that he is as devoted as ever to his beloved house music, the former Paradise Garage resident feels that the media are to blame for building up and knocking down dance music.
“You can say that ‘it’s on the way out’ about everything: you can say it about music, fashion, cars, movies or buildings,” he proffers. “At the same time, I’m not into segregation or the idea that you can only play trance or electro or vocal house at a particular club. That’s why some dance music has become boring. In the old days, you could experiment with a wide range of styles, it was cool to slip in a mid-tempo record once in a while or, when I was throwing parties in Brooklyn, to get singers or bands to perform as well.
“You go to a club nowadays, and from the opening bell, it’s bang bang bang, there’s no seduction, no build. The other problem is the promoters: you have guys promoting for the money’s sake. The whole point of having a party is entertaining, showing people a good time."
Blaming technology for the deluge of mediocre records that overshadow the great releases, Morales feels that music is too easily available nowadays, that the mystique about discovering something has disappeared.
“Technology allows so many people to make music, but just because you can buy a car doesn’t mean you can drive it,” he explains. “Back in the day, an unreleased record was only available on a cassette. There was a clear division between DJs and producers and you had to rent a studio and hire an engineer, it wasn’t so simple back then. Nowadays, the industry is totally fucked.”
Despite his misgivings about the current climate, Morales still belongs to the very upper level of the international DJ elite – his yearly earnings often top $2 million – but he feels that he has little in common with many of the names on the top 100 list.
“At the start, I had another job and was DJing just to make enough to buy records and beers. I wasn’t coming from the same angle as the Tiestos and Oakenfolds of this world, where I wanted to make a lot of fast money. A lot of DJs are overpaid; these guys who come in and play their banging tunes for two hours are a joke: it takes me two hours to warm up! What really started my international career was remixing in the '90s,” he says, referring to the period when everyone from Whitney Houston to Chaka Khan and The Jacksons benefited from Morales’ deft touch.
“It was a strange situation because I was travelling to the UK to play and was still getting just a few hundred pounds and the big labels were offering me crazy money for remixes!”
The glamour and glitz of the DJ lifestyle are a far cry from Morales’ background: growing up in the projects in Brooklyn, he freely admits that he was ‘a knucklehead’ in his teens and that his behaviour nearly cost him his life.
“It was a rough, rough neighbourhood and I got shot when I was 15,” he says. “I was a gang member walking around with a nine millimetre or an Uzi. We were baby gangsters, crashing parties and ending up in brawls and I got shot by someone I knew. I was lucky: it could have been a very different set of circumstances. I could have got badly hurt and nearly all the guys I grew up with are either dead or in jail.
"My best friend was shot dead when he was just 18. I have two teenage kids and I can’t think about my son walking around with a gun. I was very lucky to escape. I know I’ve bitched a lot about the way things are but I am grateful: I suppose you could say that music really saved my life.”