Introducing the ever-popular DJ…

In many ways, the DJ card is emblematic of the whole pop tarot deck. She is the artist at whose hands culture is re-shaped and re-combined in new and novel ways which suit her better. She’s there any time you put on a CD, change the radio station, or program your Tivo. She’s the creative force which allows you to take something that is pre-packaged and make it your own. She represents also the old made new, and we can see this illustrated in the old-school photo of her overlaid against the computer sound-editing screens.

A website on DJ history calls her: “part obsessive record collector, part mad scientist, part intuitive psychologist of the party groove” and Wikipedia expands this to say:

Yet, even simply “playing records” allows for the DJ to bring his own creative ideas to bare upon the pre-recorded music. Playing songs in sequence offers the opportunity to observe relationships forming between different songs. Given careful attention and control, the DJ can create these relations and encourage them to become more expressive, beautiful and telling. If successful, it allows the listener or audience a way in towards a deeper and more complete experience of the music as well as insight into the person choosing the music sequence.

Here’s another history of the DJ, and here’s one of the funniest Photoshop images I’ve seen in a while with Saddam Hussein as a DJ.

The realm of the DJ, however, is not all just fun and games. The cruel Corpsoration both fears and envies the wild free spirit of the DJ. It attempts to place ridiculous restrictions on it’s very lifeblood - it’s customers - by burying fun under puritanical warning labels and frivolous lawsuits (see the evil RIAA logo in the corner, and this page for more info). When not trying to outright put a halt to the DJ’s creative skills, the Corpsoration spends it’s time trying to eat them. The iPod advertisement in the back represents the theft of the fun and cool spirit of the DJ, and its imprisonment behind a wall of advertising and paid-access.

The DJ card appearing in your life means that maybe you need to try out some new combinations. You need to get down and get funky, and re-arrange your life, in order to bring out the underlying “groove” which supports and propels all things.

[For more info on the pop culture tarot, go here]