When David Guetta isn’t tripping balls on-stage, he’s contemplating the bygone era when DJs didn’t have the luxury of using pre-made mp3 playlists for their performances. In case you didn’t know, he’s very ahead of the times.
Guetta recalled such an archaic instance of DJing in a recent interview with Beatport:
“Something crazy happened to me on the [first weekend of Coachella],” says Guetta. “I’m using Rekordbox and Pioneer to play, and before I saved my playlist to my SD card, my computer crashed. So I just had to put all my music in a random order on USB sticks at the last minute, doing it really old school, scrolling to look for the records I wanted to play next.”
Indeed, those days of having to manually select tracks from your collection as you mix are pretty much considered ancient history now, says the French producer, who obviously knows a thing or two about how time works.
Later in the same interview, he described downloading a song on iTunes — that thing that came out eons and eons ago, like in the prehistoric 2000s — as “completely crazy.” It’s a wonder he and his camp even remembered how to do such a thing:
The Black Eyed Peas’ surprise appearance also threw a curveball. “When Fergie decided to come last minute, it was like, OK, but I don’t have ‘I Gotta Feeling,’ because I don’t play it any more. I called my stage manager to go download ‘I Gotta Feeling’ on iTunes so I could play it. It was just completely crazy, but I loved it.”
What’s even crazier? The fact that I’m turning 28 in a few weeks, which in Guetta’s time-warped universe, makes me about 65. At least I’ll be able to retire?
Revisit quite possibly my favorite clip of the “Hey Mama” beatmaker: