If you don't know what that's from, go see Stepbrothers. It's like masturbating in a time machine.
I recently received the news that in addition to being Best Man at St. Aubyn's wedding next month, I also get to be the unofficial deejay. He asked me to email him a list of songs that he will give to the actual deejay, and I responded with as much excitement as a 13-year-old girl finding out that NSYNC will be playing her next birthday party. Wait, kids still listen to NSYNC, right? That's just a little taste of some of the songs I'm going to be picking. Holler back.
I've always wanted to deejay a wedding dance. Back in 2004, I made a half-assed comment (I mistakenly thought the bride-to-be knew I was joking) that I would deejay her wedding, and then she legitmately asked me a few weeks beforehand if I would, but by then I realized I would rather just get hammersmithed and dance like an idiot than stay sober and play songs, so I declined. Apparently they were counting on me to actually do it, so they had to scramble and find someone else, so I felt bad. To repay her, I just got superduper drunk and provided free entertainment in the form of some MC Hammer dance moves.
But this situation here is the best of both worlds. This way I get to pick the songs beforehand, and ALSO get bombed and shake my tailfeather. I spent probably 10 minutes in the 'deejay booth' at Ike's wedding, making adjustments to the MC's playlist.
His argument: "Yeah, um, I've been MCing weddings for 10 years. I think I know what songs people like to hear."
My argument: "Well, I've been getting drunk and acting stupid with most of these people for 10 years. Play Barbie Girl next, dude."
At the risk of tooting my own horn, after I tweaked his playlist a bit, the dance floor was packed for the rest of the night. As Jon Jon would say: Toot toot.
During all my years of attending wedding dances, I've been on opposite ends of the spectrum. I've been the 15-year-old scavenging half-empty champagne bottles off of abandoned tables in the corner, and simply watching the dance floor, trying to maintain my composure so that when I unexpectedly run into my Spanish profesora by the punch bowl, she won't know I've been drinking; and I've been the 24-year-old squinting through a drunken haze at the 15-year-old scavenging bottles in the corner, and asking my buddies if she looks like she's 20, does it really matter if she's only 15? Through these experiences, I've been making observations and forming opinions, and now I organize them into a manifesto of sorts, for your enjoyment.
Rule #1- And this is Wedding Dance 101 here, but it's amazing how many deejays fuck this up: Play the old people music (waltzes, tangos, other shit that no one under age 50 knows how to do) at the beginning. Old people don't stick around for the end of the dance, and if you play one of these songs at the end when it's just kids out there, it results in the biggest stampede since the dinosaurs got loose in Jurassic Park.
Rule #2- Do not, repeat, do not start off the dance with Celebration by Kool & the Gang. I bet like 75% of the weddings I've been to are guilty of this. It basically wastes a great wedding song, because nobody dances to the first song of the night. You could put Jessica Biel, naked, with a hundred dollar bill in each hand, in the middle of that dance floor, and you're still not gonna see any dudes out there, for the same reason that you don't ever see a 200-pound girl leaving a bar with a random guy anytime before last call: we're just not that drunk yet.
Rule #3- In a follow-up to #2, don't start throwing around all your best songs at the beginning. No matter how good the songs are right away, you just have to accept the fact that the dance floor will be pretty empty. If you're deejaying, you have to look at it like you're flirting with a stranger from across the bar a little bit. You can't just play a bunch of crap at the beginning, just like you wouldn't act like a total asshammer right away, or then the girl will ignore you completely. But you can't play all your awesome songs right away in a desparate ploy for attention, either. You wouldn't just stroll up to the girl at the bar and say, "Hi, my name is Brad. I bench 250, squat a clean 400, volunteer for disaster victims on weekends, love watching The Notebook and snuggling, have 1.3% body fat, and enjoy going down on a girl for hours on end." Of course not. You'd come off as creepy, potentially a serial killer. Play a few decent songs at first, you know, kind of putting the vibe out, letting them know that yeah, I'm pretty good now, but wait until you see me later. Then let her get a few drinks in her system and take advantage of her when she assures her friends that she's OK to drive home by herself. Wait...I may have just mixed up my metaphors there.
Rule #4- There seems to be a backlash lately against songs like the Chicken Dance, the Macarena, and the Electric Slide. Bullshit, I say. There's nothing wrong with any of these songs. I always thought that the biggest omission during Wedding Crashers was to not include learning the Electric Slide. Look at your typical dance floor during that song. It's usually like 15-20 girls for every guy. If you're a dude, you gotta love that ratio. Learn the Electric Slide, boys. In fact, learn to love it. Once you establish yourself as one of the only dudes in the joint who is both comfortable enough and coordinated enough to execute the Slide, it's like fishing with dynamite (speaking from experience.) Even G.I. Joe would tell you, "Knowing is half the battle." And I'll be damned if he ever led me astray.
Rule #5- Along those same lines, choose your spots wisely when you're inserting slow dances. If you're a deejay, an important underlying factor to keep in mind during the reception is: There are people trying to get laid here. You have a duty--nay, a responsibility--to help make that happen (especially if you're a guy.) With that in mind, you can't just throw slow songs in wherever you want. Slow songs are a very key part of the 'hooking up at a wedding dance' process, but as is so often the case in life, timing is everything. Don't play any Alison Krauss right after you just played Shout! Everyone just spent the last 6 minutes jumping around, sweating, and if you're anything like my friends, most likely spraying beer on each other. Chicks don't wanna slow dance with you if they can feel a mix of sweat and PBR dripping on top of their head (also speaking from experience.)
Rule #6- Contrary to popular belief, it is OK to play the same song more than once, as long as there is at least an hour and a half between repeats. I've always believed this, and my argument was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt at Ike's wedding. Early on we requested Apache by the Sugarhill Gang, and Bergman and I did our dance to it. (By 'our dance' I mean the Fresh Prince and Carlton's, but as far as most people know, I made it up. I've never claimed to be the originator, but when people compliment me on it, let's just say that I don't tell them otherwise.) A few people noticed us, liked it, caught on pretty quick, and then the deejay cut the song short. Unreal. So later I requested Jump On It by Sir Mix-a-Lot. The deejay didn't know it was the same song, only slightly remade. Sneaky, I know. This time more people were joining in. Then, almost at the end of the night, I made him play Apache again. He was dead set against it, but I finally convinced him. See the above logic I used for this argument. This time, there was a rush towards the dance floor by people who weren't already out there. And every single person on that dance floor was doing the Fresh Prince dance. And it was spectacular.
Rule #7- Don't play any of those bush league megamixes. I've heard this a few times with Michael Jackson songs, where it's like 30 seconds of Billie Jean, then 30 seconds of Thriller, 30 seconds of Beat It, etc. etc. That's just garbage, for so many reasons. C'mon, this isn't a Jock Jams CD.
Rule #8- Keep the newer, "the only way to dance to this song is to grind the shit out of each other" rap songs to a minimum. I would say 2 max; depending on your crowd, you could go 1, or even none. This isn't El Roco on a Thursday night; let's try and at least keep the illusion of appropriateness here. The main reason for this rule is the abundance of parents that are usually in attendance. Let's be honest here: if I'm a father, and if I wanted to watch some spikey-haired shithead with his shirt partially unbuttoned rub his dong all over my daughter, while flashing westside at his buddies with one hand, and sloshing a keg beer all over the $300 dress that I paid for with his other hand....well then, I would just videotape my nightmares.
Rule #9- Always, always, always finish with a slow song. You'd think this would go without saying, but I've been to more than one wedding that broke this sacred rule. A slow song puts some closure on the party. You can't just play some kick-ass song and then say, "All right, that's it, folks!" That'd be like if CBS immediately cut to an episode of Law & Order, 2.5 seconds after the National Championship game ended. You gotta be able to see One Shining Moment; you gotta have some time to wind down a little bit. Plus, finishing with a slow dance is beneficial to all the wedding-goers: The people who are about to hook up can whisper their room numbers in each others' ear. The wallflower couple who hasn't set foot on the dance floor yet can share a romantic moment on their journey to being the most boring couple ever. The single ladies can go drunk dial their ex-boyfriends. And the single dudes can go shotgun a couple of beers at the bar before they go back to their hotel room and jerk off to their $16.95 skinemax pay-per-view. Everybody's a winner here.
Of course, I wouldn't pretend to know everything about deejaying a wedding dance, so any suggestions are welcome.
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