Ah yes! It’s the old iPod versus DJ debate. It’s almost a right of passage for engaged couples now. I have read so many pro/con lists that I feel like it’s all been said.
But I’m going to say it anyway.
For a long, long while I was convinced I’d go iPod all the way. Music is extraordinarily important to me and I the last thing I want at the wedding* is some schlocky DJ sporting excessively gelled hair cavorting around the audio booth, spewing forth cheesy aphorisms in a pop radio-ready voice and playing jams so lousy that guests are congregating in the corners for fear of being spotted within several feet of the empty dance floor.**
I even spent hours developing an ultimate master playlist of songs that flowed from lounge-like to progressively dancier.*** I took into account our guests’ varied musical interests; frontloading the list with older, softer tunes ranging from Patsy Cline to Velvet Underground to early DJ Shadow and saving the Lyrics Born, Beastie Boys, and Gogol Bordello for the wilder, alcohol-induced, grandparents-have-gone-to-bed part of the evening. Yep, this way we’d hear what meant the most to us and our guests. Plus, we’d save a ton of money! The iPod was clearly the superior choice.
What convinced me I might be wrong after all?
I started reading**** accounts of others’ experience with DJs. I started to see how they could be vital to establishing a flow, reading a crowd, and elevating spirits. As an added bonus, neither the beau and I nor any of our friends would have to be distracted from the evening’s festivities by rushing over to the iPod to change playlists or add new music on the fly.
Via http://media.createdigitalmedia.net
I warmed to the DJ idea pretty much immediately. And it didn’t hurt that one of my brigadiers has a cousin whose husband***** is in the music biz in L.A. We plan to try to make contact with some potential “underground” DJs (a.k.a., they don’t typically do weddings) via this tiny network. If that dead-ends, I figure we can toss up a Craigslist post and try to find someone cool that way.
But. There is always a but.
Our venue is going to kick us out at 10:00pm. Well, we’re actually supposed to be mostly gone by then, so I guess the party will start switching gears around 9:30pm. To put it bluntly, this kinda jacks the flow. 9:30pm is generally the wedding witching hour when the guests have a few drinks in them and their blood sugar levels are spiking from dessert. But instead of kicking things into high gear, we’ll be herding people onto the street. Boo.
I’m not saying this will ruin the whole evening, of course. But it’ll definitely be a real interruption. Not everyone will choose to continue with us to the after-party, so we’ll have to say some goodbyes a tad prematurely, and that will be kinda sad.
The after-party. We haven’t officially secured it yet, but we’re 98% sure that the second floor of a bar on State St. is going to be all ours. We’re not allowed to use our own iPod in there, nor bring in our own DJ (not to mention that would be complicated), so that means we’ll be subject to whatever the DJ downstairs chooses to play that night. Which will probably be your average pop/rap beats. This can be fun sometimes. But I’ve really been looking forward to having a massive dance party at some point during the evening, with some of the music I don’t usually hear in the average bar or club. And I’m kinda afraid that our luck will run out and we’ll get a downstairs DJ who is really into playing, I don’t know, Julio Iglesias Jr. and Ciara remixes, and so nobody will be in the mood to bust a move.
This also brings up another issue I’m grappling with: we are having an outdoor wedding that will start shutting down at 9:30pm. Do we really wanna hire a DJ when we won’t even be able to utilize him during the part of the night that’s most danceable? Is it really worth it just to hire somebody to play music during the cocktail hour and dinner?
As always, there are some options:
- Hire the DJ but move the ceremony start time back to 3:30 so that we have an earlier dinner and maybe an extra hour or so of dancing and talking with everyone before the party moves on to another location. At the after-party, deal with whatever random DJ is working the bar.
- Use an iPod during the ceremony and reception. Try to find somebody cheap who will agree to wrangle it on our behalf, plus act as psuedo-MC. At the after-party, deal with whatever random DJ is working the bar.
- Hire a local band during the ceremony and reception (ka-ching!). Look for a different place to have the after-party where we might be able to bring in our own DJ (ka-ching! ka-ching!)
- Various other combinations of all of the above that I don’t care to write out here lest you be rendered so bored and sleepy that you pass out and faceplant into your keyboard, and the “U” key gets kind of stuck into your forehead, and you don’t realize this until later when you wake up and you are clicking through the archives of your favorite web comic and the key falls off and plops into your mug of coffee and the coffee splatters on your new favorite sweater, and you’re like, goddamnit, I just washed this stupid sweater.
- Call off the wedding and stay home eating cookies.
Yeah. I’m liking #5.
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* Besides a brawl to suddenly break out between my family and the beau’s, that is.
** Let me derail for a moment with a side story: I went to a wedding once where the DJ played only one song I wanted to dance to. The entire night. The rest of the songs made me want to pull a Monty Python and run away, run away! Dude, nobody should be expected to listen to — let alone get down to — Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.” That DJ was an utter disgrace. I can’t even postulate that he was skewing the songs towards the bride’s individual tastes, because I think I saw her on the floor a grand total of once during the evening. I can only hope that she wasn’t in a bathroom sobbing, “Oh God, somebody please make him turn off ‘Barbie Girl.'”
*** I started building this before we even got engaged, because wow, I’m super obsessive-compulsive awesome rad.
**** Reading. It’ll get you in trouble all the time.
***** You following this?
We are figuring this out now. Stupid decisions.
We are in in the throes of deciding between two locations–but they both kick us out at 10pm, too. Such a bummer, I agree. So much for dancing until dawn. However, my firm suspicion is that if you get enough alcohol in everyone (but not too much alcohol–see “vomiting”) and tell your bridesmaids/friends/family to dominate the dance floor, there will be no problem. I really thought I was a do-it-yourself kind of girl, but I really don’t want to spend my wedding day worrying about music flow or a possibly jammed ipod. I’m all for hiring a dj! Give him/her your extensive playlist and tell them to have fun.
Yep. Parallel planning. The noise ordinance sets in at 10pm for us too so, even though we can technically continue the partying, we can’t actually have music with any discernible volume after 10. I.e. – no party. That’s part of the reason I’m okay without a DJ/using our playlists and an assistant DJ, since I don’t feel like it’s going to be a rager, given these limitations. And since it’s a Sunday for us and bars will mostly be closed by the time we get down the canyon from our site and back to civilization, we’re going to see if we can find a hotel that will allow a rocking afterparty with en-suite or rooftop dancing. My guess is that older adults will be thrilled with a 9:30 pm end time and mostly wanted to jive with Sinatra anyhow. And your peer-group friends will follow you to a bar and have a great time regardless with the fun of it all. That’s what we’re hoping, at least…
However, if you have some good underground LA connections, I’d love to know what they are.
DJ idea is excellent. We are thinking of it too. For the ceremony we’re gonna invite a string quartet and for the party a DJ.
I’ll try to use your experience and to look through my guests profiles in order to choose music which everyone will like.
And yes, it’s not so easy to choose a right DJ. So I wish you good luck!