Yes. A DJ does not just "play" records: he selects, builds a narrative, reads a crowd in real time and improvises — the book Culture DJ compares that sense of improvisation to a jazz musician's. The confusion comes from the tool: because the instrument is an already-recorded disc, people assume the gesture is mechanical. It is the choice, the timing and the sequencing that make the work.

Who invented hip-hop?

A DJ. On August 11, 1973, at a block party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc extended the breaks — the passages where only the percussion remains — by playing two copies of the same record back and forth. Hip-hop was born from that DJ move; the MCs, who would become the rappers, came in afterwards to hype the crowd.

Is the nightclub really a French invention?

Yes. Under the Occupation, Parisian dance halls replaced the banned orchestras with records; in 1947, Paul Pacini opened the Whisky à Gogo in Paris; and it was Régine, then the venue's barmaid, who invented the modern discotheque: she threw out the jukebox, installed a double turntable for continuous, controlled music, and worked the lights by hand. The concept was then exported to London and New York.

Will artificial intelligence replace DJs?

As a tool, AI will settle into DJ booths: recommendations, playlist prep, analyzing the energy of a room. But people do not come to see a DJ to hear well-sequenced music — they come for a personality, a universe and a human connection that no algorithm reproduces. AI will help average DJs be decent; it will never make a great DJ.

Why do we say the DJ was the music tastemaker before the Internet?

Because without streaming or social media, a track only existed in France if someone played it. That someone was a DJ: on the free radio stations after 1981, on the specialty shows of the national networks, in clubs and on mixtapes. The DJ was the sounding board for the music the industry ignored — hip-hop and electronic music reached the French public through his turntables.

What is the cultural role of the DJ?

Why is the DJ so misunderstood?

"You're a DJ? So you party, you meet girls, you have fun." Every DJ has heard that line. The caricature is so entrenched that Cut Killer made it the heart of his preface to Culture DJ:

We are not just "party entertainers": we are artists, musicians, performers.

This misunderstanding has precise causes. Four, to be exact:

The apparent ease. In the digital era, the gear is accessible and the software does a lot — from a distance, anyone can do it. Up close, hard-earned experience is what separates a clean transition from a set that holds a room.
The absence of classical training. No conservatory, no music theory, no diploma: people conclude there is nothing to learn. That is confusing the absence of a school with the absence of skill.
Easy access to music. When a music library was crates of vinyl you had to find, pay for and carry, the work of selection was visible. A hard drive weighs nothing — the work of selection has not changed.
The button-pusher cliché. The image of the DJ "pushing buttons with his arms in the air" comes from a limited understanding of what actually happens in the booth: reading the crowd, managing the energy, making calls in real time.

Dismantling these four prejudices requires neither indulgence nor activism. You just have to look at what DJs have actually given to culture — and that is precisely the story nobody tells.

Three global cultures were born behind turntables

The most ignored fact in modern popular music: the biggest genres of the past fifty years were invented by DJs — not by instrumentalists, not by record labels.

Date	What was born	The DJ(s) behind it
1940s-50s	The modern discotheque, in Paris	Régine, at the Whisky à Gogo
1956	The club DJ profession, in Cannes	Lucien Leibovitz, the "opérateur"
August 11, 1973	Hip-hop, in the Bronx	DJ Kool Herc
Early 1980s	House, in Chicago	The post-disco DJs (first record: Jesse Saunders)
Late 1980s	Techno, in Detroit	Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May

Hip-hop, today the dominant culture on the planet, was born from a DJ's technical move: on August 11, 1973, at a block party in the Bronx, Kool Herc extended the breaks in his records by playing two copies of the same track back and forth. The dancers caught fire, MCs came in to hype the crowd — rap was originally the DJ's sidekick, not the other way around. The reversal came with money: after the success of Rapper's Delight in 1979, record labels signed the rappers and left the DJs behind.

House and techno tell the same story: when disco died commercially at the turn of the 1980s, it was DJs — in Chicago, in New York, then the "Holy Trinity" of Detroit — who kept it going, stripped it down and invented modern electronic dance music. As Culture DJ puts it: house and techno share the same origin, "the creativity and innovation of DJs".

The nightclub? A French invention. The first DJ? A Frenchman.

This is the least-known chapter of the whole story, and it is French through and through. The roots of modern clubbing go back to the clandestine parties of the Parisian zazous under the Occupation (1941-1944): jazz was repressed, live orchestras were driven out, so people danced to records — out of necessity first, out of culture next.

In 1947, Paul Pacini opened the Whisky à Gogo on rue de Beaujolais in Paris. His barmaid was named Régina Zylberberg — Régine. She is the one who invented the modern discotheque: she threw out the jukebox (so that customers, as she put it, would "stop putting on slow songs"), installed a double turntable guaranteeing continuous, curated music, painted the lamps in different colors and worked them by hand from the electrical panel. Continuous music, controlled selection, stagecraft: the DNA of the club — and of DJing — was laid down by a woman, in Paris.

Nine years later, in 1956, Pacini opened a Whisky à Gogo in Cannes, at the end of the Croisette. Behind the decks: Lucien Leibovitz, a former zazou in a white work coat marked "opérateur". From 9:30 pm until 4 or 5 in the morning, without a day off, he did what no job description yet covered: two turntables, a switcher, tracks matched by key and by rhythm, a selection adapted to the room — the exact definition of the club DJ, twenty years before the word even existed in France. He would end his career at Europe 1, unknown to the general public, never aware he had been a pioneer.

Before Spotify, the tastemaker was the DJ

The term "disc jockey" was coined in 1935 by the American journalist Walter Winchell, to describe the radio hosts who played records on air. That is no coincidence: for seventy years, radio and the DJ were the main channel of music discovery.

In France, the history is documented: Hubert Wayaffe invented jingles and the hit parade on Europe n°1, Président Rosko imposed his "minimum talk, maximum music" on RTL, then the end of the state monopoly in 1982 freed the airwaves — and with them, the music nobody was programming. Hip-hop and electronic music reached the French public through the turntables of Sidney, Dee Nasty and the free-radio DJs, not through the industry. With no music videos, no streaming, no social media, a track only existed if a DJ played it: on the radio, in a club, on a mixtape. The DJ was the sounding board for marginalized music — he literally decided what France was going to dance to.

That gatekeeper role came at a cost the listener never saw: digging — entire days spent at record shops hunting for the track nobody else would have. Some defended their finds with a ferocity that remains legendary — Culture DJ tells of a Marseille pioneer who went as far as breaking records in the shop to keep other DJs from getting the same music as him. You can smile at that; above all, it is proof that selection was a work of art, in the literal sense.

The question is fair: if Spotify discovers music for us, what use is the tastemaker?

Three things the algorithm does not do. First, context: a statistical recommendation does not know it is 1:40 am, that the room just sang along and now needs to breathe before you pick it back up. Second, risk: an algorithm optimizes for retention; a DJ bets on the track nobody knows — that is how genres are born. Third, human connection: people come to see a DJ for his personality and the universe he creates, not just to listen to music. AI will analyze a room's atmosphere and prep playlists — fine, that is tooling. It will not replace what makes an entire room live the same moment at the same time.

The real danger is not AI anyway, but inverted priorities: when up to 80 percent of a DJ's career plays out on social media and 20 percent on talent, the profession manufactures DJs who are famous before they are good. It is the modern version of the 1979 misunderstanding — money rewarding visibility over art.

The recognition that never came

Here is the final paradox. France invented the discotheque, employed the first club DJ in history, gave the world the French Touch — and DJing is still not considered part of French heritage. The Covid crisis exposed it brutally: an entire sector judged, neglected, forgotten by the cultural recognition plans, while more than half of the country's nightclubs closed.

Even the greatest had to go through other countries to exist in the eyes of their own: Daft Punk conquered the United States and the United Kingdom before France claimed them, and DJ Snake had already conquered the world "before the French media realized he was a compatriot". No one is a prophet in their own land — least of all behind turntables.

That is exactly why this Academy exists, and why it opens with a culture pillar rather than tutorials: you cannot pass on a technique cut off from its roots. DJing is a culture — and it deserves to be learned as one. The logical next step is understanding how you become a DJ — with this history in your back pocket.