To me, there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. I love pop music, I always have. Growing up, I was into hair metal. I was into death metal. I was into punk. I was into break dance music, early electro, Kraftwerk. I never thought of music as having boundaries. As long as you never really think that, nothing stops you from jumping place to place.
Tommie Sunshine is a DJ for the ADD generation. ADD DJ. Apple‘s omnipresent shuffle feature has obviously influenced tastes in an unprecedented way, and a brand new breed of beat matcher is adapting to meet the resulting dance-floor demand. While doctors continue to over-prescribe Ritalin for attention deficit cases, though, music is the only mind-altering substance Sunshine craves these days.
When Felix da Housecat found me in Atlanta, I was 28 or 29. It was just around the time I could begin to take what I was doing seriously. Before that, it was just one giant swimming pool of alcohol and drugs. I’m four years sober. So when I DJ, music is my narcotic. Music takes me somewhere totally else.
Going on a sonic walkabout inside his head seems to bode well for Sunshine too. Promoters continually book him in far flung locales all over the globe. Australia particularly adores Sunshine. They can’t get enough of Tommie’s over-the-top persona in the Land Down Under. He’s been there a full five times already, and racked up a gold plaque from Sony in the process. There’s obviously something about the man that Aussies relate to.
The original people of that land, the Aboriginal people, were really intense, spiritual, musical people. It’s crazy. Didgeridoo and really heavy sh!+. Shamanistic stuff. When you have that as a basis for a society, people are gonna wanna go out and have a good time. Plus, let’s not forget, it’s a fµ©king penal colony. That place was a jail. That’s where they sent criminals.
We don’t understand how similar we are to the rest of the world. I think the statistic is that 7% of Americans have a passport. When 93% of your country has their head planted firmly up their @$$, how are you supposed to have empathy for a country that we’re at war with? You can’t, because they’re not real people in the eyes of most Americans. They’re a fictitious nation; that’s fantasy land over there, except for the people that are sent there.
Sunshine headlines Beta Nightclub this Saturday, February 20.
Great post!