Art of the DJ
A short animated/live hybrid documentary about the art of the DJ from the beautiful mind of Tony Sinclair (a.k.a. Rock the Beat). Unlike a traditional music biopic, this is more than just his story (although that is fascinating), and more than the catalog of songs he will guide us through (although that is a playlist to star and save on your streaming platform of choice), but this is about the power the DJ wields over the people in the space they play. A phenomenon that lives at the edge of behavioral science and metaphysics…psychology and trance. The power to hypnotize us and almost puppet our bodies, hearts, minds and lives.
Context
Tony is a DJ, emcee, music producer, music engineer, B-Boy, popper, locker, and all around amazing artist. He was so dynamic that not a single person could take their eyes off of him when he was on stage. Suffice to say, he knew something about moving an audience…he had us in the palm of his hand.
One day in 2012 we sat at our parents' kitchen table and he let me in on a little secret of DJs. "When you DJ you have to be in constant awareness of the collective vibe and the vibe of every person in the room, while playing one song, setting up the next and jumping on the mic to emcee every so often. You know what's going on with the crowd better than anyone. Based on what I'm vibing I can start fights, stop fights, make people fall in love, and even get someone pregnant just by what I choose to play! It's like you are a puppeteer."
Sitting in his studio, with wall to wall crates packed with vinyl, was like watching a brilliant mathematician scribbling formulas on whiteboards in rapid succession and listening at the feet of a Griot. His mind is just beautiful. It is like a living almanac of 20th–21st Century music. He hears 4 bars of some random music and can tell you what song it is, by what artists, on what album, recorded in what studio, and tell you stories about the tour. AND tell you who they sampled from and who that sampled musician was covering, etc. etc. While seamlessly blending one song into another on the turntables, he told the stories behind the music. It was like having the soundtrack in the foreground of a film.
Background
As a small child, maybe 4 years old, my father took me and my brother Rob to go see Tony (our big brother) at work in the middle of the day. I remember bits and pieces of that day.
We were walking or driving through the streets of Costa Rica (Somewhere in Guanacaste, I believe. Or was it when we had moved to Limon?). The jungle was never too far from the little streets we lived on and iguanas (big iguanas) were regulars on the tanning rocks and branches. This was 1981, so this was not the tourist industry version of Costa Rica people know of today, 2026. It was a bright, sunny day…almost white blaring light. We arrived at a building that didn't look like much and opened the door. Inside was pitch black. Black floor, ceiling, walls. Tony was there and so excited to see us. He said, "Hey Kiki, Bobby, look at this." He turned on blinking, colorful, laser like lights and right above my head was this shiny, sparkling sphere of mirrors. Then he jumped on a raised platform with metal railing around it with turntables and speakers. My big brother was a "Disc Jockey!!!" My sister had given me a disco wrap around skirt (a kind of burnt orange/mahogany) made of spandex. I went under that disco ball and spun and spun to get the skirt to fly and twirl, and my life was made.
We lived in the small roads and land plots that the jungle allowed us to inhabit, for a while anyway. We were out in the country with hardly any city amenities around, but somehow he found the one discotheque in I don't know how many miles and brought sounds from all over the place to our little spot in the jungle. (That's how I saw it at least.) He was only 18 years old and he had already started to move people to act and become with the secret art of the DJ.
He changed my life before I even really had one.
Two Inquiries
The film widens out from Tony to explore the secret he revealed to me in two ways:
The science of suggestion. We bring in voices who study how this actually works: researchers in the psychology of suggestion and persuasion, neuro-scientists of rhythm and entertainment (how separate bodies sync to a shared pulse), scholars of crowds and collective emotion. They give the film its evidence.
The traditions of trance. We bring in the other kind of expert, the culture-bearers. People from lineages where music has always been understood to bend the metaphysical: practitioners and elders from drumming and ritual-trance traditions, ecstatic worship, the Black church's transporting power, club and rave states of collective dissolution. They give the film its evidence.
