The answer was that this would be narcissistic. Long ago I was diagnosed with adjustment disorders with features narcissistic personality. To me, it seems ironic, because I never forced anyone to take interest in me. Similarly, Sidney SN releasing mixes was never meant as a desire to be famous. That happened as a reaction to events. I also don’t think I’m oversensitive to a events.
Nevertheless, as soon as I told myself that deliberately persuading crowds with my person, manipulating them for my own goals, would be narcissistic, I began to reflect on the question of DJing. In a way, every DJ tries to win over crowds and manipulate people in order to be liked.
If a DJ plays to gain recognition, admiration, and a feeling of power over the crowd, that can have narcissistic traits. The truth is, almost every DJ wants that feeling of power over the audience. In their case, the desire and pleasure come through music.
Almost everyone who starts releasing music online also tries immediately to gain listeners and build a career through it. From the start, in such cases, it is somewhat self-serving. But there are also people who want to make things better through music, and so, as activists of their own goodwill, they try to speak through their music—that is the purpose of their DJing and production.
And of course, many DJs understand their role more as a guide of the audience’s energy. They try to create a connection, an atmosphere, and an experience where they themselves are not the center of the universe, but rather the music and the shared experience. Moreover, even if a DJ desires to be liked, it doesn’t have to be pathological. The desire for recognition—one of the narcissistic traits—is quite natural for a human being.
But in a way, every DJ wants recognition, sometimes also because DJing becomes their job and they need or want to earn money from the crowds they command. In a way, every DJ should know how to control crowds in order to sustain themselves, when the original idea of music fails. In this context, DJ often also adapts to the music a “narcissistic traits” in a given country and similar contexts, in order to keep their audience in that environment.
