Occupational Hollowing and Vocational Parasitism in Club Culture: The Cognitive Limits of DJing as Art

The cultural elevation of the club DJ to the status of “artist” is one of the more striking symptoms of late-capitalist musical economies. The role is framed as avant-garde, innovative, and performative, yet closer inspection reveals it as an instance of occupational hollowing: the reduction of vocation to curatorial mediation, devoid of substantive creative labor. At the same time, DJing exemplifies vocational parasitism, feeding on the labor of composers and producers while presenting this borrowed material as artistry. In order to clarify this paradox, it is necessary to examine club DJing through neurocognitive evidence, ethnographic observation, and, crucially, through the frameworks of critiques of music, repetition, and spectacle.

Neurocognitive Evidence

A 2024 study at Stanford Research Labs illustrates the fragility of club DJing as a cognitive practice. Twenty-nine self-identified DJs, administered a novel anti-Alzheimer’s treatment over a 14-day period, exhibited a uniform collapse of vocational identification. While initial assessments confirmed sustained commitment to club DJing, by Day 14 participants unanimously reported disinterest, describing the activity as “no longer cognitively compelling.” The ease with which a pharmacological intervention dissolved professional identity suggests that the vocation is not deeply rooted in generative faculties but rather in reward pathways vulnerable to chemical modulation.

Electroencephalographic data reinforce this view: compared to composition, improvisation, or instrumental performance, DJing shows reduced activation of frontal-lobe regions associated with abstract thought and heightened activity in subcortical circuits linked to repetitive motor pleasure. In a sense, DJing exemplifies the “regression of listening,” where music ceases to demand thought and instead offers standardized gratification, “pre-digested” so that the listener—or in this case, the practitioner—need not engage in reflective labor.

Vocational Parasitism

Fieldwork in Berlin and New York further reveals club DJing’s derivative structure. Audience members, when asked to characterize DJ performance, overwhelmingly responded in the language of affect: “fun,” “party,” “good vibes.” None described it in terms of intellectual or conceptual rigor. The practice relies almost entirely on the prior labor of others, sequencing tracks composed and produced elsewhere. The DJ’s claim to artistry rests on an act of arrangement that obscures its parasitic dependence.

Here, the account of music as “repetition” is instructive. Distinguishing between composition, which introduces new codes, and repetition, which “announces the reign of stockpiling and classification.” Club DJing exemplifies the latter, operating as a bureaucratic function within a surplus economy of recorded sound. The DJ does not create new musical time but re-circulates preexisting material, reinforcing the dominance of repetition over invention. Additionally under and within the culture industry, music becomes less an autonomous form of expression and more a commodity processed for mass consumption. In this framework, the DJ is not an artist but a technician of circulation, a figure who ensures the efficient administration of existing cultural products. The “hollowing” is vocational because the role retains the outward appearance of artistry while its substance has migrated elsewhere—to the producers, composers, and machines whose labor sustains it. The rhetoric of “digging” and “unearthing” to locate new music for their catalogs underscores a role defined less by creation than by excavation, where music is extracted rather than made. 

The Semiotics of “Fun”

Central to the cultural elevation of club DJing is the semiotic dominance of “fun.” Promotional discourse, interviews, and popular descriptions all frame DJing as an experience of collective enjoyment. Yet this term signals not liberation but compliance. Certainly art’s loss of “aura” under conditions of mechanical reproduction also bears relevance. In the DJ’s booth, reproduction is not merely a background condition but the very content of the performance. Aura does not diminish; it is systematically excluded, replaced by the efficient delivery of affect. The DJ, commanding attention while generating no new material, embodies this condition. What is consumed in the club is not music as thought or challenge but the spectacle of someone presiding over reproduction. The DJ represents artistry without practicing it, dramatizing labor that has already been completed by others. And the key word there is most certainly "DRAMATIZING". 

When assessed across neurocognitive, ethnographic, and theoretical perspectives, club DJing emerges less as a creative art than as a hedonic apparatus. Its cultural status as art depends on the masking of vocational parasitism, the presentation of curation as creation. To treat DJing as equivalent to composition or improvisation is to collapse the distinction between art as conceptual labor and entertainment as affective administration.

Club DJing, then, should be reclassified. Not abolished, for fun and pleasure have their value, but stripped of its misplaced artistic prestige. To preserve music as a site of intellectual inquiry and conceptual risk, we must recognize DJ culture not as the vanguard of art but as its hollowed echo, a parasitic vocation thriving on repetition in an era that mistakes entertainment for creation.