Lifestyle "My Favorite Song"
(Song Removed)

Sometime towards the end of 2001 (roughly), I met this guy going by the name of Rock Stone on one of those Yahoo Music Chatboards that I used to frequent before I got annoyed with people wasting 100+ post threads on repeated debates over what constitutes a song as electro. Rock was in this band called Lifestyle, based out of Boston and connected to Freezepop, and asked if he could send me a CD. I said, of course.
Although I absolutely love receiving and listening to new music, most of the stuff that is sent to me by bands doesn't ever get played in a club. This is because, more often than not, when a band contacts me itself, it is with a demo-quality CD (even if it's actually released either by the band itself or a smaller indie label), meaning that, even if the songwriting is stellar, the production doesn't lend itself to play over club systems, where everything must sound big and clean. (Radio, on the other hand, is a completely different story). So, I do my best to keep in touch with the bands with the hope that a new, club-appropriate version will surface.
I thought that such a scenario might be the case with Lifestyle, but it wasn't. The band sent me a copy of the 2001 CD release Frontier, which was released through The Archenemy Record Company. I popped the disc into my CD player and the album's first track, "My Favorite Song," instantly became *my* favorite song. I thought this song to be perfect synthpop more in the Duran Duran fashion than the more prevalent Depeche Mode, um, mode. This was the sort of song that could fit in with the still-popular Britpop bands, Pulp in particular, and then-current hits from Bis and Ladytron.
But then a new problem presented itself. Playing new music in rock-oriented clubs is no easy task. (Long, rambling diversion from the point to follow.) As a DJ, your major task is to keep the dancefloor packed and you keep that crowd moving through song selection, not beatmatching. It's not always appropriate to beatmatch at rock clubs. There are several reason for this, but the big one is that in rock-based music, whether or not it has electronic elements in it, there is no uniformity to the rhythm. With techno and house, you're basically dealing with a limited range of beats per minute, which varies depending on the sub-genre your playing. For example, if I play an electro-techno set, most of the music is going to fall somewhere between 125 and 135 bpm. With rock-oriented music, the beats can be as slow as 90 bpm or as fast at 145 bpm. Additionally, the crowd at rock-oriented clubs tends to prefer hearing/dancing to songs in the form closest to the album version, so, if you're going to play a remix, which can lend to more consistency in the beats, it tends to be something that keeps the major points of the original song in tact adding, perhaps, longer (hence, easier to mix) intros, outros and bridges. With that in mind, the biggest difference between techno/house-based clubs and rock-based clubs is that, at the latter, your crowd is dancing to the song, not the beat.
Let's get back to the whole introducing a new song thing, though. When you play a new song, particularly if that song is by a band that most people in your city won't know, you're taking a huge risk of clearing the floor. So, when you play a new song, you have to cover your ass. The song before New Song should be a major hit. This ensures that you have the maximum amount of people on the dancefloor. Also, people might be so high off the Big Hit that they will continue dancing despite having never heard the song that follows. New Song must then be followed by a hit that is at least as massive as the first track, as to ensure that people will return to the floor should New Song tank. This is definitely the biggest gamble you will make if you DJ at a rock club. Sometimes, the songs that you are convinced will be major hits tank so bad that you will refuse to ever play them again. Other times, songs will tank, but you will remain convinced of their hit factor and play them week after week until the songs become the club hits of the year.
In this instance, I played New Song after "Just Can't Get Enough." Depeche Mode songs are almost always floorpackers at LA clubs, but this is the classic, the band's "Blue Monday." After fading up "My Favorite Song," I immediately cued "Common People," which was, essentially, Pulp's "Blue Monday." Between those two hits, the floor remained packed. Lifestyle was actually working. I was shocked. Even Ladytron's "Playgirl" didn't hit until playing it for a month straight. "My Favorite Song" became a staple of my sets for a year or two, never once failing to make people dance. I'm not sure if that ever did anything for the band, but I really hope that there were at a least a few folks in Los Angeles who ended up contacting the Boston band based on this song.
I lost touch with Lifestyle after Rock, my contact, left the group. This CD, according to the website, is out of stock. However, it's still listed in Archenemy's catalogue, so you might be able to order a copy.