Recently Joel Zimmerman aka Deadmau5 called David Guetta a ’button pusher’ who basically needs ’two iPods and a mixer’ for his show.
Zimmerman told to Rolling stones, that Guetta ’has two iPods and a mixer and he just plays tracks – like, 'Here's one with Akon, check it out!'... there’s still button-pushers getting paid half a million. And not to say I’m not a button-pusher. I’m just pushing a lot more buttons.’
Obviously Guetta couldn’t leave it at that. He responded in an interview to Vibe magazine:
“The big DJs start by being bedroom producers and they have a hit and suddenly start playing in front of thousands of people. But the way I did it was by working six nights, playing eight hours sets every night. I’ve learned a lot about how to communicate with the crowd, so when my music crossed over that stayed," he said, "The connection with the people is what makes the difference for me.”
There’s been much accusations about DJs ’miming’ their sets. Steve Angello was one of the first to be critizised. French electro duo Justice got caught some years back playing a midi controller that wasn’t plugged in. Guetta got involved in a similar ordeal at the 2012 Tomorrowland Festival. It is hard to tell if Guetta was ’faking it’, but the social networks saw a wave of outrage. Deadmau5 comment was probably inspired by the incident in question.
We are not the ones to judge Guetta. He seems to have shaken off the accusations with his latest comments saying: 'If you listen to a hip-hop DJ, he's not playing his own music. It makes a huge difference. When I perform, everything you hear is me playing my own music. You'll hear unreleased music; every record I play, I will edit and use parts of another record to make it unique. I'm not gonna play what you hear on the radio.’
#1 in The Official Global DJ Rankings, the veteran DJ will surely not be affected by this. He’ll be looking forward to DJing in South-America after his recent birthday. As discussed in another article, he’ll also be looking forward to the release of Rihanna’s ’Unapolagetic’, where he’s involved on one of the highly-anticipated tracks.
To finish off, listen to one of the tracks to be lifted from David Guetta's last album Nothing But the Beat 2.0!