DJ Outlaw Charged with Murder
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An American DJ who shot a clubber five times with a shotgun following a DJ request dispute was this week charged with murder after prosecutors rejected his claim that he acted in self-defence.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said Johnny Jackson III (aka DJ Outlaw) was initially attacked by Mark Williams at Rockafella’s Nightclub, South Fulton County, for refusing to play the victim’s CD, then took revenge, shooting him in the car park outside.
“You have an absolute right to defend yourself if you feel you’re being threatened,” Outlaw’s defence attorney told reporters, “And you have the right to use force- deadly force if necessary,” (http://bit.ly/yAnkeY )
Swedish techno star Cari Lekebusch also encountered violence in the DJ booth some years ago in Stockholm, though over a misunderstanding over his identity, he told Skrufff in an interview in 2005.
“I was just about to play and was going through my records in my case when this guy came up to me and said ‘put the beer back, you can’t just steal the DJ’s beer’.
I said ‘I’m one of the DJs, I’m just about to start’ but there was something wrong with him, he was really aggressive and he tried to punch me,” Cari recalled.
“I was quick enough to duck and avoid being hammered. I don’t know if I can thank my kung fu skills for that but they certainly helped. He threw a punch at me and it’s no problem to avoid one punch so I did that, then he stopped because he realised that I really was a DJ,’ he chuckled.
“That was in Stockholm. A typical Stockholm thing.”
Chatting to Skrufff about the DJ request issue the same year, US house pioneer Frankie Knuckles was considerably less forgiving.
“There’s always the occasional person at the party who thinks I’m just not playing well enough. I don’t know these people and they don’t know me, but they think they do and they don’t seem to realize that when they come and interrupt me to say something like that, they completely break my concentration, destroying my evening.”
“I could never walk up to somebody else working and tell them they’re not performing to the best of their abilities; I could never do that to them and destroy their day.”
“But how do I get around it? The only way I can handle it is by not allowing them to get any closer to me. I don’t like to be put in that kind of position; I don’t want to be disconnected from the audience, I like being close to the crowd, but not so they can disturb me.
“I would say that probably 90% of the people understand that, but there’s that 10% who don’t, who think the purpose of me being that close to them is so they can bother me while I’m working. The minute they destroy my whole head and ruin my evening, then the rest of the night becomes work, and it’s awful,” he said.
Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff
