DANCIN’ AIN’T NO CRIME!

What a Hump Day it was!  We had 19 booty shakers in da haus for DJ SCARE-A’s sweaty beat bustin’ mix!  Who needs a cool down song when the DJ’s been playin’ your song all night long?  J. Lo sure doesn’t and neither do we!

We had a special guest with us – Minneapolis Den Mother Megan Krejny!  It was great to see you dancin’ next to me, girl!  You gots da MMOOOOVES!

Thanks to DJ Scare-a for keepin’ us on our toes.  Great mix!!

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On an unfortunate note, our brand spankin’ new DDPP sign was stolen from the street during class!  It was an old real estate open house sign transformed into something INCREDIBLE by Den Mother Jenny B…incredible enough for a random person to snatch it and take it home, apparently.

…a moment of silence in honor of our departed sign.  Our time together was short and we wish you luck wherever you are.

Slap!Chop! Thank!You!

Woah woah woah.

One woah for how many ladies came out to DDPP last night. Thank you Yelpers! Thank you Time Out! Instead of an event that was happening, it was quite simply, a happening.

Second woah for DJ Slap!Chop!’s diamond-hard mix. She slapped all our troubles away with the power of rock and roll (as well as with Fire! Muscles! Guns!) and made us all into Linda Hamilton’s for one fantastic hour.

See this playlist? It’s the perfect winter recipe for head-banging, foot-stomping and heart-pumping hotness. At times I gazed around the room and all I saw was a sea of gyrating, smiling ecstatic women with arms a flailing and feet a jumping. Mmmm. Perfection.

The 3rd and final woah is for our dear Toni (aka DJ Tunkerin)! We learned that last night was her final DDPP with us because she’s moving on up and out to Indianapolis (and will hopefully be starting up the first Indy DDPP!). Toni has been boogying with us for 2 years on the nose, and her exuberance, enthusiasm and heart of gold has kicked up every DDPP she’s attended many, many notches. She’s a VIP member of the DDPP community and we’re gonna miss her like nobody’s business.

Upon hearing the news, no joke – this harmonica solo immediately started playing in my head. So Toni – this one’s for you:

You didn’t have to shake it like you did like you did but you did, and we thank you!

It’s a Group Thaaaaang

Perhaps it was a willfully subconscious mishearing, perhaps I need to ear candle myself. But regardless, and right or wrong, the lyrics to song #9 on DJ Michelle Leslie Brown’s NEVER BEEN HEARD AT DDPP BEFORE NOW mix (how does she do it? srsly) captured the essence of last night’s jam session perfectly.

While the song is called “Groove Thang” – I couldn’t help but hear “Group Thang” the entire time. And in that lost in translation interpretation, it felt like the lyrics captured DDPP’s essence in a brevity and directness that Hemingway could have only dreamed of emulating.

Well its a group thang
It’s gotta funky swing
Well it’s a group thang
A group thang
(Come on)

We’re moving on, keeping strong
Don’t you let them steer you wrong
It’s a group thang
We’re goonna give you what you want
Just as long as you’re around
It’s agroup thang

Oh yeah
People There’s really nothing to it
Let your mind rest my friend, and do it
Remember it ain’t over ’till it’s really over
group thang, group thang
Relax your mind, listen to the rhythm
It’s got you flowin’, but it’s in precision
Music is life, and we are livin’
group thang,group thang,group thang

It’s gonna make you touch the sky
Your bod’y movin’ left to right
You’re groovin’ to the evening light
It’s a group thang
It takes some time to realize
Yoiur body’s movin’ left to right
The feeling’s oh so dynamite
It’s a group thang
So whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do
Keep your body movin’
So whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do
Keep your body movin’
Party people, it’s a silky fun, and a groupthang
Party people, it’s a silky fun, and a group thang

Group thang, easy to hear, right? Ok – there’s a lot of redundancy in Zhane’s masterpiece, and Hemingway is rolling his eyes as he rolls over. Speaking of rolling, I think we might have to have a BYORS (roller skates/blades) to one DDPP ala the video. By the way – wish I could have been a fly on the wall in that art direction meeting for that puppy – “We need more rollerskaters! And planks, dammit!” Whew! Anyway… lyrics notwithstanding –  it creates a rhythm and pattern that is so very nice on the ears and bootay. Just like the way DJ MLB designs her signature mixes, and the way we love it.

Thanks for yet another fantastic and original mixterpiece Michelle Leslie Brown! We shall forget-it-not.

Outsssstanding!

If yesterday’s class were rendered on the side of a van, it would look something like this:

That us, (looking pretty foxy, I might add) getting our gold bikini’s charmed off by DJ Ssssnake.  Her mix was as smooth as her name, and as dangerous!   Which we knew as soon as the warm up ended and the super slick Billie Jean mash up began (still not sure who won that melee…oh wait a minute, we did!)   Once caught by her rhythm we shouted, moved our feet, and completely lost control.  Were we professionals?  Not exactly, but there was clapping, spontaneous jogging, and some full on ga-ga lurching that brought something back.  I think it was sexy.  So stare straight at, if you dare, the mightiest of mixes:

Thanks again DJ Ssssnake!  We’ll be swaying under your spell for the rest of the week….

Take Me Home Tonight

Auspiciously, I began my day getting stuck in traffic behind this:

Little did I know that was just a foreshadowing for an evening of pure relish (had to), as well as the 4th in line of 17 fabulous song son DJ Easy Bake’s ecstasy-inducing mix for this evening.

(Oh I wish I were a DDPP dancefloor, that is what I’d truly like to be, cuz if I were a DDPP dancefloor, twenty women would lose their (proverbial) shit all over me.)

Yeah – that’s right. Tonight was virgin-palooza #2. Thanks to some mighty accurate reviews on Yelp (thanks ladies for sharing the love!) a whole new crop of online lurkers have joined in the beautiful chaos that is gathering in a dark room with a bunch of strangers and losing it in the best way possible. We had the biggest crew of 2010 and it bumped the whole session up to the status of bona fide happening. DJ Easy Bake’s perfectly steamed hot dog of a mix got our buns all toasty and dressed us up with glisten, hold the onions. She schooled us in a way that only a Chicagoan can in such matters.

So how did we like it? Like a Kodiak bear loves an eating contest. Behold:

Here’s what DJ Easy Bake busted out of her 1 woman heat machine for us to enjoy:

1. Fun for Me / Moloko
2. Mercy / Duffy
3. Right Hand HI / Kid Sister
4. Hot Dog (Watch Me Eat) / Detroit Cobras
5. Dreamer / K’naan
6. Rolling Down The Hills (Spring demo)/ Glass Candy After Dark
7. Consolation Prize / Julie Doiron
8. World Town / M.I.A.
9. The True / The Knux
10. Cobrastyle / Robyn
11. Can’t Get Over You / Vivian Girls
12. Take Me Home Tonight / Eddie Money
13. Da Style Deh / Busy Signal
14. Radio / Beyoncé
15. I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked / Ida Maria
16. Sure Fire Winners / Adam Lambert
17. Femme Fatale / The Velvet Underground & Nico

Thank you femme fatale DJ Easy Bake for slaying us so appropriately! We owe you one.

Virgin-palooza!

This week the studio was packed–and nearly half the ladies who came were first-timers!  Good thing we didn’t promise to be gentle, because DJ Sassybrass ROCKED. OUR. SOCKS. OFF.  But we looked a lot cooler without our socks than this dude:

One of the many reasons DDPP is ladies only.

Anyway, back to yesterday’s mix–so bootylicious that ladies had to continue moving during the cool down, just to get their heart rates out of the danger zone!  DJ Sassybrass showed us what we were looking for.  Her little secrets had us jumping, shaking our pom poms, keeping our right hands high, and within the first five minutes I saw smiles multiply!   And believe me, there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.  DJ Sassybrass, you can put this record on anytime!

Yeah!  Yeah!  Hell yeah yeah yeah.

Sheik, Shaykh, Shaikh / Cheikh, Šeih, Šejh / Şeyh Djibouti!

If you could not get this song out of your head today after recalling our amazing DJ last night, then welcome to my esteemed free-association club.

DJ Sheik Djibouti did justice by her name and inspired all of our djiboutis to tranform from dormant to quite astir. The Sheik shook up a slurry of the familiar with obscure in an expert fashion that only a music appreciator with tremendous life experience and wisdom could hope for. Weird Al bookended by Camera Obscura and Martin Sexton? Be still my camel! This Sheik dug deep and struck black gold, selling it back to us for way under $40 a barrel.

Thank you DJ Sheik Djibouti for curating a night of joy explosions and borderline full-body freakouts! We can be certain if your mix came loaded on macs at the Apple store, this video would look (yawn) quite tame.

It’s 2010 B*tches

Fruitcake, snowstorms, extended family, underwear bombs–the season of giving is officially over and I don’t know about you, but I’m just glad to have survived.  Thankfully we at DDPP decided to start the new year off with a less destructive bang–it still burned, but not in the third-degree kind of way!  Giving the deep freeze of January the middle finger this week was DJ…YOU!  Yep.  Let me ‘splain.

You know how when you’re doing your holiday shopping and you find something so fantastic, so supremely divine, that you have to get one for everybody–including you?

No, not that!  (though as the temperatures refuse to climb out of the teens, it’s looking more and more appealing.  Especially the leopard print…) Back in December we assembled a shiny new playlist to drop into the Twin Cities DDPP stocking, and gosh darn if it wasn’t so spanking delicious that we decided to get one for us too!  This week we served up the mix lovingly crafted by a score of DDPP regulars, and the result was so dick smellingly wrong it was right:

Welcome to 2010 ladies!  The only resolution this year is to ROCK HARDER!!!

We’re Back on Womens!

DDPP is ON for 2010!

Unbuckle your dance belts and join us tomorrow (Sunday – Jan 3rd) for the first DDPP of the new decade!

We’ll be spinning the mix we made for Minnesota and lemme tell you it’s gonna be one resolution revolution we can all agree on. Wachaa!