While on a recent trip to London, DJ Venus X was profiled by Vice, which quizzed her on her background, the start up of her infamous GHE20GOTH1K warehouse party (which currently is on hiatus) and the state of the music industry.
Always willing to speak her mind freely, here are some of Venus’s more compelling quotes from the video:
“I’m obsessed with mind control and being the holder of a lot of power and knowing how to use it.”
“GHE20GOTH1K is really about bringing together generations of different kind of people, weird black kids, weird brown kids. A rebel is always a rebel.”
“I had a particular set of parents, one who was an educator and one who was a criminal and so that enabled me to commit intelligent crimes, like running warehouses.”
“There was a moment around 2011 where a lot of celebrities started reaching out to me and trying to work with me. I just didn’t want to be a martyr to the mainstream.”
“I realized I had this power, but I also realized that it was like, complicated. In order to move up the social ladder of entertainment, you kind of have to give up that power as a girl.”
“As a woman people are constantly just telling me it’s not good enough, you know. It’s not quality DJ-ing, you’re not mixing well enough. Well, if you went to as many punk shows as I did, you know that rules, they are just conjured up by people who want to fuck up the party.”
“Commodification is just a cycle. When people commodify things, they forget about them. The easiest way for me to deal with that is just not to commodify myself. I don’t really put out mixes, I don’t put out EPS, I don’t have management.”
“I participated in like the American dream because my parents are immigrants and I wanted to make them proud. I started science for a while. I actually went to school to be a doctor.”
“If we could restore underground celebrity to like pop-star status influence, the way that music kind of once was. You know we had all these archetypes of women that were different, they were overweight, they were skaters, they were punk, they were you know folk singers. You just had different kinds of women. Now you just have pop stars. You have machines.”
Watch the full interview below:
