how dj mandy turns music into performance art

some thoughts on the meme-ificiation of djing

Hey there, hope your summer is going swimmingly. I’m dealing with a touch of classic August melancholy, although that could be because I’m just back from five days in Berlin & Whole Festival and still feel like I need to sleep for an entire week. Not a complaint, just an observation. These are the consequences of Brat summer that they don’t tell you about.

This post was originally pitched for another publication, but as these things often go, it ended up getting scrapped. I wrote it earlier in the year but I still like a lot of the thoughts in it and didn’t want it to go to waste. It also features interviews with two fantastic DJs: Gadget & the Cloud and polyp. Hope you enjoy!

how dj mandy turns music into performance art

A young woman stands in front of her phone camera, a DJ controller placed in front of her. Her face is stoic with concentration as she turns dials and presses the cue button. “Listen to this track, bitch,” hisses a demonic version of Waka Flocka Flame, punctuated by the sounds of sirens and air horns. She moves up the fader and the vibe drastically shifts. Now folk singer Ron Pope is crooning out of the speaker: “a drop in the ocean, a change in the weather..” 

@dj__mandy @dj__mandy ♬ original sound - DJ MANDY

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Whether you’re a devout techno-head or an entry-level deejay, you’ve probably seen her. Even if you have no interest in electronic music at all, DJ Mandy’s videos will likely be familiar to you. A scroll through her feed will show you countless videos like the one described above. Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech speeds up and transitions into Psy’s Gangnam Style. One Direction’s What Makes You Beautiful is interspersed with Ace Hood screaming “I WOKE UP IN A NEW BUGATTI.” Sometimes she ducks off camera to break character before reappearing, a blank expression fixed firmly on her face as she mixes.

DJ Mandy is the alter-ego of Amanda Shultz, a college student from California who first posted on TikTok in August 2023. Since then, she has amassed 700k followers and 22.1 million likes on the platform. “what i’d play at church”, one video is titled. “what i’d play a funeral”, another declares. And then there’s her trademark phrase: “give tips/feedback”. Watching them is a bit like tripping on acid, full of noises that sound wonky and unexpected, with an air of hilarity that verges on sheer, unbridled mania. 

Everyone wants to get on the DJ Mandy train. Musicians like Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo and SG Lewis have professed their love in her comments section. Obviously brands couldn’t resist trying to get a piece of the pie, with Spotify, Windows and more leaving quips under her videos. Last October she posted a video wearing a t-shirt branded by Julie, the morning after pill company, with a #juliepartner tag in the caption. It’s not a surprise that people want to capitalise on her audience, because she’s successfully captured the attention of Gen Z. We’re rapt and waiting, poised to see what the hell she does next.

The top suggested search on most of her videos is “dj mandy actually sounding good”. People are right to seek evidence, because, spoiler alert: she actually is good. In September 2023, she posted her first track, a house number titled Jam. A few weeks later she was flown out to play at an event at UCLA. She’s been announced on lineups for festivals in California and Miami this summer. She’s pumping out new ‘MANDY MIXES’ on her SoundCloud every month. Basically, it’s DJ Mandy’s world. We’re just living in it.

It’s not a surprise why her content scratches a particular itch in our social media-addled brains. Since the early days of 2000s talent shows, we have loved watching people earnestly seeking fame, and the less star-power they had, the better. YouTube compilations of terrible auditions on The X Factor have hundreds of millions of views for this reason. We adore things that are horrifying and cringe. Watching DJ Mandy’s content evokes this, but without the icky feeling that comes with laughing at someone’s expense. She’s in on the joke, you see. Some people comment critiquing her technique, lamenting how ‘actual’ DJs grind for years to get the level of attention she has. In doing so, they become the punchline, and we all get to point and laugh at them. The girls that get it, get it and the girls that don’t, don’t.

My girlfriend started teaching me how to DJ late last year. I set myself a goal to learn in time for our HONEYPOT Valentine’s party so we could play a B2B set alongside some other DJ couples. The algorithm already served me up a healthy dose of electronic music content, but when I began learning, it ramped up tenfold. I couldn’t scroll TikTok without seeing videos of people practicing in their bedrooms, which was slightly overwhelming to be confronted with when I was just trying to figure out the basics of mixing. DJ Mandy stood out as a much-needed breath of fresh air, a burst of levity in a scene that can sometimes feel too serious for its own good.

I spoke to Ly Hagan, a DJ who plays under the alter egos of ‘polyp’ and ‘lychee’ in Dublin, who shared similar feelings as me. “I think there absolutely is a landscape for humor and DJing. There always has been! Humor and playfulness is one of the ways I connect best with other people. I think in recent years there’s been this more serious wave of DJing emerging, like, ‘this is a craft, this is something you have to hone’, but I do think it’s possible to be a very serious DJ and also have some silly moments.” 

Ly added that it’s refreshing to see someone like DJ Mandy breaking onto the scene. “Maybe there’s people who would say that what she’s doing is a gimmick, but I think you can say that anything a DJ does is a gimmick. As another Asian FLINTA DJ, there’s a tendency to not be taken seriously at all, no matter what you do. To see this young Asian woman capitalising on that is kind of nice. If you can’t be taken seriously, just become as silly as possible, you know?”

I then chatted to Kelly Doherty, an Irish, London-based DJ and producer under the moniker Gadget And the Cloud. “Obviously DJ Mandy is someone who is super interested in DJing and electronic music because otherwise she wouldn’t be putting so much effort into parodying this scene. I also don’t think she would be able to capture people if she didn’t have a love for it.” 

Kelly highlighted that gender likely plays a part in the way people perceive DJ Mandy’s content. “I think if you can come up with a strategy that helps you cut through all the discourse and elevates you, then good for you! I think it’s something that certain people might get angry about but people love getting angry about women who are DJing anyway, so.. it doesn’t really matter what you do.”

For DJs today, internet virality is a double-edged sword, a necessary evil that everyone has to reckon with. One viral Boiler Room or earworm release can skyrocket an artist from playing opening sets in half-empty rooms to a sold-out world tour. But those moments of fame are rare and fleeting. In a sea of personal branding, it can feel like we’re reaching a saturation point, making it harder than ever to stand out. Both Ly and Kelly told me that they struggle with the pressure to promote themselves online, with Kelly noting that participating in self-promotion can often feel like “screaming into a void.” It’s what makes DJ Mandy’s online presence so genius; in true Gen Z fashion, she used humour, subversion and irreverence to rise to the top. Now that she’s got our attention, she’s showing us what she can really do. Knowing her trajectory so far, her next step is bound to be unpredictable.