Women Shatter the Vinyl Ceiling

One film crew is already shooting in the sparsely decorated Mulholland Drive home of Charissa Saverio--a.k.a. popular nightclub disc jockey DJ Rap--when a second crew arrives at the door. It’s a little before 4 in the afternoon, the start of her day. Bouncing around the room in tight blue jeans, a black tank top and boots, her blond hair flying, Saverio is actually at work--getting her set list together for an after-party to the Sunset Junction street fair, which is being held at the Echo Park nightclub the Echo.

The house is suddenly full of cameras, bodies and booming music, all flowing together in a kind of impromptu mix.

That she happens to be a woman in a male-dominated art form has long ceased to matter to Saverio. She’s got to tend to business, and business is very good. The first film crew is one she hired to document the making of her new album, her third, which she promises will blend the frenetic, tribal-esque drum-and-bass beats she’s known for with the breaks she’s been utilizing in recent sets. The second crew is there to interview her for a documentary on electronic music.

Female DJs, once a novelty, increasingly are becoming established players in the serious business of late-night fun, with their popularity growing. Despite concerns that some of the women are relying on their sex appeal to get gigs, and the resulting backlash on the credibility of others, there is a core of talented female artists who are taking hold of the scene, with newcomers arriving regularly. In the process, the idea that women can’t compete with their male counterparts--from sheer talent to handling the constant travel and the vampire-esque hours--is slowly fading.

On the August weekend of Sunset Junction, DJs Rap and Colette are sharing the bill at the first-night after-party. The next day, DJs Colette and Irene are headlining the dance stage. This seems appropriate for a fair celebrating diversity and open-mindedness, but that’s not why they are appearing as featured entertainers. Along with hot local and nationally known acts DJ Angelique, DJ Alicia, DJ Dazy, Mistress Barbara, Sandra Collins, DJ Heather and Lisa Lashes, these women are routinely listed among the area’s top picks to get the party started.

The presence of women behind the decks changes the room--and, most people say, for the better. Women definitely use their sex appeal, and often their voices (occasionally singing over their mix), to push the party higher. They dance during sets and look great. But they’ve been dogged for years by charges that they get the gigs only because they’re still relatively rare or because they’re cute.

For Saverio, it only means she has more to prove. “For a two-hour set, I practice all day,” she says, thumbing through endless boxes of records. “I really want to know the ins and outs of my records. The mixing is what makes me different, so it’s important I not get caught off-guard by a groove.”

On the wall of Saverio’s home recording studio is a picture of a beach chair on an empty beach. Written above it in black pen are the words, “Just 5 years away. Work harder!”

There are posters promoting the drum-and-bass records she has made, 21 stacks of mostly unlabeled vinyl stacked on various shelves, candles in the fireplace, magazines--Spin, Urb, Entertainment Weekly, BPM--on the coffee table. There are also photos of her family throughout her studio, where she and her music partner, Brian Paturalski, are working on her forthcoming album as well as a film score they are doing on spec. As an artist, producer and label head (she runs Proper Talent records), Saverio is almost completely single-minded in her pursuit of the perfect mix.

That tenacity is what allows her to be one of the few women to succeed in the competitive world of drum-and-bass, a style popularized by Goldie and Roni Size in the late ‘90s. Saverio says of her preferred style of music: “There is definitely a war. It’s fiercely competitive.”

Why, though, is drum-and-bass so much more cutthroat than other styles of electronic music? “It’s so fast,” she says, “it’s so technical and it’s such sharp music.”

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Colette--last name Marino--stops short in front of Vice, a trendy clothing boutique on Sunset Boulevard, where a girl with pink hair is kicking out an awesome mix of songs on Day 2 of the street fair. “Oh, it’s a girl DJ,” a man in a cowboy hat says to a friend as he walks past.

“Did you hear that?” Colette asks, looking to her entourage. “It always cracks me up. When people say that, they must not ever go out, because there are so many female DJs out there now.”

Later, Jenny Arellano is one of several fans dancing throughout Colette’s hourlong performance. As Colette goes down off the the stage to meet her followers (this is still standard practice for her but no longer typical of the increasingly superstar world of DJs), Arellano is one of the first to approach her. Arellano is a bit shy, but as soon as she sees how receptive Colette is to the compliment--Colette asks Arellano’s name, poses for pictures and signs autographs--Arellano embraces her in a hug.

“Colette is house music,” Arellano says. “And we don’t have a lot of female DJs who can throw the energy to the crowd, so any time you see a woman up there, it’s inspiring.”

Colette has an intimate understanding of the female DJ movement. She became a role model for it, albeit unintentionally, after getting her start with Super Jane, a collective of four women--Colette, Heather, DJ Dayhota and Lady D. Formed in 1997, Super Jane inspired a number of female DJs and was among the first DJ acts, male or female, to infiltrate mainstream national press. A sort of Spice Girls (even Colette jokingly uses the term “girl power” to describe them) for the female DJ scene, Super Jane was featured in Spin, among other publications, for its positive influence on young women.

“People freak out over Super Jane,” Colette says. “They love it.”

But Colette recalls a comment by Reid Speed, one of the few women to break into the drum-and-bass scene, that put their impact in perspective. “What she said is: ‘What I like best about Super Jane is it’s not just they’re girls; they’re all great DJs.’ ”

Colette comes from the less aggressive genre of house music. The day of her Sunset Junction performance, she prepares in her San Fernando Valley home by going through her mail (she says records are sent to her every day; among the swag being opened on this day are 12-inch singles by Moby, which she doesn’t like, Underworld, which she does, and a T-shirt from dance label Electric Monkey), practicing and eating her usual: chicken Caesar salad at Mazzarinos, a Sherman Oaks eatery owned by her cousin.

If Colette and Saverio have the same dedication, their approach to music varies in theory. For Colette, who painted the oils on canvas hanging in her living room (paintings done during her college days at DePaul and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she graduated) and who has studied photography and is a voracious reader, music may be her life, but it’s not her only interest.

And walking around the Junction, she frequently stops to ooh and aah over babies. At 27, she freely admits to “baby fever.”

“It started in airports,” she says. “There were five babies on my flight from New York back to L.A. yesterday.”

She wants to have kids, but for a DJ it’s even more difficult than for female musicians like Madonna or Patti Smith because DJs have to be on the road so frequently. Although a recording artist can make an album and choose not to tour, being away from home is the way in which DJs support their recording work.

From January of this year through August, Colette has flown 140,000 miles. She can tell you that United Airlines switched from Coke products to Pepsi. Little wonder she says, “I don’t have a time zone.” So, how will Colette handle the baby thing? “I don’t know,” she says, smiling. “I’d need a superlative man.”

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Saverio can relate. She bemoans the fact that, somewhere in her industrial-strength schedule, she hasn’t managed to find a boyfriend since moving to L.A. from London last February.

“L.A. is so dry,” she says with a smile.

For Saverio though, that’s secondary to the music. If she feels she has something to prove, it has less to do with her being a woman behind the decks than with her own intensity. A self-described “bulldog,” she is, at times, almost disarmingly candid. Even at her most personable.

“I came here because I felt I’d gone as far as I could go in England,” she says. “People were not physically stopping me, but I really felt that people did not want me to step out of place and I should just be a little cute girl that plays drum-and-bass in clubs where nobody really cares. I’m better than that, and that’s it.”

Like a lot of female musicians, she’s fed up with the focus on gender. At the mention of the phrase “female DJ,” she snaps: “Male, female; it’s the same. We’ve got to stop going on about female, male. There are tons of female DJs now; get over it.”

While it may feel equal to Saverio, who along with Irene and trance goddess Sandra Collins opened the door for female DJs, DJ Irene questions if that is indeed the case. “It’s great that there are other women becoming DJs, but they have to realize that they have to work harder than the average guy who’s a DJ. We still live in a world where we think women are OK, but we get judged more than a man next to us,” she says.

“That will always exist and we’ll always have to work harder to prove our point--that we are just as good,” Irene adds.

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Following Colette’s set, the spiky-haired Irene takes the stage at Sunset Junction, throwing down some furiously paced hard-core house beats to a gathering of enthusiastic fans down front, who make it clear why she is America’s top-selling female DJ.

Clad all in black, the smiling Irene comes to the front of the stage, waving to her fans, then throwing some CDs into the crowd. A star here in L.A., where she earned an “MVP” honor from L.A. Weekly, she is conscious of maintaining that bond with her fans. Later, when her monitors go out, rather than throw a tantrum, she apologies to the crowd and promises to do her best, despite the fact she can’t hear her own mixes.

Watching Colette and Irene back to back on Sunday night, and Saverio, as DJ Rap, the night before, it becomes clear that one noticeable way in which female DJs differ from their male counterparts is their use of physicality.

Many male DJs look stagnant on stage, save for some fist pumping and hand waving to energize the crowd.

But Colette and Rap use their bodies--bouncing when directly behind the turntables and dancing during particularly long tracks that don’t require them to be glued to the decks.

There’s no question that the crown feeds on their energy.

Almost as soon as Rap takes her place behind the decks at Echo, the dance floor fills up. Deftly crisscrossing her arms to navigate the multiple turntables, she reconfigures her normal drum-and-bass set to a break-heavy mix. Although the friendlier breaks, featuring more stops and starts and large synthesizers, are not her usual weapons of choice, she wears out the dancers.

Bryan Rabin, of Rabin, Rodgers Inc., a party-planning company that counts Details magazine and Madonna among its clients, says female DJs bring less ego to the mix, which is why his company likes to use them for events. “Women ... can really read the crowd and map out the details of the night,” Rabin says. “That makes the difference between a good night and a great, unforgettable night.”

There’s no question that while women have proved their skills behind the decks, they still do occasionally get gigs because of their gender. Some promoters suggest that women have more of a built-in audience than male DJs. Men want to watch a female DJ, particularly an attractive one, while women feel they should support one of their own, the theory goes.

As a result, of late, there is a sort of reverse sexism taking effect.

It’s not the male DJs who have a problem with it, at least outwardly, but the women who feel it diminishes them. “There are DJs that get recognition just because they’re females, and that’s not necessarily fair either,” says Alicia, an L.A. resident via Salt Lake City.

Saverio finds the same thing: “All I see is promoters giving girls a chance because they’re girls, and that’s not right.”

Penelope Tuesdae is a New York-based DJ who likes to go topless during her set. She is not the only one, though she is the best known. Though even she admits in an interview with Orlando Weekly, “I have to back it up with the skills.”

Irene seconds that.

“There are other women who may be sexy, but as long as they can back up their stuff, then I’m all for them.”

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Steve Baltin is a Los Angeles-based writer. His last Weekend cover story was on the L.A. electronic music scene.