New York City – Interviewing François Kevorkian isn’t exactly akin to a press conference with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – the stakes are certainly different – but the word prickly does come to mind. Perhaps true to his artistic nature, there’s rarely a question he doesn’t want to rearrange, disassemble or recast in some way. And the answers, while offering depth, wisdom, perspective and some tasty provocation, can be circuitous, rarely arrived at by directly addressing the inquiry he had an issue with in the first place. He’s a man seemingly bent on sharing his never-ending supply of semantic Play-Doh – or maybe my list of questions just, y’know, sucked.

Regardless of the interview’s quirky dynamic – much of which has been tidied for you dear readers – the fact remains that after more than 25 years in the music business as a drummer, DJ, remixer, producer, A&R scout, studio owner and label chief, there isn’t much that the 48-year-old Kevorkian hasn’t done or isn’t currently doing. And if you shut up and listen, like I did, there’s much to learn.

The short version: The French-born Kevorkian was a drummer who moved to New York in 1975, hooked up with some of the era’s best-known DJs (Walter Gibbons, Jellybean Benitez, Larry Levan, etc.), became a top DJ himself, gained notice with his homemade edits, performed A&R duties for disco label Prelude, became a top remixer and producer, worked on a series of classic cuts like his remix of Musique’s “Push Push in the Bush,” took a six-year DJing hiatus in 1983, and in 1987 he started Axis Studios, which has recorded artists from Madonna to Deee-Lite, Mariah Carey to Mary J. Blige, C+C Music Factory to Todd Terry.

Currently, he runs the influential Wave Music label, which since its 1995 inception has released music from a wildly diverse roster that includes Itaal Shur’s Milk & Honey project, Kevin Aviance, Fonda Rae, Floppy Sounds and François K himself. (His latest mix comp, Deep and Sexy, offers a deep and beautiful collection of Wave-released tracks.) Additionally, he travels the world as a DJ, and – along with Joe Claussell and Danny Krivit – spins each Sunday’s Body & Soul party at Manhattan’s Vinyl club. Offering an early evening mix of classics, new sounds and sweet vibes, Body & Soul remains one of the most heartfelt musical experiences you’ll find in New York City. It’s simply about the music, which is presented by a trio of DJs whose collective passion is palpable.

With the exception of a fascinating article he showed me from NewScientist.com about how artificial intelligence experts at Hewlett-Packard have invented a computerized DJ that could play dance music based on an audience’s biological impulses, Kevorkian wasn’t particularly interested in talking tech or discussing the processes of modern music production. Instead, he seemed to remain drawn to its end result – powerful music. And in the wake of the 9/11 events, which occurred only a short walk from Vinyl, Kevorkian seems intent on revisiting the full breadth of music’s power to uplift, inspire and eventually heal.

DJ Times: As a longtime New Yorker, how have the events of 9/11 impacted your DJ sets?

Kevorkian: A DJ is really an illustrator for the cultural things that go on in the community. We did a [9/11 benefit] party at Centro-Fly where every DJ played for free to raise money for the police department and fire department family members, people who had love ones basically killed. So deeply wounding are these things. Basically, the message in the songs that we played at the benefit – because, of course, we played songs – we couldn’t help but make it something really topical, poignant, trying to sum up the feelings that maybe we should be looking forward to having some hope, rebuilding, keeping it together, treasuring the memories of those that are gone. Certainly, if you think in those terms there are a lot of songs that have those kinds of lyrics – powerful songs. Some people pointed out to me that when they talked to younger DJs that wasn’t the case. They played all instrumental music. So to them, songs have no meaning, it’s just tracks.

DJ Times: Generational difference?

Kevorkian: I don’t know. Are we saying that depending on your age you either play a song with a message or you play tracks with no message at all? I was kind of startled by that and it made me realize that – especially during the time of the benefit, which had Louie Vega, David Morales, Danny Tenaglia, everyone was there – everyone who contributed was so conscious of this and they really brought to the party a new dimension, like when I saw David Morales drop his own record, “I’ll Be Your Friend,” and listening to those lyrics in that context was not just powerful and touching – it was intense! Feeling the impact of those lyrics when they’re appropriately played was the same way that I felt about my own little contribution to the whole thing. It was a ballad, a Stevie Wonder song, “Ribbon in the Sky.” You can go and check the lyrics if you want. [“We can’t lose with God on our side/We’ll find strength in each tear we cry…”] There’s no explanation necessary in my opinion. That’s the kind of emotional power that music can have and certainly as a DJ I felt whatever I could do to help was certainly a little bit of a healing mission to help bereaved people try to keep it together and give people a sense of hope, a sense that they’ll be able to get out of this. This is a heavy-duty trial and we need to be able to come out of this together. Literally, I wasn’t even able to play music or listen to a record or anything for a couple weeks after [9/11]. The raw reality of what happened was just too intense.

DJ Times: You’re a longtime New Yorker as well and your weekly party [Body & Soul at Vinyl] wasn’t too far from the area.

Kevorkian: Yeah, we’re about 400 yards away from what they call Ground Zero. It’s still something that we’re all reeling from and I don’t think that any of us can measure the true impact that it’s having on our everyday lives. It’s just too soon. In regards to the music I play, I know that the first trip I took after [9/11] I went to London and I usually don’t speak [at gigs], but I just felt like taking the mic and telling them that, with all the fear of people flying, it was really important for me to come to that gig and see them and share that moment with them and just to let them know that we’re OK in New York. We’re dealing with it. It wasn’t that big of a party. It was a small club – on purpose I play that kind of place – and I’ve very rarely felt that kind of overwhelming response from a crowd.

DJ Times: How important was it to get back on the decks and play music again?

Kevorkian: I gotta be honest with you. When these things happened, music wasn’t even secondary. It was at the bottom of the list compared to what anybody who lives in New York feels like they should be doing. Now that we have some distance and a tiny bit more perspective – with war going on and God knows what – I just think that it might just serve to highlight the fact that every minute of our lives is precious and every song that we play should be played for a reason. It shouldn’t just be a filler track to get from this to that. It serves to highlight the precious nature of being alive and the gift of playing music. Therefore, when I’m playing music I try to make sure that every song that I play is a special song, a song I really want to play, not just some garbage.

DJ Times: Let me go backwards for a moment. How did you move from being a drummer into being a DJ? I read that you were hired to play ambient music in a restaurant.

Kevorkian: Yes, in France, as a DJ. Every time I made people dance, they would be upset at me because their theory was if I played music that made people dance they could not drink and the purpose of playing music was for people to drink and have a good time. So it had to be on the un-danceable tip. So I had to find things like King Crimson, Frank Zappa, polyrhythms or whatever that you couldn’t possibly dance to.

DJ Times: You moved to New York in 1975 and eventually hooked up with legendary DJ Walter Gibbons and played drums while he spun.

Kevorkian: The owner of Galaxy hired me to play the drums while his DJ was playing and I didn’t know who his DJ was and I’d certainly never stepped foot into a major downtown underground club in Manhattan at that time. This was February 1976.

DJ Times: What was that experience like? I read that Walter wasn’t thrilled about having a drummer for accompaniment.

Kevorkian: Well, who would be? He claimed it would throw him off. By the time the sounds of what I played came back to his ear it would add a confusing element to the mix and mixing could be difficult. But it was OK. We worked it out. He got to like me and we became friends. But the first few times we did it, he threw every drum solo he could possibly throw at me. Luckily, those were the things I really knew. It was the other music that I didn’t know – the stuff that was typically dance music from the underground American scene. A drum solo, like Chicago’s “I’m A Man,” I knew like the back of my hand [laughs].

DJ Times: What did you learn from Walter Gibbons and what kind of DJ was he?

Kevorkian: He was an absolute technical wizard. As far back as 1976, he could probably cut almost as fast as hip-hop DJs are today, but without the same kind of equipment. He just had a whole repertoire of things and I never got to find out who he knew it from – like he’d take two records and make them flange together. He knew how to repeat the phrases by offsetting the records one to the other. He had this technique where he’d do incredibly fast cuts between records – extend basically any part of the record he felt like extending. I mean, hip-hop DJs go down to two beats or something ridiculous. Him, it was a few seconds, but technically speaking it was really advanced, especially at that time, and he was so smooth about it that nobody knew he was really doing it. He was that smooth. He was playing really soulful, powerful dance music at that time, which subsequently changed because he got turned onto a very heavy religious meaning and, from that time on, he refused to play any song that had “dirty” lyrics. But when I met him he was really into James Brown and all the really heavy “get-down” stuff and the pretty diva records, “Love to Love You Baby,” that kind of stuff.

DJ Times: Rare Earth, things like that?

Kevorkian: Yeah, actually that Rare Earth record you mention was one of his drum records and he had a lot of drum records that were fairly obscure, but he brought ’em in in a way that everybody loved it. The way he was playing it, “Happy Song” by Rare Earth gave me ideas and I thought that it was a lot of hard work to cue up these songs the way he did. Why not make a little medley of it and put it together so I can just play it and not have to worry about going back and forth between those two copies? I could do it, but why do it? The same way I demonstrated my other talents of laziness by switching from a drummer to DJ – so much less to carry, so much less to rehearse – was the same way I perfected it more by deciding to put a new version on an acetate. That was definitely a Walter thing.

DJ Times: So you got good with a razor blade, I guess?

Kevorkian: The first edit that I did on “Happy Song” was actually before I knew there were editing blocks, splicing tape and razor blade. That was done with a pair of scissors, figuring out if I cut the tape here then this is what it sounds like. I kept practicing with the scissors and I put it together with Scotch Tape and I put the Scotch Tape on the side so it was a handcrafted edit. I still have the tape, by the way.

DJ Times: Attention Pro Tools users, here’s how it used to be done.

Kevorkian: Really, after I discovered that there was an edit block and that it was really easy to do, I got quite adept at it. I only saw people do it a couple of times in the studio where I was going to master – Sunshine Studio, to make cheap acetates. It only took a couple of times of seeing someone else do it to make me think, “Oh, alright, leader tape – that’s a good idea…”

DJ Times: And Jellybean Benitez at Experiment 4 helped you get your first DJ residency.

Kevorkian: Yes, he was the resident DJ and I was the busboy. I was cleaning toilets and doing all sorts of other glamorous jobs. I think the high end of my job there was catering. I was deemed articulate enough to actually place slices of ham on a plate and bring them to customers. I kept pestering the manager to let me DJ and they kept saying, “You’re not a DJ.” I kept giving them audition tapes from home, but I didn’t have a mixer, so I had to use a tape recorder where I’d mix in mono and mix one track, stop, rewind the tape a little bit, and then mix in the next song with the delay between the playback and record head. I had to offset my mixes in mono. Then I’d have to mix it down to another tape deck by varying levels. It was like two-track mono, so I simulated mixes, but I did it well enough that you couldn’t tell it was without a mixer. By the time I did it with a mixer it was so easy compared with the hard work with a tape. Anyway, I was giving Jellybean acetates, saying, “Look, try this hot mix, it’s a hot edit,” whatever. We had become friends. One day Jellybean called in sick for a private party – he really didn’t want to work it. But he called in so late that they couldn’t arrange for anyone else. We had set it up and I brought my records and Jellybean said, “Hey, why don’t you have François DJ?” So they said, “We’ll give you a try, but if it doesn’t work out the first few records, we’ll have to call somebody else.” I had never touched a mixer yet in the DJ booth. But I guess it worked out.

DJ Times: How did you move into production and your work with Musique?

Kevorkian: Prelude was one of the labels in New York that I used to visit when I was making the rounds. I was working at a club called New York, New York, which was Studio 54’s direct competitor. I was with this other guy, Ted Currier, who was the first DJ who started the Fun House and he became the in-house producer and A&R for EMI Records. Prelude played us some new tracks and wanted our opinions on them and we started giving them a little report. The Prelude owner asked me to stay and talk and told me he liked how I listened to music and proposed to give me an A&R job. I didn’t know what that meant, but when I found out I was happy to do it and they put me right away in the studio working on stuff and the first record I did was “Push Push in the Bush.”

DJ Times: What was your approach to that song?

Kevorkian: By 1978, I was doing a lot of editing and had some experience as a DJ – at least a year and a half [laughs] – and I knew what crowds liked. But please understand, back then I was working as a DJ six or seven nights a week at New York, New York, so I went in the studio and I told Prelude that I needed time to study the song. So I took the multi-track piece by piece and I printed to two-track pieces of tape. I basically had the drum and the bass on track one and two, then guitar and organ on three and four. I went to the next part of my two-track tape and I had all the elements. I went back to the office and I wrote out a structure of the song – what track does what at each part of the song. So I had a recreation of the song on paper. Then I could isolate which elements I liked about the song and which ones I wanted to highlight. By the time I got in the studio I was able to tell the engineer Bob Blank – me, without much experience – that this is the part I want to take, take the vocal here, edit there, and so on. Between the two of us, we made it happen. Then I went in the edit room and edited some more.

DJ Times: How the concept of mixing and remixing has changed…

Kevorkian: Let’s just keep things in perspective. A remixer in 1978 is someone who takes your track and just mixes it differently. I think the concept of mixing today means, “Screw the original production; let me re-produce the record.” That wasn’t the case for me. I just took the elements from someone who was a disco god, [Musique’s] Patrick Adams, and I just remixed them, using his elements. I think the song was hit in its original form, but the version I did added an extra dimension of club friendliness and maybe more spectacular.

DJ Times: What do you remember the most from making music in that era?

Kevorkian: Too much was happening. I got to work with a lot of great artists. I was kind of thrown to the wolves. I was in sessions where I was supposed to tell people twice my age and with 25 years of recording experience what to do. It was pretty intimidating and I was just trying to make the appropriate contribution musically, whether it was mixing or being an A&R guy. It was really an incredible time. I was maybe too busy working to take perspective. It was an endless stream of sessions – record after record after record. And when I wasn’t in the studio I was DJing. I was fully immersed in music – it’s still kind of like that today.

DJ Times: And the clubs in New York City compared to today’s environment?

Kevorkian: It was incredibly fertile. There were so many more clubs then than there are now. I don’t know why. More people are living in Manhattan now than there were then. There were some major, major clubs like 12 West and The Flamingo for the gay white crowd. There were some of the black gay and black underground clubs that were equally powerful. I was just getting to learn about this. I was propped into the scene so fast that I didn’t even know about the clubs until I played in them – I didn’t necessarily know their history. For example, Flamingo was closed in the summer and in 1977 someone rented it out for the whole summer and I played there the whole summer for a black crowd. It was the same summer the [Paradise] Garage opened and right before Studio 54 opened. Back then, there was Studio 54, Xenon, Harrah’s, New York, New York, and, if you want to consider it, Regine’s. There were also the underground clubs, whether they were straight, gay, whatever – Better Days, Buttermilk Bottom, Gallery, the Garage, The Loft, 12 West – just so many places. It just hasn’t been as rich or flourishing as it was back then.

DJ Times: Why do Larry Levan and Paradise Garage maintain its legacy?

Kevorkian: Why do people talk about Jimi Hendrix? Well, because today you can go to a club and watch some lame-ass guitar player trying to play three licks together that have a little bit of bluesy feeling. We’re talking about somebody who could transfuse an audience with his guitar and create plasma with the notes he played. It’s kind of the same reason. Larry was more than just an incredibly talented DJ. He had this club that was his house, his music, his sound system. There was something going on there that was far too advanced for the times. Sadly, it all kind of fell apart because of AIDS and I think that Larry and a lot of his contemporaries were robbed of their true success. They fell victim to an epidemic. That generation that was so creative – whether it was graphic arts like the Keith Harings or a Larry Levan – they’re all dead. They don’t have anything to celebrate anymore. It created a disconnection between them and the following generation because that tradition was not really passed. What was great about [the Garage] was that, for the people who went, it was the most amazing party you’ve ever been to. The music was absolutely electrifying. Larry didn’t just play fierce records; he decided what [the party] was going to be like and how he would make the party. Sorry to say, but no such people are around today. He did it year after year and he had a level of refinement that was difficult to emulate. I know that a lot of people in past interviews, for various reasons, claim that Larry passed the mantle or the torch onto them – I’m very unconvinced that that’s true. The reason is because most of that crowd is gone and people today party in a different way. Larry was a true original – as a DJ, in the studio, mixing, all kinds of ways, as a friend.

DJ Times: Before Larry Levan passed away in 1992, you did a tour of Japan with him. How did you two perform your tag-team DJ sets on that trip?

Kevorkian: There was always a dynamic of certain interaction between us. I know there was interaction with other of his close friends like Tee Scott or Larry Patterson or even David DiPino. Our interaction maybe was a little more because we were both studio animals. There’s a certain fierceness in the music that we’re both after. The tour was really an expression of that and we found a common vehicle of expression of that as a team. He would make some kind of statement to the crowd. It wasn’t at all a rivalry, quite the opposite. Then I would try to take his statement and take it on a little bit and he would say, “Hey, wow!” Then he’d take it even far beyond that. Then we’d keep blowing each other’s minds. So when you see two people do that genuinely, sometimes the crowd went berserk. Every night was pretty spectacular – really great. We were discussing moving on and we talked about doing a Sunday night party at The Loft because it was struggling financially. Of course, it never happened because he went straight from the airport to the hospital and never really came out.

DJ Times: At the Garage, how did his idiosyncrasies manifest themselves? Kevorkian: If he felt like turning the music off for a half-hour and put a movie on, he’d do it. If he felt like playing ballads for three hours, he’d do it. It had nothing to do with some club owner telling him, “Beer sales are going down when you do that.” First of all, no alcohol was served. It was a different concept; it was not an employee concept. He was part owner of the club and it gave him the opportunity to train people to respond in a certain way and his dedication was unbelievable. I remember after he’d finish around noon, I’d maybe help him move speakers around and then we’d go hear David [Mancuso] at The Loft, who was still playing from the night before. We were just living music. It wasn’t about, like some of the people I see today, who are more worried about, “Is my set over in four minutes and 20 seconds? Has my agent collected the money? Can I take the helicopter to my next two-hour gig?” In some ways, it’s kind of sad that we don’t have a monumental figure like that today who could slap silly all these wannabe superstar DJs, who all think that they are so magnificent, while a lot of them don’t take the time to work the system properly, but they sit there looking grand. It’s kind of saddening not having an example. That’s what Larry was – someone who could move mountains.

DJ Times: Why did you stop playing records in 1983?

Kevorkian: I was too busy in the studio. I felt that people were accustomed to hearing me DJ with a standard of quality were I was investing a lot of time finding new releases and stuff that nobody ever heard or breaking records that I felt particular about. I got so busy in the studio and traveling that there was no way I could keep a regular DJ schedule. I would’ve rather quit while I was ahead. Also, I didn’t have a full-time residency – I did a lot of guest spots – and in order to gain a full-time residency I would have to become a competitor with one of my friends’ clubs or take their job, neither of which was an option for me. I had accomplished a lot of things in a short few years, was proud of it, and would prefer people had a good memory about that, instead of becoming a has-been DJ.

DJ Times: Regarding remixes, has the dance music industry changed much since that time?

Kevorkian: Everything worked the same way. The only difference in those days maybe was that the artists were a lot pickier about how you were supposed to mix their records and they weren’t quite used to the concept of you calling a remix a “reproduction.” It’s evolved slowly. I remember in 1981 or ’82 already doing remixes where there was a fair amount of additional production to change the record. But by ’87 or ’88, everyone was stripping everything out and making their own record with the original vocal and calling it a remix.

DJ Times: Why did you start Wave Music?

Kevorkian: Frustration. I kept doing [remixes and productions] and people kept telling me things like, it’s too fast, too slow, too white, too black, too this, too that, not enough that. I volunteered to do a remix for somebody for free and they didn’t like it and I was like, “OK, that’s you’re opinion, but you know what? I’m tired of this.” I’m going to make my own music and put it out. I was tired of dealing with major labels and A&R departments or even small labels that tried to pay you two pennies and dictate what you should be doing. This was seven years ago and, being as how I had a recording studio [Axis] capable of producing endless streams of material for reasonable cost, I felt it was an OK thing to try out.

DJ Times: So what do you think of Hewlett-Packard’s computerized DJ?

Kevorkian: Over the course of seeing dance music evolve for 25, 30 years, I’ve seen from these luxuriant gardens of rhythms, beautiful peaks and valleys that used to be my home. I’ve seen vast portions of it become bulldozed, flattened, landscaped and become sort of very mindless. I go see some DJs play and I’m struggling to understand what differentiates one track from the next. It seems like an endless flow of similar-sounding tracks. Although there are extremely talented individuals and performers out there who have mastered the craft of using records to entertain a crowd and bring them to an aural auditory orgasm, I think there is a great majority of wannabe DJs. It’s not for me to judge whether they’re good or not. But I think those wannabe DJs are soon going to be replaced by very sophisticated algorithmic composition devices that are far more astute at being consistent in entertaining a crowd. The sad reason for that is not because I want it, but because some of the dance music has become so predictable and so formula-based that it is now very easy for a couple of clever database programmers to input all the parameters that make dance music what it is. It is really easy to define an amount of patterns, progressions, beats, melodies and you can quantify those and make a machine generate those on the fly for you. Once that’s the case, it’ll be an interesting phenomenon. Just like DJs have replaced musicians – to their great chagrin – now there may be something around the corner to replace the complacent DJs that keep playing an endless stream of what I call garbage because it’s uninteresting. It is devoid of any passion, has no meaning except that it’s the new white label of the week. And if you look back on it in two years later, you wonder why in the hell you were playing that crappy track. Well, that kind of thing is going to change in the next 10 years because club owners will figure out that it’s much cheaper to license that machine and the customers will be entertained in the same way as that guy who was standing there and slapping 10 records on.

DJ Times: So who’s going to be the DJ that keeps the human element in the booth?

Kevorkian: There will be lots of them, but I think that machine is going to make them work a lot harder at showing that they have something that makes a difference.

DJ Times: Darwinism in the DJ booth?

Kevorkian: Why not? The music producers and the people that have made the dance music of the last few years have created this monster – not me. And they’ve created this monster by trying to distill the essence. This is the thing: When you look at a track from the old disco days, the track took a while to get going. You had a little intro and it took a while to get there, and then you had a song, and then the song went into a whole breakdown. And now when you hear a record, it starts at 110-percent and it has nowhere to go. It doesn’t. They figured out the art of remixing and having that powerful, strong element to such a degree that now that is present in most of the songs you hear in the store – immediately. You throw it on and you go, “Wow! This is great!” But then you say, “OK, the intro is kind of long.” Six minutes later, you ask the guy in the store, “Is this all the record does?” And he goes, “Well, what do you expect?” Like, I’m not supposed to ask if it does anything else. It’s just a very long intro – for eight minutes. So…I think that that Darwinism is in the productions and people coming up with the same copies of beats that they chop off each other, the same loops that are used endlessly by countless producers. I only show this article not because I think that it’s good or I advocate it. I think the evolution part of it is coming. And it’s coming because we’ve created our own boring landscape. And for those DJs that are actually spending time creating amazing, interesting, beautiful storytelling landscapes, I don’t think there’s much chance of them ever being replaced. But those playing endless mumbo-jumbo, they’re easily replaced because they’re playing music like wallpaper. It’s utilitarian. We’re playing music for soundtrack to the mating rituals for people who come to the club for their lifestyle. For those people, it doesn’t matter who is playing the music – or what is playing the music.

DJ Times: Since you began, what do you think are the most important technological developments for DJs?

Kevorkian: Nothing. I think I’m basically using the same things. I may have been using a reel-to-reel for effects and now I’m using a digital reverb. Maybe I was using exclusively vinyl and reel-to-reel tapes and now I’m using more CDs. Now I’m using a sampler. But all these things don’t represent a quantum leap. They’re all very incremental changes. DJs are actually very conservative people by nature. The only people who made me believe that something was up were, like, Richie Hawtin where he’s incorporating drum machines, live effects processors and looping devices with records. That’s starting to evolve. That’s a little more serious now.

DJ Times: And technology for the producer/remixer?

Kevorkian: It can only be the sampler and the ability for any turd to not know a note of music and to actually be able to crank out a track based on other people’s music.

DJ Times: What was your musical approach to your mix comp, Deep and Sexy?

Kevorkian: I was looking at our entire catalog and I felt that there was a collection of songs that really had a common mood, something that really linked them together as far as the atmosphere and the general groove. It just fell into place. I didn’t have to think about it. It made itself in front of my eyes. There was no grand directive. It had a jazzy undertone in certain tracks. It was just…deep and sexy. The feedback so far has been very sweet.

DJ Times: From your vast experience, how do you these days view dance music and its future prospects?

Kevorkian: In dance music, the problem you have with the United States and the reason why it’s so different from Europe is that in Europe you have radio support. In Europe, advertisers feel that it’s OK to associate advertising their products and dance music. In the United States, a number of committees that control the airwaves have decided that their advertisers have told them that they’re not willing to pay as much per minute of airtime if the station’s format is dance music and they’re willing to pay for other formats. I also think part of America is very Puritan. It has a guilt complex induced by religious educations and therefore they feel that the lifestyle that disco or dance music implicates involves minorities and gay people. Ever since the days of Comiskey Park and the record burnings, there is a large portion of the population that’s prejudiced. Dance music is not prejudiced. It doesn’t see color. It’s a very inclusive kind of thing. It brings people together. There are a lot of people who are very much against that. When I see things like what happened on September 11 – not that I see anything really positive in it – but maybe it’s something that can make people find some common ground in that. It can unite people and I think music is something that can do that.