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DJ Cassidy: Spinning For The President
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When Jay-Z celebrates his birthday, he calls DJ Cassidy to provide the soundtrack. So does Naomi Campbell, who has flown him to Saint-Tropez and Dubai for her parties. He has DJ-ed the weddings of J-Lo and Beyonce, and now his bona fides are just about complete: Cassidy is now unofficially being called President Obama's DJ.
Cassidy spun records at the inaugural ball, and last week he picked the playlist for the president's "Welcome Home" bash in Chicago.
Prestigious clients don't faze Cassidy. "I've been DJ-ing since I was 10 years old," Cassidy tells NPR's Guy Raz. "I love music and I know music, and because of that, I get hired for these jobs."
For Obama's Chicago soiree, he stuck to the classics: Marvin Gaye, Sister Sledge, Madonna and, of course, Michael Jackson.
Cassidy doesn't think too much in advance about what he's going to play.
"Of course I have an idea of what I'm going to play at the inauguration. But the real skill is being able to not play what you thought you were going to," he says.
Technology has helped with that somewhat. "For years, I carried eight crates of records, and I traveled with those records all over the world," he says. "Now, you get to carry 30,000 songs on your laptop instead of 1,000 songs in eight crates of records."
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