Our company, Rent-A-DJ, has been around since 1976. We'll probably play 30 proms this year.
Kids today are so much more readily accepting of DJs. For weddings, bands may be more prevalent. But the kids are into the DJ culture these days.
The kids all have prom themes. They'll pick a song a day or two before the prom a lot of times. Mostly they'll be new songs, but there can be old songs, even classic rock. Somebody used Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton last year.
Some kids post a list with like 1,200 songs on it. We try to go with all the music they want. The problem is some kids do what they call Stump the DJ; they give you some obscure title and try to get the DJ to play it for whatever reason, to show they're cool or because it has some cuss words in it. But usually those songs are so obscure, nobody else knows it.
Some of the current songs do have bad words in them, but we play all radio versions of songs, which are pretty clean. But to be honest, they're still not clean enough. Because the kids will sing along and insert the real words of it.
It's like years ago, you couldn't play Billy Idol's Mony Mony because kids would have this chant they'd do with the song. It wasn't on the record, but kids would chant it, so the schools wouldn't like it.
Even Billy Joel, his Only the Good Die Young, they wouldn't want us to play that at schools 20 years ago.We pretty much stick with what the kids want to hear. This year it will probably be Pink, 'N Sync, Shakira, Enrique Iglesias. Ja Rule is huge. Nickelback.
What the big, slow songs will be will change widely from week to week. Right now, it's S Club 7's Never Had a Dream Come True, Differences by Ginuwine and All or Nothing by O-Town. That will be the prom song of the year.
We do play some old songs. You can play the Grease megamix even though it's 20 years old now and sounds like 40 years old. Even YMCA, a lot of schools love that stuff. It depends on the school.
A lot of schools still like to do the electric slide. But not the macarena, thankfully.
- Roger Catlin