I haven't been going to many music shows in the last year, but this past week has been pretty busy. On Saturday, I caught ?uestlove's (The Roots) dj set at a small club near my house. He is a resident dj there, but appears infrequently due to a rather full-blown career. Last night, I checked out a Toyota-sponsored set from Gang Starr's DJ Premier. The two could not have been more different.

?uestlove was spinning tunes to dance to, period. He had several subsets consisting of classic and recent hip-hop, 80's top 40 dance and soul, and the continuity was pretty good. There was minimal technical showboating, with jarring transitions wherever he felt like it, but there was good flow and there was only one point where he started to lose the audience. Otherwise, the crowd was loving it and the dj was having fun.

DJ Premier seemed to phone it in. He has a pretty polished set, but you definitely got the feeling that everything was scripted, especially the frequent call-and-response with the audience. After opening with some good tunes and a long but well-chosen Gang Starr medley, "Primo" dropped into an extended technical noodling session that killed the dancefloor and thinned the crowd. I had hoped that we'd be treated to more original work, but that was not the case. Thank god for the top shelf open bar in the VIP lounge. So here are two examples of famous producer/performers spinning other peoples music, with very different results. They both had attentive, enthusiastic audiences, great sound systems, and plenty of good mp3s (no vinyl was harmed in the making of these shows).

What went wrong with Premier's set? Maybe it was because it was really a corporate gig (tickets were free). Maybe it was the fact that cutting up old Run-DMC tracks is just not entertaining anymore. He is truly a master dj, but there was a whole lotta chatter between tracks and too many lapses in danceability.

If you have the chance to catch a ?uestlove show and aren't afraid to dance to whatever the hell is making his afro bounce that day, do make the effort. If you have a chance to see Premier on the Scion tour, do make the effort to get a VIP pass.

Tonight I'm going to the Phillies game, and then Josh Wink is spinning at the same place ?uestlove played for like $5 or something. Not sure I'll make it, but having access to world-class DJ's for peanuts is not something to be taken for granted so I'll do my best to get there.