Meet the 68-Year-Old DJ Who Brings Down the House – AARP

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REAL PEOPLE/Motor City Icon
Detroit’s Bring-Down-the-House DJ
Stacey ‘Hotwaxx’ Hale shares her crowd-winning wisdom
Photograph by Sylvia Jarrus
THE LIGHT BULB first went off when I was a teenager. I walked into a Detroit disco called the Chess Mate, made my way to the DJ booth and thought, That’s what I’m going to do. The sound just blew me away. House music! It’s a combination of funk, soul, R&B, disco, jazz, rock, church music, electronic music, classical music—whatever gets you up and moving. As a house music DJ in a club, you have two turntables and a mixer to combine different sounds, and it all comes together over a continuous drumbeat. What I love most about house is that it’s relentlessly positive. The whole point is to make you feel good, to make you dance and throw your hands up.
I was one of the first women to DJ at clubs and the first female DJ to play house music on the air in Detroit in the 1980s. If guys ever had a problem with me being a DJ, that was their problem, not mine. People would say, “Oh, you’re good for a girl.” I’d go, “What? No, I’m good because of what I deliver.”
Fifty years later, I’m still mixing—on terrestrial and internet radio, in clubs, at fundraising events. And I’m on a mission to teach the next generation how to make music and have fun. I’m mentoring kids as young as 11 on how to use all this equipment, and they just knock it out. I remind them that being a great DJ is about more than the technology. It’s about reading the room, getting the feel of a place, knowing what’s going to get the 60-year-olds up and the 20-year-olds up. You want to know the key? If you play music that women can sing, you’ve won over the audience. It doesn’t matter what kind of music it is. Also, women don’t care whether you dance with us or not. We’ll still dance. Guys? They might get in there by default. But if you’ve got the women dancing, you’ve got a party and life is good. —As told to David Hochman
DJ Stacey “Hotwaxx” Hale, 68, streams online at Deep Space Radio and serves as executive director for the nonprofit Girls Rock Detroit.
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