DJ Tatiana Used to Play Gigs While Dressed as a Man

Tatiana Alvarez has been mixing and producing electronic music since she was a teenager. In those formative years, she spent countless hours with her equipment, figuring out the house and tech house productions that eventually brought her name recognition as a DJ in the early aughts. She was good, and she knew it—yet she wasn’t getting booked as much as her male counterparts. When she did (notably, traveling as a DJ on the touring auto show Hot Import Nights) she was not only encouraged to forego her skater style and dress sexy, but she also found that guys usually stood in the booth behind her, looking over her shoulder to make sure she was really mixing.

She called bullshit. In 2007, as an experiment, she transformed herself from DJ Tatiana to DJ Musikillz, a male producer. She taped down her chest, sported a wig, facial hair, makeup, baggy clothes and a jockstrap, and spent a year playing gigs as a dude. She found that life as a male DJ was profoundly different than what she had experienced as a woman.

Alvarez’s social experiment is now being turned into a movie. Warner Brothers has purchased the rights to her story, and the film is currently in development. Naturally, Alvarez will serve as music supervisor.

What kind of double standards did you experience that prompted you to dress as a man?

[My manager] gave this demo that had my productions on it to these underground guys and was like, “Tell me what you think of this.” He didn’t say anything more about it. The guys were like, “Yeah, this is great. We’ll book this dude.” And he was like, “It’s not a dude; it’s DJ Tatiana,” and they were like, “Fuck that girl. She doesn’t even know how to DJ. She’s only gotten there because of the way she looks.”

I’m sorry that I look the way I do. It’s not like I roll up in a miniskirt and high heels, but in the press, there were definitely sexy pictures out there. I was fuming, and I was like, “I’m going to do something that will show them and make it in a way that has nothing to do with the way I look.”

And then what?

I remember telling [producer] Teo Moss—because I was really into tribal house at the time—“I think I can start a record label, and I want it to have every genre on it.” He was like, “That’s a bad move, that’s never going to work”; although of course, now everyone does it. I thought maybe I should do it under a different name, but I didn’t know how I would do that if I then had to show up and play. Then I thought, “You know what? I think I can transform myself to become a guy.”

I reached out to some of my friends, and one of them was a makeup artist. I went to her house to see if we could make me into a guy. It didn’t stick right away, but when we did the makeup and the clothes and everything, it did stick. [Andrea] lived in Burbank, and we went to her next-door neighbor’s house; we needed to borrow jeans, because the pants I had weren’t good enough for a guy. It was a brightly lit day, and I was all made up. They were like, “Hey Andrea, what’s up?” and then the guys who were in the living room were like, “Hey, dude” to me. I was like, “Holy fuckshit.”

Then it was like, “I need a dick.” [I got a jockstrap], and I wore tighty-whitey underwear over it… I had my girlfriend tape my chest. My boobs are like a big B, small C, and they went absolutely flat. And then my friends were like, “Dude, it would be so funny if you played as him.”

Where did you play?
I played a lot of warehouse parties and little clubs, and I would bring a girl with me who was acting as my girlfriend, because the one thing I couldn’t be was very emotive. I couldn’t talk a lot, because my voice is not very masculine. I adopted this whole Eminem style of gesturing.

What kind of music were you playing?
I was playing more underground music than I would have played as myself, because the gigs I was getting as myself were more mainstream. That was the problem. I was trying to switch and go in a different direction, but I couldn’t get booked. It didn’t matter if they were going to book me based on the mix, which is as it should be, but they’d see me, and they were like, “no.”

What other differences did you notice when you were a man?
I think just the treatment. I’m a pretty perceptive person… I’ve read on comment boards that I have some bad attitude and that I think women are always the underdog; I don’t think that way. I’m not one of those people who are like, “All women are being discriminated against,” but a lot of them are. I just feel like even though some guys are really stoked and awesome and supportive, the majority are like how they are with other men. They don’t want to help people, and they don’t want to let people in. They’re like little, horrible, small-minded people. To me, the universe is huge, so I’m always helping people; I help other artists all the time, and sometimes it’s not even to my advantage… But I live a certain way, and a lot of men—and a lot of people in general—want to hate.

How long did this go on for?
I played a lot of underground shows at venues as far north as Iowa. I had this other email, and I would book shows for him with the name Maya Fader. It was very labor intensive, which is another reason why after a year of it I was like, “Okay, I’ve proven my point.”

“The guys who were in the living room were like, ‘Hey, dude’ to me. I was like, ‘Holy fuckshit.’”

How have you changed since those days?
The anger for me has gone to a better place of understanding, because I’ve also grown as a person. But at the time, I was in this industry that was already very male-dominated, and all women were like this sexy thing. Of course there were exceptions, like Sandra Collins, but they weren’t the young, emerging people—they were old-school. I was already running on a lot of heat. Now, because I’m all sort of zenned-out, I would just be like, “You know what? There’s enough room in space and time, and you’ll just see.”

Do you think the field has opened up for women since then?
I think if someone is really good, then you have to have the right representation and the right exposure. There are things like YouTube and SoundCloud that can help, and there’s more corporate America involvement; so it’s easier in one way, but it’s more difficult in another. It’s obviously more producer-based now to get gigs and to get out there, and there are some great women who are coming up. It’s still very much a man’s game. And DJing isn’t enough anymore, because it’s now a producer’s game. It’s like we’re a different kind of artist.

Do you have a theory about why women are underrepresented in electronic music?
If you want to do this the right way, you have to give up all of your time… I’ve never been married. I don’t have that kind of life because of music, and I chose that; but a lot of women want to have babies and get married. To sit in a studio for 12 hours a day and figure this gear out, it’s not the easiest thing to do. So I don’t know if it’s definitely a gender thing, or just that the pool of women who desire to do it is smaller than it is for men.

If you’re really producing your own stuff, it’s very time-consuming. That’s why a lot of people say now that a lot of producers are like tech geeks. We sit there and are not going out and doing other things or really having a life. It’s not that easy. I know what it takes, and how difficult it is to produce music, and how much you have to put into it. My whole life is consumed by this, and I would have it no other way. I love music. I love this industry. I love sitting in studios; I could live in them. I love working on a track for 20 hours, and if it doesn’t sound right, starting over to make it good. But not everyone has that in them.

It seems like the people I’ve worked with have been men who can sit there for that amount of time and be patient and have the staying mentality. I’m sure there are women who think like me out there, and probably some of the women who have been reaching out to me are in the same boat. They’ve written to me like, “Oh, the stories I could tell you,” and I totally understand. But that is more based on the sexism of it, because if you’re an attractive girl, people don’t take you seriously. But on the technology and production end, there are a lot of girls that are geeks that are into technology. You have to have the time and the space and the passion to make this happen.

What else do you think contributes to misogyny in the scene?
Unfortunately, there are also DJ groupies that come around too. Everyone’s like, “Oh man, you must get a lot of play when you’re on the road.” But guys are so intimidated—by me, anyway. I’ve never been hit on on the road. I think it’s because I’m tall—I’m almost 5’10”—and I’m pretty serious. I’m not like miss crack-a-smile, or jumping up and down. I try, but I was born with a serious look on my face. Men get girls that want to sleep with them on tour… they’re just ready to give it up. I think that unfortunately, guys see a lot of that… it warps their perception.

Did women hit on you when you were dressed as a man?
I would whisk in and out with my crew and have my friend get the money, and then we would leave. So I didn’t give women the opportunity to do that.

Is being an attractive woman a disadvantage for DJ?
I think it is. When I read that horrible [comment board] that I’ll never read again, people were like, “Oh, women have it easier.” I was like, “Maybe in your small town, they get gigs because they’re hot,” but they might play two times and never play again if they’re not good. I don’t think anyone’s saying, “Oh, that girl is really beautiful, so let’s put her on.”

I saw a flyer recently where it was two guy DJs dressed normally, and then the girl who was the DJ was dressed all sexy. I’m sure they told her to dress like that. It’s just strange, because it doesn’t help you. It might help you in the short term, but it doesn’t help you in the long term. If I still had to play every show as the guy, it wouldn’t bother me because I’m not trying to use my looks. I don’t even think I’m that great. I’m not like, a Victoria’s Secret model.

Who do you want to play you in the movie?
I would love it if Jennifer Lawrence played me, because she’s so great. And I think she has the right attitude to be able to pull it off.

What are you up to in the meantime?
I’m working on my artist album. I’m almost done with it. I have been playing gigs, but I’ve been really laying low. Nothing huge, but things are changing drastically. It’s going to be mostly dependent on the album, me getting gigs, because the game is totally different now. I just think the album is so solid, so I’m really excited about that.

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