While you were eagerly awaiting the announcement of the Dillo Day lineup, McCormick junior Jake McGuire was a thousand miles away in Hanover, NH, performing at Dartmouth College in front of thousands of students for their spring music festival.
McGuire, a trap/dubstep DJ and producer who goes by the stage name of DJ Big Mak, performed on the Friday of Dartmouth’s Green Key festival, a three-day celebration that is essentially their version of Dillo Day. McGuire opened for hip-hop duo Aer and Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco, who closed the concert with an hour set. Lupe’s tour DJ also played a 30-minute set.
Having been on the DJ scene for only three years, McGuire had never played a show as large as Green Key. He essentially stumbled upon the gig, doing it as a favor for his friend from high school, who also happens to be the president of the Green Key Society (Dartmouth’s version of Mayfest).
“I got a text from her about a month and a half ago saying, ‘hey, do you want to open for Lupe Fiasco?’” he said. “And I was like, 'ha, that’s kind of funny, but stop.' And then she said she was serious, and I agreed, but I still thought she was pulling my leg. Then a week later I got the contract from them, paying for my hotel room and transportation and everything. So I was like, okay, I guess this is actually happening.”
Sure enough, DJ Big Mak found himself on the same bill as a Grammy-winning rapper. He arrived in Hanover to cold and rainy weather, however, and worried that his set would be moved inside or even cancelled. But Green Key reportedly had sent out a poll to the entire student body two days before, asking whether or not they would prefer to have the concert moved inside in the event of rain. The results were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the music outside, and McGuire went on as planned.
“I had performed in front of crowds before, but I had never been the only one up on stage, and never been above the crowd,” he said. “Usually when I play I’m about level with them, but this was the first time I was staged above a decent-sized crowd. Every time I looked up from my deck, having that many eyes staring back at me was a really strange feeling.”
Unlike Dillo Day, Green Key isn’t an isolated music festival in the middle of a lakefill. All of the programming happens in the middle of the quad, right along the rows of dorms and campus buildings. Everything is centralized enough for people to be able to hear the music from their dorms, so McGuire got to watch Dartmouth students lean out of their windows to hear his set. The structure of the festival is also much different than Dillo, with the festivities spread out over several nights.
“They go out after the concert, whereas we [at Dillo Day] party beforehand. We’re out all day, and by the end of the concert everybody is starting to get tired. For them, the concert is more of a pregame. It was definitely a lot more energetic, with people getting ready to go out for the night instead of teetering out.”
Green Key may have been the biggest show McGuire has played, but that’s not to say he hasn’t been active in the DJ scene before that. The son of a professional guitarist, McGuire has been playing music since a very young age, starting out on the drums and dabbling a bit with the guitar. He only got into DJing and producing late in his high school career, but since then has put out several remixes and original tracks online. While he has compared his music to artists such as Milk ‘n Cookies and RL Grime, he admits that he tries his hardest not to stick to one genre.
Over the past couple of years, McGuire has performed in a variety of contexts. He has played at clubs throughout the Chicagoland area, and often gets hired by Northwestern student groups to play parties and other events. In February, he entered Dance Marathon’s Battle of the DJs competition, where the crowd chooses a winner to play a block of the thirty-hour fundraiser, although he walked away empty-handed.
Much of the DJ scene at Northwestern runs through the WNUR Streetbeat organization, as many prominent student DJs find themselves playing their parties and spinning on the air for them. But while several of McGuire’s friends are involved, he himself prefers to shy away from the organization, as he has found they have a conflict of personal taste.
“I like those guys, but it’s just not really my thing,” he said. “They focus on the underground scene, which is fine, but they have a lot of prejudice against the mainstream stuff, which is where I come into issue with it. The point of DJing is to share your music with all kinds of people, and if you’re only going to play one type of music and refuse to do something else, you’re depriving your audience.”
McGuire plans to continue making music and playing shows, and plans to “take his music to the next level” after he graduates by attending music production school instead of grad school. Who knows – maybe in a few years he’ll be headlining festivals like Green Key instead of playing as an opening act.
You can check out DJ Big Mak’s soundcloud here.