Waiting For The Drop: Rise of the Superstar DJs

Waiting For the Drop is a new music documentary about the contemporary world of DJ-ing and electronic music culture. The result of over a decade’s worth of venue footage and talking-head interviews is an engaging – yet not always well-articulated – story with a multitude of moving parts. Director and producer Alexei Barrionuevo is very much making a film about the industry for those interested in the industry... which is not to suggest that it is inaccessible to the average non-house-music-obsessed viewer, for instance. This is simply a case of a documentary’s rich content and contexts outweighing the piece’s overall craft and spectatorial consistency.

All audience-members will engage in fascinating areas of discussion. For instance, the movie touches on how, once big business caught on to how lucrative the scene was becoming, they attempted to commercialise the movement without knowing what about it appealed to the masses. The invasion of capitalistic intent within art will not only speak to music-lovers but to film-lovers as well, since we’re living in this age of great division between the biggest, most superficial products of cinema and the most tiny, perceptive works from independent creatives. It’s a film which expertly explores the fine line between what’s cool and what isn’t, and the external forces which have a bearing on that dichotomy.

Throughout the feature’s runtime, we get valuable insights into the perspectives of some celebrated professionals. These interview snippets are golden; fascinating for their confidence, candour and occasional contradictions. You’re almost left wishing that the film had taken its time a little more to remain with these personages and their stories. Because if there’s a definite problem in Waiting For the Drop, it’s the sense that this is a most by-the-books, general overview of such a vast range of topics. After a while, the viewer will realise that we’re simply viewing footage of crowds in arenas, put to music and informative voiceover, with fragmentary testimony sprinkled in. In this way, the film lacks any kind of cinematic punctuation. It’s a phenomenal piece of research, yes, and some of the images are impressive; but it struggles to maintain a structure and therefore momentum. One way in which to fix this would be to focus in on a single subject or sequence – for instance, seeing what a day in the life of a DJ is like; the practical pressures and processes they must go through every night. Ideally, I’d like to follow them on that journey.

One can safely say that, through watching this 95-minute film, this reviewer has learnt more and comprehended further the workings of an industry which I heretofore had little to no awareness of – in addition to now understanding the appeal of such a genre and such a movement. Alexei Barrionuevo and the rest of the production team should be proud of what they’ve accomplished, for on a level purely of accumulation and arrangement, this is a formally competent, well researched, well organised document. Despite complaints that this movie fails to be quite as experiential and emotionally immersive as one might hope, Waiting For the Drop is sure to educate a great many viewers when it comes to the history and culture of authentic electronic music.