Thursday, October 10, 2024
HomeArts & CultureThe multiple sides of DJ Blitz

The multiple sides of DJ Blitz

Who is the DJ and social media personality who has taken Halifax by storm?

The Pint is crowded, loud and sweaty. Bodies bump against one another, beer sloshes from loosely-held glasses and voices break trying to be heard above the deafening beat of top 40 songs ricocheting around the Halifax bar.

In all the commotion, it’s easy to miss the DJ standing behind the booth on the dance floor. He’s stone-faced, focused. His goal is not to be seen. 

If you didn’t know who he was, you’d only start to suspect something unusual was at play after the second or third group of young adults approaches him for a photo. He steps out from behind the booth, and, for a few seconds, the neutral expression is replaced by a winning, sparkling smile as he poses with the admiring group.

His name is Daniel Beddome, but you probably know him as DJ Blitz. If you haven’t seen him DJing, whether that be at a Halifax club or opening for celebrities like Bill Burr and Jerry Seinfeld at the Great Outdoors Comedy Festival, you’ve most likely seen him on some form of social media. 

On TikTok, he’s amassed over 275,000 followers and 7.5 million likes. 

He opens his videos with a signature “Oookay Halifax,” drawing out the first syllable to accentuate his Canadian accent. (Beddome is originally from Winnipeg.) He strolls around empty Lower Sackville parking lots talking to the camera, does outdated TikTok dances that make viewers squirm and interviews Haligonians out on the street. Most importantly, he covers all things Halifax: niche things like the Harbour Hopper but also the nightlife scene and his adventures to Nova Scotia’s landmarks.

He’s goofy and a little clueless. He’s a Halifax celebrity of sorts. Also, no one quite knows what to think of him.

The online persona

In videos posted to his Instagram, he’s seen running into cheering crowds, slapping high fives to grinning fans. 

And the steady stream of club-goers posing for pictures with Beddome or trying to make it into his videos, is proof enough that Beddome has many devoted admirers. 

But some aren’t so adoring.

“I cringed so hard my teeth broke,” said a commenter on one of his videos. “This guy sounds like SpongeBob but like a distorted version,” added another. 

What may not have occurred to many is that perhaps Beddome’s scheme is a little bit more complicated than just being himself. 

“The reason I maybe embellish a bit of the character, the persona, is to add a bit more of an option for people to talk about the videos or share them with people or talk about maybe, me as a person,” says Beddome. 

And people certainly talk. Some have likened him to a cartoon character or an AI. Some simply refuse to believe he is real. 

“Someone who’s just kind of boring or bland, not adding enough energy or, you know, additional mannerisms, like the ‘Oookay,’ might still do okay in the views department, but might not get the whole, ‘people are talking’ mentality. I can take a video, that’s a rather boring topic, and just kind of make it into a fun video that people can share because of how goofy I am.”

Another topic of conversation is Beddome’s heavy Canadian accent. Some love it, some command him to “stop talking like that,” and others question its authenticity. 

“I do actually have a Canadian accent,” promises Beddome. “But it’s maybe just a bit embellished at times for added effect.”

He does think there’s at least one thing ties his personality off social media to the one on social media.  

“I think we all have a different persona on social media than we do in real life interactions. I know though, I’m always a fun person, face to face, real time off camera.”

The craft of DJing

The energy, the music, the night, can be tricky to wind down from. But Beddome has found a ritual that works: head home, watch forty five minutes or so of a movie. Have a non-alcoholic drink and some candy. Avoid his phone, step away from entertaining for a moment. Take a moment to enjoy the night.

Beddome has been DJing for 10 years, since he was 19. After all the years of working on his skills, he feels confident in his craft out at the club. 

Beddome is a resident DJ at The Pint and DJs there every Thursday night. As for other nights, he likes to keep people on their toes. Sometimes he’s at the Wobbly Duck on Fridays, or Hide and Seek on Saturdays. 

“But one thing’s for sure, is that DJing or not, you can usually find me out and about downtown on a Friday or Saturday,” says Beddome. “Maybe doing some interviews or doing some sort of content.”

When he is DJing, he uses a library of approximately 8,000 songs, all organized according to the speed of the song, known as the beats per minute. The speed of the song, rather than the song itself, is the most important element of DJing, according to Beddome. If you stay at one BPM for too long, then the dance floor wears out, and people feel like they’re listening to the same song over and over again. 

Transitioning between different BPMs—for four hours straight—is where skill is needed the most. 

Though he stays loose and wings his DJing for the most part, he does have a bit of a formula. Top 40 songs for the first hour. Then mix in some hip hop. Next back to top 40, but in remix form. Then toss in a throwback. After midnight, he brings the real party anthems out. “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” by ABBA is a big hit in Halifax, he’s noticed. We really like sing-alongs. 

How the two sides come together

Beddome says that the way his DJ career is going, he doesn’t actually have to be creating content. DJing, at the moment, is more profitable, and he almost sees content creation as a hobby.

“I really enjoy content,” says Beddome. “It allows me to connect to the community more.”

However, he suspects that if he slowed down his content creation, then his DJing gigs would slow down as well. The reason he may get hired for things like The Great Outdoors Comedy Festival is that they want to get the word out, and know Beddome will post about it and get views. So, his two endeavours blend together, and Beddome sees his social media presence as a tool for his DJing. 

His two focuses are different from each other in many ways. Beddome feels that measuring success is more concrete in DJing, whereas with social media, it’s trickier. 

“There’s not really a tangible ceiling on social media. When’s the point where you’ve kind of made it on social media? The lines are kind of blurred with that, it’s kind of a grey area.”

And the way he acts in each scenario is different too.

He describes the nightlife side of him. “It’s a very, I don’t want to say, more edgy side of me. But there’s vulgarities that I’ll toss out at the clubs, you know, F bombs and stuff like that.”

He knows that people in different niches of Halifax perceive him differently, having seen the different sides. 

“I’m just trying to have it all make sense for people,” says Beddome.

But he’s still grappling with how to do that. 

In some senses, he thinks that the brand will do a lot better when the two sides come together. His social media presence, after all, is what brings a lot of people out to see him. He proposes, chuckling, that one day he might ask the crowd at the bar to say his signature phrase, “Oookay,” alongside him. 

However, he recognizes that most people are not out at the bar for him, and many want to simply enjoy the music. 

“I tend to play it down at the clubs,” he says. “If I just kind of shut up and play the music for four hours, even if they don’t enjoy me or my content, they can still have fun with their friends.”

He concedes he still has some decisions to make. 

“I’ll have to kind of experiment a bit, and maybe dabble in blending the two.”  

Conquering Canada

Beddome started making waves as soon as he moved to the East Coast in the fall of 2022, fresh from Winnipeg.

“I arrived down here, and I just kind of milked the new guy card for as long as I could, with, you know, discovering everything new about Halifax, and people seem to be eating it up with a spoon,” says Beddome.

He wanted to move to a new city in part to expand his career, aware of the fact that no one really knew who he was outside of Winnipeg. 

And although Beddome doesn’t intend on leaving Halifax anytime soon, he does have plans to continue expanding his empire to the rest of Canada. DJing in cities like Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto are on his bucket list. 

“I’ve heard rumours that out in Ottawa and Calgary and out West in Vancouver, there are people who are aware of the DJ Blitz brand,” says Beddome. He wants to put those rumours to the test. 

But he ultimately has his sights set on something even bigger. 

“The grand finale is going to be DJing in Las Vegas. I can’t rest easy until I DJ in Las Vegas.”

Other than Vegas, though, Beddome doesn’t want to venture into the States, which he calls a whole other ball game. 

Nevertheless, Beddome is extremely happy with how things are going here in Halifax. 

“It all kind of played out exactly as I hoped, where I start off building with social media, and then from there getting into the DJ scene and kind of have them elevate each other in that way. Like it was the plan that was executed, exactly how I intended. And so I’m really happy things are working out. I really am.”

RELATED ARTICLES

Most Popular

Recent Comments