At first glance, Warehouse on Watts is an unassuming building; its only telling emblem, a bold W hung above the entrance, which can be found just off east of the Broad Line, is tucked behind a row of beauty salons and mobile phone stores. After braving the cold January winds and a lengthy SEPTA ride, you enter the small room. The red lights and hazy atmosphere are a warm, if slightly ominous, welcome. You’re forced to navigate through a billowing, iridescent fog that envelops the crowd as you make your way to the coat check in the corner—the sole disco ball in the room tucked away from the dance floor, suspended elegantly over a rack of puffers and parkas. Oddly placed, though glimmering, it seems too obvious an analogy for the venue. As heads scatter across the floor like pool balls, your eyes are immediately drawn to this little thing of a stage and the great mass of wires and equipment that spill out from under it. It’s a twinkling canvas for the upcoming artists. Though the venue was intimate, the DJs of Madness and Badness—a show jointly put on by DJ@Penn, Shea Collective, and Students of Hip Hop Legacy—filled every inch of the room with sound, taking us across genres over the course of the show.
The first tunes of the night came courtesy of Keshav Katti (E ‘22, Ph.D. ‘27), DJ name K3SHV, who took his station at the deck in a long sleeve Barcelona jersey and a broad smile. K3SHV’s set, though consistently high energy, took the crowd on a sonic journey around the world, featuring Afrobeat, reggaeton, and R&B bangers. The role of the DJ is essentially split—while a huge part of the job is catering to the needs of our audience and giving the people what they want, a DJ also has to set themselves apart as a tastemaker, establishing a unique artistic identity through their song choices and savvy production. The duality of the profession took center stage during K3SHV’s set, as he spotlighted lesser–known artists from across the globe while also playing crowd pleasers such as Rihanna’s “Work” and Bad Bunny's “NUEVAYoL”.
Caleb Choi (C ‘26)—&ERSON—was the next DJ up to the plate, and he built off the raucous energy that K3SHV had built up in the room with a powerful house collection. The depth of his musical knowledge was evident as he delved into nearly every subgenre of house one could imagine. More than anything else, however, Caleb’s set revealed that DJing is, at its core, a performance art. Just as important as curating a perfect setlist and nailing those transitions is the ability to read and react to the crowd. And that’s the funny thing about DJ shows—the energy of the audience is mirrored by the energy of the artist. As individuals on the checkered dance floor jumped and swayed with rhythm and intensity, Choi waved his hands with bravado. Like a magician, &ERSON captivated party goers with the sheer energy of his performance, accentuating the rhythm of his house stylings with movements of his arms and flourishes of his wrists.
The barometer against which DJs are often judged is very often the emcees of Greek life, whose paintbrush is not the deck but the Spotify playlist. But comparing the two feels like stacking party tricks with fine art—while technically engaging in the same practice, the method might differ entirely. Vinod Ruppa–Kasani (C, W ‘27), stage name RKADE, showed us that genre wasn’t to blame, as his set showcased a blend of hip–hop and house tracks that wouldn’t be out of place at a frat boiler room. His criteria for what draws him to the music is simple—“I just like how it sounds!”
Every DJ has their specialty, and RKADE’s clearly lies in improvisation. The majority of his performance was constructed on the fly, a fact indiscernible from the quality of his set, in which he pulled off transition after seamless transition with ease and flair. What RKADE’s dynamic set revealed was that much of DJing lies not in rote practice or scripting transition, but a kind of talent or instinct that allows a musician to command the crowd. As K3SHV puts it: “There’s an abstract part of DJing that’s hard to teach … being able to curate a set that captivates an audience.”
The night’s next performer, Leandra Archibald (W ‘25), or DJADA, experimented plenty with music production and acapella before finding herself at the decks. For her, the art of DJing is “mostly intuitive … I can feel out what sounds right.” DJADA’s freewheeling set seemed to fold audience and performer into one—with every track, she fed off the energy of the crowd, combining the will of the artist and the audience’s intuition into a single yield. “I think, more often than not, in recent times, I've just been doing it live where I just cycle through, like, all the songs in my repository, and I'm like, okay, what fits best in the present moment?” DJADA’s talent in triangulating the audience’s precise needs is indicative of her finely tuned intuition, which brought her set to a powerful crescendo fueled by dancehall and hip–hop hits.
“I think about like, two years ago, I realized that every single frat that I was stepping into with my friends had such, like, badly mixed music,” starts Fay Shuai (C ‘25), or FAYZE, who closes out the night. “It was just the same repeat of, like, bad EDM remixes and, like, really overplayed, like, Y2K songs.” The DJ broke into the scene only recently, but her musical ties go back to early childhood, where she received classical training that she says, definitely hasn’t hurt her when it comes to building musical instinct. Although it was FAYZE’s first ever major gig, the energy her set brought to the floor was electric, replete with a combo of Brazilian funk street music and Amapiano remixes. The music embodied her personality—humorous and unblushing. FAYZE took her job as being that of an entertainer in the broadest sense, enthralling the crowd with her music and bookending her set with Spongebob audio clips, beginning with the famous “are you ready kids?” of the cartoon’s intro and closing with a Jersey Club Spongebob remix.
"Even though not everyone might be an expert on music theory, everyone has a pretty good ear, I think, and they can tell when something sounds good together; when two songs pair well together and when they don’t,” FAYZE says. The crowd, composed of students from Penn, Villanova, and other universities from across the Philadelphia area, displayed that intelligence throughout the show, cheering harder at each clever transition and laughing appreciatively at melodramatic callbacks. Sometimes, in the shallow light of the discotheque, it's more about the sound than the song.
Though it would have been easy for each DJ’s set, with their unique musical talents and stage presence, to feel discrete and self–contained, it was exactly this respect and response to the audience that made sets to blend together while also allowing each DJ to maintain their own artistic identity—both a mix of people and genre. Caleb remarks that one of the core talents a DJ must cultivate is thinking of one’s set not as a series of tracks, but a holistic work of art—it is here that the vision of the DJ arises. By taking us on a wild journey through genre, Madness and Badness made it clear—in DJing, as in life, the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts.
