INTERVIEW: DJ SHAWNA
THE OFFICIAL DJ OF THE MILWAUKEE BUCKS
When I was a kid, I was a suffering Milwaukee Bucks fan. Then I found punk rock and rap and all that other stuff, and I stopped suffering so much. But I never completely stopped following the team. Almost a decade ago, a man named Giannis Antetokounmpo Euro-stepped his way into the city, and things started to change–slowly, then all at once. Finally, the Bucks were good. Real good. When the team won the championship in 2021, it felt like vindication for the 8-year-old version of myself, who would freak out whenever the team lost a game. Which was often.
But this isn’t John’s Basketball Blog or John’s Mental Health Blog. It’s John’s Music Blog. So, when I reached out to the DJ and producer and athlete and entrepreneur DJ Shawna, who has been the official in-house DJ for the Bucks since 2019, I wanted to talk craft. I’ve chopped it up with a lot of DJs who do a lot of different kinds of DJing. I’ve never talked to one who plays at professional basketball games. Or the Ryder Cup, or the NBA bubble, or a college football stadium, or any number of the gigs Shawna Nicols has rocked. She was nice enough to go deep with me over Zoom yesterday. The Bucks were on the road.
Night of a game… How do you prepare? What does the opening set look like? When do you start to DJ, actually?
So, those are two big questions.
Yeah.
So, one, normally for a 7 P.M. game–let’s just say, on a Monday night–I will get the run of show the day before, and I’ll start prepping the day before. Each game will take me anywhere from four to six hours to prep, before I even step foot in the arena. And that’s just to make sure that for every element, in my opinion, I am a value add, for what I’m playing: if it’s a sponsored promotion–Bucks do tic-tac-toe, all this in-game timeout stuff–or if we have a theme night, the Bucks have five different jerseys. I think something crazy like 30-something out of our 41 or 42 home games this year have been themed.
Every game for me is different. And so, purple jersey nights have been really popular because they’re our classic, throwback nights. That’s like anywhere from 1994 to 2006 hits, which is so fun. It’s a hard question to answer, what my set looks like, because, again, every night is different. We’ve had Pride Night, we’ve had Noche Latina, Greek Night… Everything obviously sounds different.
You tailor every set to every game.
Yeah, and that’s how our show kind of goes, too. Everything that happens in addition to the basketball game–it’s kind of like two shows at one time. There’s a professional basketball game going on, thankfully right now with a really great team in the NBA, and there’s everything we do entertainmentwise. So, yeah, everything is kind of tailored for every game. I don’t have a carbon copy. I get challenged to try not to play the same music every single game.
Are there any songs you do play every game?
Our win song. We have a fourth-quarter pump up. Our tipoff song is the same every game. We have a tradition in Milwaukee, if we’re winning pretty significantly in the last minute or so, we play “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” which is, you know, the fans really enjoy it in-arena. Hip hop-wise, though, it depends on what the guys are feeling. And sometimes they just let me go, and sometimes they’ll give me some advice on what they’re feeling, which I love, because every day that I workout or I listen to music, I’m feeling something different, too. And so, I like being able to feed off of them. Even if they just give me one or two artists, I can take off and run from there. That’s a long answer to maybe say yes, and no.
Do you ever play any local rap music?
Oh, yeah. That’s my favorite. You just got me fired up, because we have another jersey, our blue jersey, that’s our City Nights, and that has taken off for me. I was doing it before everything shut down, but then it was the Bucks championship season, we were in-arena with no fans, and we still had these kind of theme nights. I would take a picture of my playlist every night on the video board, and post it on social. I would tag all these local artists, and it just started to snowball.
It’s been one of my favorite things to do, and it’s really evolved at Bucks games now. This season, artists have been invited to the game, and then they come on the court after the players run out, and I introduce them while I’m playing their song. And so, I think it’s this really cool dynamic that’s happening within the city, to hopefully help promote not only our local artists–because there’s so much talent and such incredible music–but hopefully help inspire people to make music, because I don’t hold back. As long as it’s clean and doesn't have any bad words and I like it, I’ll play it.
Right now in Milwaukee–I don’t live in the city anymore, but just from afar–it feels like the rap scene is maybe the most exciting I can remember it ever being.
Yeah, it’s growing. And there’s so many contributions to that, from 88.9 and Grace Weber’s Music Lab to artists doing their own thing and people coming and going and influencing it. But I’m excited to see where it is in the next couple of months, but also in the next couple of years. I think it’s going to be a cool space to be in creatively.
I interviewed this guy Certified Trapper.
Oh yeah.
He’s maybe a little bit left-of-center to be played at a Bucks game, but that might be good at some point. He just signed a major label deal.
That’s amazing, yeah I know the name very well, so I’ll have to look it up and see. That’s awesome.
What do you call the music that’s being played while the game’s happening?
In-game. Just in-game. Typically for the Bucks games, offense will be beats, and I have three different build-outs that I made, and one is particular to our classic night, so it’s, again, all hip hop, R&B beats from 1994 to 2006, which I think is kind of cool. And the other two are different, depending on the game scenario. So, offensive beats, defensive prompts, and then when the guys score, those are called stingers. So when Giannis does a fancy Euro step reverse dunk, SportsCenter Top 10 stuff, that’s when I play his stinger, which is “Notorious” by Biggie. Some of the other guys have some, too. We actually have quite a few. Free throw sound effects, “everybody clap your hands”-type stuff, all of that stuff. So that comes from its own separate laptop. I have two laptops that I DJ off of for Bucks games, at the same time.
So you’re pretty much running all recorded audio?
I’m not our A1–they run mics and videos and PA and all that stuff, but anything that you hear that’s auditory that’s not a video or somebody’s voice is coming from me.
I feel like I read an article about you where somebody commented that you knew when to not play audio.
That’s a huge compliment. That’s one of my favorite things, to be honest, and I’m grateful. I was fortunate enough–I played professional basketball overseas, so I think my basketball IQ is pretty high. My scouting report on the Bucks, that’s all I watch, so I feel like I can see and know their tendencies pretty well. And so, one of my favorite things, when Giannis gets a long rebound, is to just give him, literally, that space, to just do what he’s going to do–to attack. And so, I love that feeling, you can feel everybody in the arena collectively, unknowingly, take that deep breath, because that anticipation just builds.
My job is to only add value–in those moments it can take him literally less than two seconds, maybe three, to get from front of the rim to the front of the rim. For me to play a beat for three seconds would feel so jarring. And so, to know to give him that space, and then when he makes it or it’s an and-one or he goes to the free throw line–that’s his show. And so, that is one of my favorite things: To know silence is just as important as the music.
Close game, late game: Are you a little bit lighter on the audio?
Actually, no. We go harder. Our team and our game-op side, the team and the organization loves it. They don’t want it quiet.
I guess that makes a lot of sense–obviously. What was the learning curve like doing this? You come from club DJing, I assume that at the beginning of this, you had to kind of figure it out to a degree.
Yeah, I like your questions, man. This makes me feel like I can nerd out with you.
That’s what this blog is about.
Oh man, I love it. So, I did: I was in bars and clubs for the first, like, six-to-seven years of my DJ career, and I had started to learn about live entertainment stuff online–Instagram, honestly. Actually, one of my best friends and now best mentors and peers, DJ Roueche–he’s the Lakers DJ–he was posting about the AVP, the pro-volleyball tour. He’s also the pro-volleyball tour DJ. And I was like, I want to do this stuff, I didn’t know this existed out here. And I started to learn about it. And so, to answer your question, it was a huge learning curve. But in retrospect or hindsight, the best thing that happened to me was Covid, and then being one of four DJs that got to go to the NBA bubble, because there I got to DJ for 22 NBA teams.
So, the other crazy part was, because it was just us and there weren’t any entertainment teams going on, I would just DJ for timeouts. There were no promotions or games–it was just playing music literally for the people in the arena, which was predominantly the two teams that were playing. That was the easy part, to be honest. DJing was the easy part. It was all the in-game stuff and learning 22 different teams’ philosophies. We also incorporated one more piece of equipment in the bubble, which was an iPad for the defensive crowd prompts. So, it had defense noise with it to help stimulate people that weren’t there.
All of that helped me really, really feel like I got, I don’t even know how to put it into something that is measurable, because it was just unbelievable. I DJ’d more games in the bubble for other teams than I did the Bucks.
Wow.
Because that was my first year. And so, that’s the part that’s just really, really such an amazing gift. And then we come home, post-bubble, and that was the beginning of the Bucks championship season. We were still in the arena without fans until the playoffs started, which was crazy to think about, then you have 100,000 people outside in the Deer District. So, my learning curve, it just skyrocketed in the NBA bubble, and then everything else kind of slowed down, if that makes sense?
Wow, I guess after that experience… So you really had to, each team probably has their own style to a degree, or they want music to be done in a certain way?
Yeah, absolutely. So, like, a huge, drastic extreme to the Bucks–where our philosophy is non-stop–is the Celtics. And so the Celtics have, like, eight organ prompts and one defense prompt. And it’s their philosophy, and they would prefer it silent rather than anything else. And that’s just what they do and that’s how they roll. So, those games were so different than our Bucks games, where every possession has, you know, an offensive beat. We have stingers for every guy, there’s 12 different defensive prompts. So, it was amazing to learn that, as well. It helped me understand the game, and what my role was a lot better.
I wanted to ask you how club DJing is now, after doing this stuff in an arena for 20,000 people.
It’s so different. I always joke that every gig now is really easy compared to a Bucks gameday, because it’s so much more condensed. And so, sometimes–my New Years Eve set this year was literally an hour and 15 minutes, and it felt like it was nothing, it felt like the blink of an eye. I think that’s a cool problem to have: I get to feel the music a little more, decide if in this space I’m going to let it play longer, or just mix it up, based on literally reading the crowd. I don’t do a lot of bars and clubs. If I do, I go back to Walker’s Pint, which is the bar I started at when I started DJing, when I was terrible. And that’s just fun.
Yeah.
Four, four and a half hours there, it’s just fun. You see what happens. Sometimes you get caught up talking to people and run a song back–there’s no rules, that’s what I’ve learned, too. I think it’s just learning, there’s different kinds of DJing, for different moments and different experiences, different venues.
Yeah, the spectrum of what a DJ can be, it’s so broad. Sports really are their own thing. What’s your take on the term Jock Jams? When I think about growing up in the ‘90s, I think about the cannon of Jock Jams. Is that still relevant? Are there any players that still want that?
They don’t necessarily ask for that, but that’s all our purple jersey, our “classic” nights, are. All those amazing Jock Jams songs. Especially for timeouts, for stuff that’s not in-game, because that’s then our philosophy, too: We don’t play a lot of hip hop during timeouts or halftime or anything like that, we kind of keep the energy pretty high, and so that stuff is amazing. It’s crazy, on all the record pools right now–and I’d love to hear your opinion on this–everything is being remixed, because the energy isn’t there. And so, whether it’s at 120 or 132 BPM, everything is being remixed, because we just don’t have the songs right now that have that Jock Jams kind of energy.
I hear DJs talking about that, how they’re just not really making club songs. I think that they are, I feel like someone like GloRilla is making great club rap songs, but maybe those aren’t fully crossing over to a mainstream audience.
I’ve seen that debate, too–what’s the demographic that’s going to get hype for that, and I look at, too, specifically for a Bucks game, when I’m trying to make as many of the 17-plus thousand people happy as I can…
Sure, yeah.
That song might hit, what, if I’m lucky, 17 percent?
Yeah.
That’s the other aspect of it, even if I play a song at 128 BPM but people don’t know the words, that’s a song that I will get people to clap along to, because they can feel that rhythm and feel that beat, and it’s easy, to be honest. It’s a little bit easier to get people moving.
No, I mean, like, there’s no room for subtlety in a sports stadium.
Right.
I think that’s what interests me so much. A song that can work in a stadium–I think about stuff like “Seven Nation Army,” songs that come from this other world but somehow have this ingredient, this simplicity, to carry on to this totally different…
“Seven Nation Army” is our fourth quarter pump-up, so, again, for those crowd-and-stadium anthems, where people can either, you know, ideally… Our goal is to get people to make sound in some capacity, whether that’s with their voices or their hands, sometimes their feet–but to make sound. Because that provides energy, it’s like psychology 101. And so, it’s all of those things that come into play.
So, to answer a previous question, during the championship year, “Head & Heart” by Joel Corry became one of our unofficial championship season songs. I played it, and everybody wanted to hear it, I played that darn near every single playoff home game. I still love that song, that’s a song I wish I would’ve produced. But, that was a song that wasn’t, again, mainstream, and there are people who come up and say, “Can you play that win song from the championship year?” And they are like [sings melody]. I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll play ‘Head & Heart,’ absolutely.’”
Do you ever test out songs, and some of the ones you think might work don’t work?
Oh yeah.
It feels like to me, it’s about some kind of simplicity.
Yeah, and sometimes, too, I have to give myself grace, because if I test a song out, just for one night, it doesn’t mean that it failed or was successful. It just means it was that night. That’s why “Head & Heart” really stands out, because that one stood the test of time. That, again, wasn’t necessarily mainstream, though it continued to just soar as the year went on. And then there are songs, like you said, it’s hard–I don’t play Usher “Yeah” a lot, but it works. You can’t argue against it. So tell me another song from the last even five or seven years that has that energy, that has that messaging, that has, again, there’s just so many layers to it, and I can’t find it.
That’s interesting, in a way I think about movies now, how everything is getting sequels or is getting rebooted.
Right, yeah.
It can feel that way with pop culture because there’s not a dominant mainstream anymore, maybe, so it’s harder to have a new song that cuts through all of this, outside of maybe Taylor Swift or something, or, I don’t even know if that even works anymore…
And that’s the thing. This is such an interesting conversation, because it's so accessible, right, we can pick up our phone right now and we can go down a rabbit hole on a genre that I’ve never even heard of. And I don’t have the ego to say I know everything about music, because it’s impossible to know. And so, that’s the part–so, we used to listen to the radio, and whatever the radio DJs would feed us, based on that business model. And now it’s streaming services. There’s so much music, somebody told me there’s thousands of songs that come out on a daily basis. And, like you said, for one single song to cut through, and there hasn’t been one, at that energy, in I don’t even know how many years.
How about that David Guetta song that samples…
Oh yeah, “I’m Blue.”
That one almost feels like a throwback to a different era of pop.
Yeah, absolutely. And, candidly, I miss the David Guetta’s, the Avicii’s, when David Guetta and Rihanna were making music… That’s the stuff that works. And then you have your one-offs: I DJ’d for the Wisconsin Badgers. You have stuff that’s at a different BPM that has the same energy. “Jump Around,” right? That’s an incredible song. “Turn Down For What,” that’s at 100 BPM. But you’re always kind of looking at that EDM-type of vibe that has that pop crossover, so that it’s not too obscure, so that people can kind of buy into it.
If you think about the era of “Jump Around,” most rap music from that era is not still getting played at sports stadiums. For obvious reasons, “Jump Around” has this…
Right, and that’s what’s fun, for a song to live on that long and to be intergenerational… I’ve never written or produced a song that has that yet, maybe someday, but I don’t know if you know it when you make it.
I saw an interview with Jack White once where he was talking about “Seven Nation Army,” and he said something to the effect of, like, “This song isn’t mine anymore.” This song is out in the world doing things he would’ve never imagined it would do.
Especially because sports brings so many people together, and that’s what I think is interesting, is now there is this whole sector of people that purely are trying to make stadium anthems, because of the influence it can have. You get to play your music in front of NBA players, or an international soccer team–I DJ for Team USA women’s soccer–so there’s all these things. Yes, the athletes themselves are somewhat A-List celebrities. But, then, 17 thousand people for a basketball game. Think about a soccer game, or a football game, you’re looking at 80 or 90 thousand people, everytime you play a song.
There’s a reach there that’s very appealing. But it’s hard to manufacture that, I think.
Oh yeah, I don’t think there is a blueprint yet.
Maybe never. This group The KLF wrote a manual in the ‘90s on how to get a number one hit. And I think a few people used it. And The KLF definitely put crowd noises in their music. Anyways. One last question: Do you remember Streetlife?
Yeah. The band.
It’s so funny how things are different, that’s my memory of growing to Bucks games growing up. It was Streetlife.
It’s funny, because someone recently came up to me and were like, “I used to be in the house band, Streetlife.” It changed, and I do remember them, because they were in the atrium, and they were playing stuff when you would walk in.
It was almost like smooth jazz, pretty much.
Yeah. That’s so funny.
You probably couldn’t get away with playing smooth jazz nowadays.
Maybe while the other team’s warming up and the Bucks aren’t on the court. Sometimes I’ll play Adele, which I think is funny.
So, you fuck with the other team a little bit.
I do, and it’s all playful. I’m not a jerk, but, again, I was in the bubble with so many of them. And so I have memories and music memories with them, whether or not they know it was me, but I have music memories with some of the guys on some other teams. But, yeah, I mess with them sometimes. You have to. It’s entertaining. It’s part of our job, again, to be entertainment. And sometimes you just need Adele.
This is the best one yet. Perfect.