Movement Festival 2022: My feet feel like I’ve been walking on nails for the past six hours and the free weed from Ooze Cannabis has my mouth dry as cardboard, but I climb the pyramid at Hart Plaza anyway. DJ Minx is about to take the stage and I know that she’ll get me hype no matter how exhausted I am. As soon as she starts spinning her infectious brand of house, it’s like call and response between my feet and her turntables. My body moves how the music tells it.
Then a young man next to me snaps me out of the spell, as he excitedly informs his friends, “You know, that’s a girl playing!” Either they didn’t hear him over Minx’s soulful beats, or they didn’t believe him — so he says it again, this time with more emphasis on “girl.”
“You know, I’ve experienced that a lot and it was deterring quite a bit,” Minx says, shaking her head, when I tell her that story over Zoom. “I even had a person that I was with at one point say, ‘I see you doing this now but when you get on Kevin [Saunderson]’s level then maybe you’ll be a real DJ.’ I always got that type of disrespect … but when people saw me play they were floored, like holy smokes!”
Now in her fifties, DJ Minx, whose real name is Jennifer Witcher, has been part of Detroit’s techno scene for more than 30 years. But instead of being celebrated alongside techno forefathers like Saunderson and Carl Craig, who she’s become friends with along the way, her name has been largely erased from the conversation until recently.
In 2021 Minx landed a cover on DJ Mag detailing her extensive career, and 2022 was the first time she had an entire stage dedicated to her at Movement Music Festival, which she’s played since the beginning when it was called the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. The year 2022 also marked 20 years since the release of her cult classic track “Walk in the Park,” which has since been remixed by the likes of Richie Hawtin and Soul Clap.
And this year Minx is getting another curated stage at Movement, titled “DJ Minx presents House Your Life.”
“Someone online one day said, ‘You’re my favorite female DJ’ and I said, wait a minute. Stop. Can I just be your favorite DJ?”
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Minx says it took the COVID-19 pandemic when DJs started streaming their sets at home for her to finally gain traction.
“I always said I’m not streaming because I’m already shy,” she remembers. “But I finally decided to stream and within the first few minutes, there were like over 700 people watching. People in different parts of the world that are not able to physically come and see me play at clubs discovered me during the stream and that’s when it all started. That’s what kicked it off because a lot of people didn’t know about me before then. I’ve been totally flying under the radar for a very long time.”
Minx almost didn’t make it to this moment. There have been many times, she says, that she wanted to quit, fed up with people focusing on her gender instead of her music.
“Every time I’d do a radio show, they’d say something like ‘It’s the female DJ Minx,’ and I’m like, c’mon y’all. Why do we have to label me like that?” she says. “Someone online one day said, ‘You’re my favorite female DJ’ and I said, wait a minute. Stop. Can I just be your favorite DJ? I’m tired of being your favorite female DJ. If I said, ‘Let me pick my favorite male DJ,’ you’d be offended now, wouldn’t you? So I’m glad people stopped saying that shit.”
Before Minx started DJing, she and some friends ran a mobile record store called Square Distribution. She didn’t even like techno at the time, calling it “that annoying stuff they played on the radio.”
“The music was glued together and I could barely tell when the track ends,” she describes her initial perception of the music that’s now become her life. “It was very noisy to me and I didn’t take the time to listen to it and love it until I got to the club.”
That club was Detroit’s techno after-hours spot the Music Institute, where Derrick May was the resident DJ in the late 1980s.
“I heard the bass coming through those walls and I was like, we have to be a part of whatever is going on in there,” she recounts, getting as excited as she was all those decades ago. “When we finally got in and they pulled back those curtains and we saw that dance floor, I was immediately sucked in, like life-changing. The music on the radio wasn’t the same anymore. It was more of a feeling and it was incredible to me. People were just jumping and when the DJ stopped playing they would stop and when he started back up they would just scream.”
Minx and her crew made their way back to the Music Institute several times but while her friends were getting funky on the dance floor, Minx was climbing the ladder to the DJ booth to watch May. After spotting her one night, May asked Minx what she was looking at, and she simply replied, “I can do that.”
The next time she came to the club May challenged her. “He said, ‘Are you doing this yet?’ pointing to the turntables. And I said, ‘Hell no, what do you think?’ He told me ‘Don’t come back until you are,’” she recalls. (May has since been accused by multiple women of sexual assault and harassment, allegations he denies.)
“I told my mentor Jerry [James] who said that I couldn’t get a challenge from Derrick May and not take it. So he brings a bunch of friends over with all these turntables and equipment to my apartment and they start plugging everything in and nobody’s saying anything. I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ Everyone leaves and Jerry gives me two records and says, ‘Call me when you mix them.’ My god, it was crazy. I called him later and he asked did I mix those records. I said no and he said, ‘Call me when you mix them,’ and hung up the phone.”
“Jerry,” who was a close friend of Minx’s, had always heard her say how badly she wanted to be a DJ. “I talked about it continuously and since it was a dream of mine, he pushed to help me with anything I felt I wanted to come into fruition,” she says. “He felt as though I was holding myself back.”
Sitting alone on her apartment floor, Minx slowly began to mix the two records. She had no idea what she was doing but remembers Jerry telling her, “You know what music sounds like when you dance to it. Make it flow like one record.”
“I was working and it was hard as heck!” she exclaims. “I was like, ‘I can’t play anything on here!’ I mean, we’re talking about a turntable with a rotating dial. It ain’t one of the sliding fancy ones. I finally did it and I called Jerry. He says, ‘I’ll see you in a minute.’ He came over with two more records and says, ‘Mix those.’ A little while later I called and told him I mixed him and he says, ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’ That’s how it started and I was in there like swimwear. After that I was smooth. I started to pick the elements out of the tracks and I started loving it.”
Minx landed her first gig by accident. While she was delivering records to Bruce Bailey through the mobile record store, he asked her for a business card. Her business cards said “DJ Minx” on them, and after seeing that, Bailey invited her to play at a spot called The Loft on Livernois that same night.
“I’m thinking, what the hell did I give him that for!” she exclaims. She went to the club, she says, trying not to let her nerves get the best of her, but when she got there, two women working the door didn’t believe she was a DJ and wouldn’t let her in.
“I had my bag of records and about six or seven cars of us had rolled up to the club,” she says. “At the door, I said I was playing that night and one of the two women just burst out laughing. I was ready to leave but Jerry and some other friends were like a shield behind me and they wouldn’t let me leave. They said, ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ Eventually, this man came out like a side door and yells, ‘Hey Minx!’ He cussed at them saying, ‘Do you see that bag of records? You think she’s just carrying that as a purse?’”
Minx was calm on the outside but says her insides were boiling.
“I get in there and I took, I call it ‘the walk of scared,’ up to the DJ booth. I was shaking and nervous,” she remembers. “Girl, I had to put the needle on the record and my wrist was quivering. I was so done. But as soon as I started to put that first record on, you could hear a pin drop. Everyone on that dance floor just stopped. No dancing, no moving, nothing. They looked up at me as if to say, ‘What are you gonna do?’”
She continues, “When I went in there, they were playing soulful house with singing and the laid-back jazzy vibes, and all I got is techy tracks because that’s what I learned on. And I played them fast, so everyone was just like, ‘Woah!’ and they finally started dancing. When I learned how to play, I wasn’t mixing tracks after the whole thing played, I would just let the track play for one to two minutes and then I planted them. I know how to ride them on top of each other as well. So I was foolin’, if I must say so myself. Then these girls came up to the booth and they were dancing. It was the ladies from the door. We became friends and we’re still friends till this day. But once I was done, I screamed at my friends, ‘OK, let’s go!’ and we got the hell out of there.”
That was in the early ’90s, and even though Minx would still get nervous before playing a gig, you’d never know it from watching her. She always looks focused as she takes the stage dressed to the nines, grooving to her music right along with the crowd.
She’s been on fire ever since. Though she says she used to let pessimistic attitudes toward her being able to “make it as a Black woman DJ” hold her back, now she lets her music speak for itself.
“Jerry and some other friends had opened a spot on Woodward and we turned it into an art gallery/club called the Skyloft Gallery in the ’90s, and that is definitely when I started to come out of my shell,” she remembers. “I got tired of people just coming in and staring at me and not dancing… One night I was playing, I stopped the turntable and I stood there. I didn’t say anything and I stepped back from the turntables and I just looked at everybody. Everyone’s wondering what’s going on. They’re staring at me and I’m staring at them.”
She continues, “I said, ‘What the fuck are y’all looking at? … I’m not gone keep playing this hot shit and y’all aren’t dancing! Stop looking at me!’ That was the first time people started screaming at the top of their lungs and jumping. I mean, the rest of that night was so off the hook. People were coming up to me after and saying ‘I love you so much! I’ve never heard a DJ talk before!’”
May has been a busy month for Minx in the lead up to Movement. Earlier this month she dropped her latest EP The Throne with two new tracks blending techno, house, funk, and industrial grit in the way that only Minx can.
After lighting up Hart Plaza on May 27, Minx will headline the official Movement afterparty on Monday at Spot Lite with a back-to-back with Carl Craig and Kevin Saunderson. In June, she'll release a compilation for pride month on her Women and Wax label.
“I love the respect and I appreciate it a great deal to be overwhelmingly accepted and loved,” she says about her Movement stage. “I’m floored by it because I went so many decades with minimal to nothing happening. One thing that for sure made me want to keep rolling with it was being a Black woman DJ from Detroit playing techno. That was my motivation and that’s me making the people that created the music proud.”
DJ Minx performs at 9 p.m. on Saturday, May 27 at Movement Music Festival; see movementfestival.com for more information.
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