![]() In his first acquiescence to the rules of Skrillex Week, he decided not to play music for the rowdy line: "I feel like it's just not a normal thing people do when they're supposed to be in a venue.” Plus, there was the fact that Good Room was right next to the NYPD precinct where he'd been detained last year, after he showed up at Diplo's pop-up show and got his speaker confiscated. That evening, Halperin was nervous about getting inside-someone on the DJ's team had sent Halperin a vague Instagram DM that suggested he'd be able to get inside the venue, but Halperin didn't actually know if he had been put on the list. Ultimately, the power of the Subway DJ comes from making things happen on his own. And what I saw was that the machinations required by the celebrity DJs did not fit with the Subway DJ's roguish methods. I tagged along with Halperin during three nights of Skrillex Week, wanting to see how he makes a moment happen. He is a wizard of the life-changing magic of just being a guy who's around. It's aspirational, in a way-Halperin just hangs out, and it somehow earns him money, clout, and access. You can just go outside, he suggests, and almost effortlessly rely on serendipity-there's a place you can party in the city, full of the most excitement you could imagine, right on the street, so long as you can vibe it into being. Halperin comes off as a sort of brazen hangout hero, a poster boy for the ideology that going out in this city doesn't have to require making appointments to spend $75 at an event, only to then head straight home. He has a tendency to pop up seemingly everywhere, and his videos capture the revelry he provokes. His followers-more than 10,000 on Instagram-look to Halperin to see the 2023 version of a merry New York trickster. And if you want to know where the biggest party is in New York on any given day, you might want to find the Subway DJ. That seemingly impromptu post-concert Celine Dion singalong at the Barclays Center subway station? It was prodded into being by the Subway DJ. (Hell Gate)Įven if you don't know the name Subway DJ, you've likely seen his work. And sometimes I feel like I have achieved that goal, and other times I feel like I haven't." Halperin's speaker. "One of the goals is to make a living doing this, and not have to do anything else. "The goal is always changing a little bit," he explained to me. Halperin, who wasn't paid for these efforts, would get a higher profile for his Subway DJ persona, and hopefully the ability to continue doing it. The upside of collaborating for the superstar DJs seemed clear: They would get free publicity. Fred himself had DMed Halperin, asking if he was around. Now that Fred was back, Halperin planned to work the February shows as he usually does, playing songs afterwards for the drunk crowd, and then posting videos of those crowds on his Instagram account. He had gotten on the DJ's radar last year, after taking a request for a song from a drunk British guy who ended up being Fred Again's brother, and for his tour in New York City last fall, Fred Again's team had enlisted Halperin to preview his album on the streets of New York. Halperin, a tall, slender 33-year-old, was there at the invitation of DJ Fred Again, sort of. ![]() It was "Skrillex Week"-Good Room was hosting the first of several pop-up Skrillex shows, and across the street, a massive line of noisy club-goers waited to be let into the show that would be held inside: a triple-header DJ set with the aforementioned EDM producer, who would be releasing two albums that Friday, along with the British electronic musicians Four Tet and Fred Again. Halperin is better known as the Subway DJ, and the “suitcase” is really a speaker affixed to a trolley. ![]() ![]() On the night of Valentine's Day, Naveh Halperin was hovering conspicuously by a rack of Citi Bikes outside of Good Room in Greenpoint, leaning on what looked like a carry-on suitcase.
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