Calabria

I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret of DJs.  A lot of the time the DJ can't tell you the name of the song they're playing.  Only about 20% of the time it's because they don't have time to mess with you, didn't remember or intentionally not saying.  Most of the time they simply don't know. 

You might be thinking at this point that this sort of thing is impossible now that we have applications like Shazam and Soundhound out there but there are songs you can't find on either network.  I can tell you from experience that both applications do very poorly with remixes and personal mixes.  If the song wasn't charted at some point, fugeddaboutit!  Now add to the mix that the genre I work with has a ton of music with no lyrics and multiply that factor by 10.

Ok, what about DJs working with digital music?  Surely they must know the names of all their songs.  *BZZT* Nope, nope, nope...and don't call me Shirley.  This is dirty secret #2.  You'd be surprised how many people working with digital either don't tag their music or have music with the wrong tags.  To this day I still have a song called Dare Me in my collection even though it's official name is Stupidisco.  In all fairness though, music tagging is rather geeky (wink wink nudge nudge) so it's understandable why there's a fair number of digital DJs out there with a folder for the name of the artist and track01.mp3 - track12.mp3 in it.

Ok, that's the story.  Now on to Calabria.  Calabria is a song you HAVE heard.  You just don't know it's called Calabria.  It's a crossover song that mixes dance with dancehall reggae.  Ahh, the wheels are starting to turn now huh?  Well the reason this song is on my list of influential songs of my short DJ career is that when I first heard this song it was THE DEVIL to find out what it was named.  The lyrics are hard to make out and the words you could make out turned up rather common web searches. I tried strings like "talk of the town" (this is really the easiest line to make out in the song) and "boop boop".  It was madness.  How did I finally find it?  It was on an album I bought that was a compilation of all the hits that came out in 2007.  Yep, in the end it was pure luck. Here it is, Calabria: