When DJs started to use CDs, purists were up in arms – and now an even more recent piece of kit has been declared verboten. Yet, like dance music itself, technology moves on – so why not embrace it?

Outrage among dance music fans on the internet this week – I know, newsflash! – as a club in Glendale, California, has issued a decree forbidding the use of laptops in its DJ booth. Cure and the Cause owner, the magnificently named Kenny Summit, said: “Keep your controller in your crib. Don’t come to work with training wheels.”

Laptops in clubs use software like Ableton, Traktor or Mixxx that algorithmically match beats so you’ll never hear sloppy mixing again – often paired with a physical controller that allows the DJ to be more hands-on when manipulating the audio files. Summit’s intimation is that working with CDJ decks or vinyl, which require you to manually match up the beats, is art – and using controllers like these is mere science.

When CDJs first came along, the old guard cried havoc from their Expedit shelf-lined man caves, arguing that they ruined the artistry of vinyl mixing. Now the CDJ is 20 years old, the same is happening with the next generation of tech. It’s a highly specific kind of object fetishism that valorises the tools of the very recent past and then trashes the tools of the even more recent past, but here we are.

The argument is false: pioneer CDJs use the same algorithmic “training wheels” in the form of beat-matching help and pitch control, and Summit admitted as much in a follow-up interview. To be fair to him, he seems mostly exasperated with having to connect up loads of new shiny boxes in the booth each night.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dubstep DJ Mala: a vinyl man. Photograph: Publicity image

The wider problem is viewing DJing as a video game where skills are honed, then deployed. This is fine in scratch DJ competitions, which, while potentially wanky, are an artform in themselves not to be denigrated – the worlds of collage and sport collide in spectacular displays. And when you see technically astounding DJs mixing accurately at high speed for dancefloors – DJ EZ, say – part of the thrill is in hearing them, and seeing them, resculpting existing music with total finesse.

The error is to think good DJing necessarily needs technical skill. Take left-field house producer Hieroglyphic Being, whose DJ sets are pile-ups of disco, industrial, cosmic jazz and 4/4 bangers. There’s little finesse in the way they’re joined – which is exactly the point.

Another mistake is not recognising that certain genres marry with certain outputs. Perhaps I’m approaching the realms of snake oil and superstition here, but trance on vinyl always seemed weird to me – surely the brightness of digital sound is much more appropriate – while there’s a reason why vinyl acetates were used so often in grime and dubstep, because wax and bass make such good bedfellows. To restrict clubs to certain tools could garble a track’s true voice.

But much of the time it doesn’t matter what’s being used – the quality of the set is mostly to do with track selection and intention. Eerily slick mixing, the kind afforded by Traktor, can be transporting, or at least wonderfully kitsch; in the wrong hands it can also be desperately bland. There’s no blanket rule. The fixation with kit is perhaps just an inevitable byproduct of a dance culture where people now face the stage, rather than dance in the round.

The object fetishists aren’t going away – there isn’t a week that goes by without a night proudly trumpeting “Vinyl only!” from its flyers. Incidentally, these are a useful way of winnowing terrible people out of other, better clubs. But the sooner we treat the likes of Traktor as instruments with huge creative potential, rather than concrete blocks weighing down the scene, the freer expression will be.