On an unusually warm night last fall, I walked into a bar in Brooklyn that was alive with lilty chatter. Once I wandered deeper into the space, all foot traffic led to the DJ booth. There, Zainab Hasnain, confined by just a few square feet, navigated the controllers’ interfaces — an overwhelming grid of blinking knobs, switches and buttons — with an unrelenting, dexterous elegance.
Dancing to her own soundtrack, Hasnain, known as Zeemuffin on stage and social media, refused to confine her energy to the booth. The vibes were immaculate as she wordlessly engaged with each exalted body in the room. In a room with layers and spectrums of identities, each of us found a piece of themselves in Hasnain’s set — an effervescent potion of hip-hop, funk, reggaeton, Bollywood, and almost everything else.
Hasnain wasn’t just playing the party. She was the party.
For BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folx, breaking into DJing has often felt like breaking and entering, even though its roots were built on our queer, Black and Latine communities’ histories. Hasnain’s sheer existence in DJing’s Cishet White Boys Club is revolutionary on its own, and it’s a persistence that’s spanned a decade professionally.
Hasnain, 32, feels the weight of her presence in this fraught industry, she tells me over coffee in July. But she’s here for the music, plain and simple. And anyone who has heard her spin knows that she, nor her mixes, can be put in a box.
It’s been incredibly inspiring to Hasnain to DJ spaces that are united by a shared experience. It feels reductive, she said, when white and cishet spaces use essentialist identity descriptors that “explain” who you are and why you’re there. In those moments, Hasnain is described as a “female” DJ or a “brown” DJ. “Why can’t I just be a DJ?” she asks.
Brittainy Newman for HuffPost
Hasnain’s mixes contain a delicate concoction of…
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