3/1/25

katie darby mullins
on
(9) robbie williams, “rock dj”

(March Danceness, 00s Edition)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a cruel (though fun) tournament! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round. We wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read. The Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? There is no voting this year, but the tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above).

We hope these great essays will again earn your love.

Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

katie darby mullins on Robbie Williams, Rock DJ

My friend Adam is really smart. He’s the kind of smart that pisses everyone in the room off, because sometimes he says something and suddenly it’s like the room is connected by this electrical current, where you and everyone else who is Not Adam, thinks “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that,” in private unison. One of those times for me was when I was 27 or 28—sometime after I’d gotten married, become a custodial stepmom, survived a house fire, and gotten on the tenure track, but before I was going to have a brain stem stroke—when he said that it took him a long time, as a writer, to learn that “humor was not the enemy of profundity.”
Say that out loud a few times. Roll it around on your tongue. Let it be like the first time you tasted scotch: maybe it burns, but it also feels like an essential part of being human, this experience, this all of the sudden obvious truth that humor and thoughtfulness are not mortal enemies. I love it.
Robbie Williams released “Rock DJ” in the year 2000, which was an important year for me for so many reasons—first, it was the year I started back in public school again after having been in a back brace and homeschooled; second, it was the year my parents officially got divorced; third, it would be the fall I started high school. I was terrified. I had started acting, which was a refuge—nothing says, “Don’t look at me, look anywhere else” like a spotlight that only shines on you when you’re saying someone else’s words and a straight-A report card. But when I was offstage, I had one definite feature, and it was one that I took with grave seriousness.

I was smart.

I’m not saying this to convince you, nor do I think you should even bother evaluating whether or not it was true. What I’m saying is that I wanted people to think that I was smart, and that was more my personality than any other aspect. I needed that. I took myself seriously in ways that, looking back, are absurd. I also found a way to take my favorite thing on earth—music—and turn it into homework. I’d buy a copy of Billboard, Rolling Stone, and watch MTV and VH1’s top twenty countdowns every week where I would religiously, with colorful, bubbly letters, average out a song’s chart position for my own ‘ranking’ system in a bright Lisa Frank notebook. (This was a few years before Clear Channel bought the airwaves and erased tastemaking for a more homogenous sound: it was before all the major labels were folding. It was right at the edge of music piracy, and I was, at thirteen or fourteen, still quite certain I’d grow up to be an A&R man.) I loved academia (and still do): I graduated with a full International Baccalaureate degree from Garland High School in Dallas, and then I graduated from college with two degrees in three years. 
My love for academia, which has been the only work life I’ve ever known, pales in comparison to my love for rock ‘n’ roll.
That means the stakes with my musical taste are even higher than stakes that people think I’m smart, but when I was younger, I accidentally conflated intelligence with music taste. This can be complicated because I no longer believe in guilty pleasures—if you like it, it’s a pleasure. I have a really hard time finding music I don’t see value in. Once, a friend of my husband’s told him to ask me if I listened to Snow Patrol, and before I could say that “Run” was one of those triumphs that makes you feel like you’ve just won some national award, the woman started laughing and making fun of me. That was over a decade ago. This is the first time I have told anyone since then that I like Snow Patrol.
It goes without saying that even when I find a good song by a boy band, I keep my mouth shut. I had a merciless dedication to learning everything about music: I could tell you who was on what label, when; disputes over lyrics and ownership; that Maverick was Madonna’s imprint under WB; all sorts of worthless things that you’d think the stroke would have erased, but that still live inside of me. But that meant I knew Robbie Williams, British pop star, came from Take That. And I knew that was uncool.
In great news, it didn’t matter how uncool he was in 1997 when he released “Angels.” I was still homeschooled. I was a nerdy kid anyway, and when my scoliosis got bad enough to keep me in a large, plastic Boston brace, my mom was generous enough to allow me to come into myself without my fellow adolescents’ running commentary. I knew that “Angels” was uncool because it was desperately sincere, because Williams commits to it in a way that aches. If I’m being honest, I still tear up a little when his voice cracks on “where ever it may take me,” because it just feels full-bodied and powerful. I got to keep really loving Robbie Williams without anyone knowing for years. “Let Me Entertain You”? Good sir, I expect it! “Millennium”? Hell yeah, that is way better than a Willennium and I am grateful to have the option.
“Rock DJ” came out a few weeks before my freshman year of high school. In bad news, there was no way for me to pretend I didn’t love it. You may be thinking to yourself— well, just don’t tell anyone. I have a problem, though, where when I love something, I love it out loud. Maybe that’s why I’m so moved by the vocals in “Angels.”

“Rock DJ” could not be more different than “Angels.” First, by then, he was in on the joke. He had grown into a writer who knew how to use a turn of phrase that took a minute to unpack, and he had mastered my friend Adam’s edict that humor is not the enemy of profundity. Second, it is an absolute bop. I have never had this song on without dancing along, at least with my arms: it is a perfect car jam, but it’s not bad to run to, either. Also, if you’re not a good dancer, it doesn’t matter. (Are you alone right now? Do you have access to music? You should put it on and dance. You’d be shocked how much better you’ll feel after that 4:21 is up.) The beat is generously easy to follow and, to use his lyrics completely out of context, it’s easy to feel like you’re “selling it.” Before I started back in public school, I had a lot of choices to make—first, did I want to change? Be different than I was back before, when I was a nerd? When I read through lunch? Did I want to try and dress like the popular girls? Wear more makeup? Did I want to paint my nails black and pretend I was very serious all the time? (My chewed off, bloody nails: one of the early signs of my OCD. Well, that and creating my own music charts in Lisa Frank notebooks. That doesn’t strike me as a normal preteen hobby in retrospect.)
A lot of things went into my decision, but let me be clear: I knew I had a choice, and I was deliberate. My mother bought me three years to become myself, and I decided to honor her sacrifice and myself, the girl who was learning to love and just… be myself. A few things helped point me that way: mostly records. Counting Crows, Harvey Danger. Some books. But one of the deciding factors was Robbie Williams’s “Rock DJ.” 

If you haven’t seen the video, nothing I can say will do it justice, but let me put it this way: on the surface, it’s hilarious. Underneath that? It’s something so much better. Even as a very young teen, I got to have this special bond with a moment in time, and I got, to bastardize the lyrics one more time, “permission to land.”
Williams has the choice, in the video, to give the women skating around him—who he seems to think will be adoring fans—either “Robbie” or “More Robbie.” He selects the first option, certainly expecting that that would be enough. He’d been a bonafide superstar for years. He is raised up to their level, and as he starts dancing, all the women… completely ignore him. It’s not like they shun him. It’s like he doesn’t exist. And for a moment, he looks confused, but then he realizes—they just need more Robbie. So he takes off his shirt.
Nothing.
     Pants!
Nothing. Well, nothing from the women. He’s in an iconic black speedo with a strategically-placed tiger.
Underwear?
Yeah, he’s thrusting naked, dancing with the same commitment I can’t avoid when the song is on. His whole body is involved. He’s singing cocky lyrics like, “Give no head, no backstage passes” to women who have not even noticed he’s in the room, much less that he’s naked.
So he peels off his skin.
Literally. He peels everything down to the viscera, and then he starts pulling muscles off and tossing them to the women. Once he is literal meat, they seem interested, but only in that part of him. It ends with his skeleton finally finding a dance partner. (Don’t worry about him! At the end of the video, you are assured that “No Robbies Were Harmed During the Making of This Video.”)
The lyrics aren’t profound. The video, believe it or not, is. It’s funny. Here’s an attractive man who, in an attempt to grab attention, turns himself into bones.
     OK, it’s not really funny when you put it like that. It’s almost… transcendent. Like he turns himself inside out to become something that appeals to everyone and he’s left empty, with nothing that even resembles him. He’s nothing but a sketch of himself, a frame. He could be anybody. And that’s the secret: if you’re talking to someone who is so generic that they could be anybody, they could also be nobody: you aren’t getting to know them, just a very curated version.
The chorus says, “I don’t want to rock (rock)/ DJ (DJ)/ But you’re making me feel so nice,” and I have to say, with a little bit of tweaking, it was my response to the song: I didn’t want to like “Rock DJ,” but it made me feel so nice. It was fun. It was cheeky. It was campy. It was like some of George Michael’s sillier songs. It got me up and moving, and when you’re kinetically involved with a song, it means more. It lives in your—your bones. Every time I think about this song, I remember thinking—don’t take it all off for anyone. Don’t turn yourself inside out.
I never lied and said I didn’t like a song when I was asked. I got made fun of. But one of the things I decided, watching Robbie Williams bare it all for attention from the women around him, was that he got the joke. You can’t ever take enough off for some people. You can’t ever turn yourself inside out and have anything left to give. But also? You can be vulnerable—nakedly vulnerable, pun intended—and that kind of full-frontal approach to life and art seems a hell of a lot more fulfilling than just going along.
Am I a good dancer? Definitely not. But I requested “Rock DJ” at every dance I ever went to, and you can bet that in my Dallas, Texas up-do, puffy taffeta dresses, and sparkly cubic zirconia, I was at the middle of the dance floor, my arms in the air, screaming along with the female backup parts, because I learned them to sing along with after I recorded the song off the radio the first time. I was always ready to declare that I felt nice, that this was keeping me up all night. And that full-bodied, all-dork Katie? Well, I never have to look back and wonder if I sold myself out. I may have done some embarrassing things and admitted to loves for things that were desperately uncool—and I still do (see exhibits “Coldplay” through “The Doors” through “The Eagles”). At the end of the night, though, Robbie Williams—who does explain early in the song that he has the gift and he’s gonna stick it in the goal—helped me solidify that dork into someone who was unfazed by teasing and who didn’t let anyone stop her from dancing.
“More Robbie” indeed.

Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she’s been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, Prime Number, and the music magazines The Aquarian and Paste, as well as quoted in James Campion’s recent book about “Hey Jude,” Take a Sad Song. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her first book, Neuro, Typical: Chemical Reactions & Trauma Bonds came out on Summer Camp Press in late 2020. Her most recent book, Me & Phil, is out through Kelsay Books.