As regular readers of Ears To The House will have gathered, a fair number of higher echelon DJs are privately supporting Derrick May. Not because they think he’s the victim of a racist conspiracy or that they disbelieve the allegations against him – it’s more to do with the dance music bro code telling them they basically have to stand by one of their own, no matter what someone is alleged to have done.
Hence why last year, we had the utterly bizarre scenario where Louie Vega mysteriously kept Derrick May out of the photos he plastered on his social media pages. This is despite the fact Vega and May both had photos with the same people in the same room, as we documented at the time. And the two men do know each other – with Vega affectionately describing him in 2018 as “a barrel of laughs”.
Which is why a rumour we’ve been sent this week has got us intrigued. The story goes that Masters At Work and Derrick May have collaborated on a project – but there are a few problems with this claim. Not only do we not know what this alleged project entails, we also don’t know if this is even true.
So what’s going on? Well, an exchange between Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez, one half of Masters At Work and Derrick May on Instagram suggests something is afoot – with May saying “we already had that conversation, you know the plan”…
Our sources are sceptical, to say the least. A source who knows the Masters At Work duo and has done for around 30 years just laughed at the idea and said “That might have happened years ago, but the idea of this happening now is ridiculous. Louie and Kenny are both smart businessmen and they know there would be a backlash to working with Derrick May. There’s no way they’d do this.”.
On the other side, a regular source in Detroit was dismissive, to put it politely. They simply said “If Derrick told you it was raining, you’d look out the window. There used to be so many rumours around him that no one knew what was true. Even Derrick couldn’t keep up. I wouldn’t take it as true until something appears in public. I’m not sure what this conversation Derrick refers to means, but I think the wires have got crossed somewhere.”.
File this one under unlikely but not impossible…
