Big Deck Energy

THE SUN WAS SETTING on May 30, 2020, when French DJ David Guetta began live-streaming a set from Top of the Rock, the observation deck that crowns 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan. This was decks cubed, the deckiest of New York deck experiences: Guetta on decks on a deck. Five days earlier Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd after kneeling on his neck and back for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. With protests against police brutality sweeping across the country’s major cities, Guetta—the king of commercial dance music, the grand fromage of French touch—spied an opportunity to turn his set, nominally a fundraiser for global Covid relief efforts, into something bigger than a mere distraction for restless ravers bored at home after months of lockdown-mandated tedium. The opening five minutes were strong but unremarkable, a standard mix of snare rolls, heavy beat drops, R&B samples, and fat pipes of synthesized sound that allowed Guetta, his hair cropped into a lawyerly part and his slight frame hidden under what looked like an upm…