He once drew us in with his outlandish innocent love of tasteful and admittedly cheesy dance music DJ sets. He toured both major and regional cities as a DJ entertainer on a regular basis and came across as one of the sweethearts of promoters and bookers across the country. He friggin stayed awake for 7 day and broke the longest DJ set world record… So why has Smokin Joe driven himself into a pile of politically fuelled controversy?

To explain the timeline, Smokin Joe originally built his career across Australia as the self titled most ‘electrifying man in dance music’. In recent years, he’s transformed his social media fan pages into forums for pumping out anti vaccination and anti government messages. This week he hit a peak controversial moment when he interrupted the ANZAC Day dawn service at Martin Place in Sydney with his personal anti war message.

Of course we live in a tricky political climate where a lot of people have widely varied views, but as passionate as he is, this shift in messaging with his ‘Smokin Joe’ fan pages has really made it difficult to respect him professionally. He’s abused the power he created through something that meant to be fun and tried to draw the average punter who loved his crazy DJ sets into a pawn for his proposed ideology.

Smokin Joe was a self made DJ brand that was as humorous as it was sincere and if anyone tried to make fun of him, there was twice as many people there to defend him. Every time he entered a club, you knew he would be sheepishly carrying his WWE inspired champions belt, wearing gold laced clothes and his signature self promotional t-shirt. It was simple and fun times which makes it so sad to see him blur the lines between that and his so wildly intense, personal views.

Here’s to the happier times.