DJ Battles Cancer with Music and Hopes to Share the Cure

A couple of years ago, Scott Rider had a lump on his chest. He ignored it at first, but when he finally went to the doctor he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma―the “best kind of cancer,” he was told, because it was curable.

“While I was going to chemo I wanted to escape reality so I was dejaying away and studying music,” said Rider, inspired by an Electric Daisy Carnival rave he’d been to prior to finding out the test results. “It made me forget what was going on.”

He started mixing songs under the name Dejay Rider, coming up with a few original tunes but mostly using work from other artists. He says he created a new “session” for each of the 12 rounds of chemo treatments.

“I started with a little tiny mixing board; now I have the standard club equipment,” said Rider, 28. “All my stuff is as legit as I can get.”

And because music worked so well for him, Rider’s hoping to pass on his good fortune with the Poway Music Festival, where he proposed that organizers raise money for local cancer patients while increasing awareness about the disease. 

“Thirty years ago they didn’t have the cure for what I had so obviously the cancer research is starting to work,” he said.