Dubai’s DJ Michelle is 14, a two-time DMC Middle East Scratch Champion, and the only woman in this weekend’s world final in London. She’d also rather listen to metal than hip-hop, and lately she’s been trying to fit an electric guitar into her set.
The idea came out of a jam session nobody planned.
Michelle Rasul was playing electric guitar along with a song at home. Her father, Vagif Rasulov, the Dubai DJ known as DJ Shock, was working the same track on the turntables. At some point they looked up at each other and had the same thought. “We should combine these!” she remembers, in an interview with Gulf News.
So now she’s working on it: scratching and guitar in the same performance, her own version of a sound that heavy music hasn’t really heard since the turn of the century.
It’s not the obvious next move for a battle DJ heading into the biggest competition of her life. But Michelle doesn’t do obvious. Asked by TNT Magazine on November 9 to choose between metal and hip-hop, she picked metal without hesitating. Asked to choose between playing Tomorrowland’s main stage and winning DMC, she was just as quick: “DMC Champion. Definitely champion.”
She’s already played Tomorrowland, for the record. She just wants the other thing more.
When turntables were metal
For people who were teenagers around 2000, a DJ in a metal band wasn’t strange at all. Limp Bizkit had DJ Lethal. Slipknot had Sid Wilson, who wore a gas mask and threw himself off things. Linkin Park had Joe Hahn. Incubus had DJ Kilmore. For a few years, the scratch was part of heavy music’s sound, sitting right next to the downtuned guitars.
Then the nu-metal wave receded, and the turntable stopped being a fixture in mainstream heavy rock. The scratch never disappeared, though. It lived on in hip-hop, in underground scenes and on the battle circuit, where DJs kept pushing it as an instrument rather than an effect.
Michelle grew up in that battle world, and she belongs to it. Her heroes are DJ Q-Bert, Craze, A-Trak and Rob Swift. But she’s coming at the guitar side as a musician too. She was playing bass at nine. She plans to study electric guitar, rock and music theory at music college, and she says DJing will always stay part of her life. If anyone her age is going to drag the turntable back into heavy music, it might be a kid who can play both instruments for real.
The dad behind the decks
You can’t tell Michelle’s story without her father, and she’d be the first to say so.
DJ Shock started out in the early ’90s, as a middle schooler throwing parties at school and around his neighborhood, as he told Ortofon in a joint interview with his daughter. Michelle was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and spent her earliest years watching him practice. Her mother, Saida Rasulova, is a former violinist, so music was always in the house.
Michelle was around one and a half when she first climbed up to his gear. “She’d always push some buttons,” he told Khaleej Times. At four, she wandered over to his setup during a show at Level Shoes in Dubai Mall and the crowd applauded. On her fifth birthday, she told him she was going to be a world-famous DJ. Watching him practice as a little kid, she once said, he looked like a real magician.
He became her teacher, and then something more fun: her rival. In 2021, father and daughter both entered the DMC World Portablist Championships. He finished ninth. She finished 14th out of 85, at nine years old, and told reporters her goal for next year was to beat her dad.
Today they still watch DJ battles and music documentaries together. “My dad’s knowledge of music is ginormous!” she told Ortofon. She says she hopes to know as much as he does one day.
The guitar-and-scratch idea came out of exactly that kind of father-daughter jam. In a way, the most unusual thing about Michelle’s music started as a family hobby.
The real work
None of this changes what she has to do this weekend. Scratching is still the hard way to be a DJ. One hand pushes the record back and forth under the needle while the other cuts the crossfader in and out in fractions of a second. Patterns like the transformer, the crab and the flare are older than she is, and they’re what the judges will be listening for. There’s no sync button and no LED wall to hide behind. If your timing slips, everyone in the room hears it.
She puts in about an hour of practice a day, split between freestyling, learning new techniques and polishing them, and fits it around online school. And she has the results to show for it. In 2025 she won the first-ever DMC Middle East Scratch Championship and went to the world finals in Tokyo at 13. This year she defended her title.
London
The DMC World DJ Championships began in London in 1985, and this year they’re back. Eliminations run Friday, November 13, at THEATA on Victoria Embankment. The world finals are Saturday, November 14, at KOKO.
A-Trak, who won the world title at 15 in 1997, is on the bill. So is DJ Craze, who won it three years in a row. Skratch Bastid, DJ Koco, JFB and Monie Love are performing, and the Scratch Perverts are being honored for their part in shaping modern battle DJing.
Michelle will be the youngest competitor in the Scratch division, and the only woman. No woman has ever won the DMC World Scratch title. If she does it on Saturday, that’s history.
If she doesn’t, she’ll still go home to Dubai with a guitar, a pair of turntables, a dad who’s been jamming with her since before she could read, and a musical idea she’s only beginning to explore.
Keep an eye on her. And maybe keep an ear out for distortion.
Electronic Dance Magazine Your Guide to EDM Since ’05
Event: DMC World DJ Championships 2026 Dates: November 13–14, 2026 Eliminations: THEATA, 8 Victoria Embankment (Friday, Nov. 13) World Finals: KOKO, Camden (Saturday, Nov. 14)
Follow DJ Michelle: https://linktr.ee/IamDjMichelle Tickets and info: https://www.dmcdjchamps.com/tickets
