There's an obvious political dimension to this argument, where an object can be used and consumed in a way that undermines the underlying power relations through which it was created, distributed, and sold.
This resonance has been seized upon in hip hop, in particular, when it comes to the turntable-as-object. As the stylus moves across the spiraling groove of the vinyl record, both linear and repetitive, it enacts a form of movement that echoes Black American history, where progress in civil rights has been repeatedly offset by the reincarnation of past travesties, reborn in new guises.
On a more mundane level, it also echoes the back-and-forth interplay between consumption and production in hip hop, the disembedding and reembedding of found sounds in the music, the push-and-pull of rhythmic syncopations that define the music and its funky forebears, and the fuzzy line between innovation and repetition that's at the heart of the creative process.
There could be no better visual metaphor for all of this than Grand Wizzard Theodore's turntables—objects than helped spawn a whole new process of music-making, a process rooted in the give-and-take interplay between music-as-artifact and music-as-oral-tradition.
Chang, Jeff. Durham: Duke University Press, The article recounts the accidental invention of "the scratch" by Bronx DJ Grand Wizzard Theodore, going on to survey the DJ's power to conjure alternative worlds of space and time--worlds where sound, not geography or chronology, binds the universe.
These worlds, however, are endangered by the culture industry and its ownership in many cases of the sonic raw materials used to transform time and space, a claim to ownership that is constantly and creatively subverted by collectors, crate diggers, and DJs. D'Arcangelo, Gideon.
Hamamatsu: NIME, This essay outlines a framework for understanding new musical compositions and performances that utilize pre-existing sound recordings. In attempting to articulate why musicians are increasingly using sound recordings in their creative work, the author calls for and shows examples of new performance tools that enable the dynamic use of pre-recorded music such as record scratching and sampling.
By using two variable speed turntables connected by a mixer, hip hop DJ began blending recording songs in seamless continuity. Blending and mixing gave way to scratching, or backspinning a record in rhythm.
This gave DJs a way to put more of their own musical selves into the playback, featuring their rhythmic skills. Films like Beat Street in would later highlight the position of the cut creator on the silver screen.
After Just Blaze hit The Sprite Corner over the summer to show young teens how to create a beat, it got us thinking to which DJs can actually scratch. We brought it back to the roots and came up with a list of DJs that started by actually scratching on their turntables. Here is a list of 16 disk jockeys who can really get busy on the wheels of steel…. Philadelphia improved it. And San Francisco took it to places no one had imagined. The history of sound system culture is a history of immigration.
In America, the seeds were sown by Latin, Asian, and Caribbean immigrants who brought with them a love of music and a sensibility for big sound. Mobile DJs—who toured with portable systems and visual entertainment—were an extension of that culture and often proved a fertile training ground for many would-be scratch geniuses. A microcosm of social and cultural interactions, this birthed the next evolution of scratching in the s as individual DJs broke from the ranks of tightly-knit crews to venture out on their own.
He travelled to London for the world championships only to be thwarted by DJ David and his handstand circus trick. Together, the three DJs began to think of scratching not simply as a rhythmic accompaniment or melodic sound, but as something more. Legend has it that the DMC asked them to retire, fearing no one would dare compete. What set Mike, Q-Bert and Apollo apart was a dedication to their craft and a belief that the turntable could be an instrument and a DJ crew could be a band, each with a precise role to fulfill.
Apollo drummed, Mike cut the bass, and Q-Bert was the lead scratcher. It was a simple concept that would revolutionise the art form. Further south, in the Los Angeles area, a Filipino-American DJ by the name of Chris Oroc, who looked up to the likes of Q-Bert as a role model, came across a new nomenclature that captured the scratch zeitgeist of the time. To the record industry, home taping was killing music. To fans, it was spreading it.
Hip-hop can trace part of its lineage to jazz, and the budding turntablist movement also found a spiritual kinship with jazz in the rigour and practice needed to master their new instrument. DJs would spend countless hours learning from each other and developing new techniques and ideas.
The drugs warped time and unlocked new ways of thinking and hearing — as well as, perhaps, a proclivity for stupid sounding names. I think what Filipino DJs injected was a new creative sense of possibility that had not been sufficiently considered prior to that. The second half of the s proved a golden era for scratching, a time of growth defined by a divide between two schools of thinking. The arrival of Bay Area DJs on the scene forced many to consider the direction that scratching was taking.
As Wang suggested, West Coast DJs defined themselves by a belief in the technical and creative potential of scratching.
The East Coast had invented the scratch and the beat juggle — deconstructing rhythms using two copies of the same record — but the focus was often less on technical mastery and more on overall showmanship.
The minute face-off was less about East against West than about two ideologies: scratching as music versus scratching as showmanship. He is widely credited as the inventor of scratching. In addition to scratching, he achieved renown for his mastery of needle drops and other techniques which he invented or perfected.
Theodore also apprenticed under Grandmaster Flash. Though variants of the story exist, it is generally accepted that scratching was created by Grand Wizzard Theodore by accident. He was playing records loudly in his bedroom, and his mother entered his room and ordered him to turn the music down.
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