History of DJing exhibits possibilities of evolution

  Cyrus McNally Cyrus is a fouth-year
neuroscience student who currently spends his time synthesizing
truth serums for the CIA. If you e-mail him at [email protected], he promises not to
bite.
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Word. Today I want to take you on a trip through time ““ a
brief tour through the early history of one of the most influential
yet widely unrecognized arts of today.

With roots going back as early as the 1940s and branches
sticking out into today’s fringes of post-modern
experimentalism, the art of DJing has evolved multi-dimensionally:
mixes between two cuts made into remixes, remixes into other
remixes, remixes of remixes, etc.

Through the past half century or so, the profession of the
“DJ,” or disc jockey if you’re not cool with the
whole brevity thing, has gradually changed from customer service to
artist: the turntable acting as paint brush, the vinyl as paint,
and the speaker setup as canvas.

As sonic pioneer and turntable virtuoso DJ Q-Bert once described
the growing acceptance of the artistry inherent in being a DJ,
“A turntablist is like any other musician ““ its just
playing a turntable … But we’re at the kindergarten level
right now. It’ll keep evolving.”

And why shouldn’t it? The turntable has several obvious
advantages over any conventional instrument. It is also capable of
reproducing the sounds of any instrument or arrangement of
instruments that have ever been recorded on vinyl.

The warmth intrinsic to analog sound is now usually preferred
over harsh digital reality in the average club or rave event, and
is part of the reason why the turntable never became extinct, even
though it came close when disco went out in the early-80s.

But prior to the ’70s ““ before Grandmaster Flash and
the Furious Five, when Ecstasy was only used by lab rats, and even
before the monolithic idea of hooking two turntables together
““ there was the early AM DJ, circa 1944, whose primitive
technology consisted of a single record player (no slip mats) and
whatever music had been pressed on the precious vinyl that was not
already tied up in the war effort.

By 1950, the radio was gaining popularity and the demand for
live music was taking a dive. The listener loyalty to radio had
become so firmly established that the success of any record
depended on the tastes of the DJ, or however much money the record
company had pumped into the radio station to ensure it would get
played. This practice, known as “payola” was squelched
by a 1959 national investigation, although many radio station
corporations have found ways to get around the word without
actually using it.

Skipping a dozen years or so, we find ourselves in the early
1970s, swooping down over the West Bronx. Probably the first man to
hook two turntables together (a process now standard to all DJs)
was DJ Kool Herc. He had recently moved to New York from Jamaica,
attempting to incorporate his Jamaican style of DJing with the soul
and funk music present in the embryonic urban club scene of the
time. Herc created not only the modern DJ prototype but possibly
the first rap crew as well, with friends shouting ad-libbed rhymes
over instrumental breaks. With Herc’s setup, it was now
possible to mix two copies of the same record together to extend
these breaks indefinitely, or for as long as the vibe of the crowd
demanded.

In 1975, Herc moved into the recently opened Club Helvalo, where
his parties became mandatory events for up-and-coming MCs, DJs and
the original “B-Boys.” The more sophisticated DJing at
clubs like Herc’s Helvalo, Larry Levan’s Garage and
Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse (the original location to hear
“house” music) influenced a whole generation of hip-hop
artists, rappers and aspiring fellow DJ revolutionaries.

Interplanetary electro futurists like Afrika Bambaata
(“Planet Rock”) and Grandmaster Flash (“The
Message”) started out as DJs in the Bronx and became
thundering hip-hop gods, developing novel ways to smooth the
transition of the mix. Flash perfected the technique of building
vocal phrases by switching between several records in a row, taking
a word or two from each.

Even a few years before the release of the electro genre
defining “Planet Rock” in 1982, Bambaata was already
regarded as hip hop’s foremost DJ, combining the phat beats
of hip hop with the industrialized synth-pop of Kraftwerk. His
legacy inspired a whole string of more modern hip-hoppers known as
the “Zulu Nation Collective,” which includes De La
Soul, the Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest, among
others.

Though today’s hip-hop or turntablist DJ might be
radically different from their early ’80s ancestor, the ethos
of turntable as instrument remain the same.

As the gateways to more musical and stylistic possibilities are
explored, such as improvised scratch solos, beat-box accompaniments
and the use of more than two turntables simultaneously, the DJ
garners more respect as an artist in its own right, and the
evolution of technology in music reaches new heights.