(Source: Ctheory.net)

4/24/2003
Common talk deserves a walk, the situation’s changed/ everything said from now on has to be rearranged.

— T La Rock

The hiphop DJ is a meta-musician, an author, a programmer, an organizer of recorded fragments and a builder of databases whose talents are uniquely suited to survival and meaningful cultural production in our emerging era of total digital cross-reference.

— David Goldberg

At the dead center of the spiraling galaxy of hiphop culture is the turntable. This is where everything starts: on the grooved surface of a record spinning on the wheels of steel. All truth is here, all meaning — everything that is hiphop…Indeed, an act of pure hiphop devotion might be to let a record play from start to end on a turntable…

— DJ Dusk

Scratch 1

The line between electronic and live music is unbroken. The forms may appear impressively distinct but they are organized around the same act: playing a musical instrument (a keyboard, drum pads, so on). In electronic music — which finds its most popular moment in the ’70s, German band Kraftwerk — a musician plays a musical instrument and is concerned about, for instance, the key he/she is playing in. This is not the case with hiphop. Hiphop is organized around the act of replaying music; and it is this act, replaying, that marks the real cheap seroquel rupture in the mode or method of production.

Scratch 2

There are no musical instruments in hiphop (or proper hiphop, and there is such a thing as proper — or closer yet, real — hiphop). This is a truth many critics and hiphop lovers find hard to accept. They instead force matters by placing the idea or image of a guitar or a drum next to that of a turntable, as in the case of the liner notes for the compilation CD Altered Beats by Bill Murphy and Rammellzee: “The turntable is more like a drum than anything else. Aside from the obvious physical resemblance of the circular platter to the typical drum head, the turntable/mixer system is in effect ‘played’ with hands, the black wax rhythmically manipulated by the fingers, just as the tightly wound skin of a congo or West African tribal drum is coaxed into sonic nuances with open-handed slaps.” But in fact the African tribal drum is a musical instrument; the turntable is not. Even the West Indian steel drum (closer to the turntable in the sense that it is repurposed — more on this later), is still very far from what the turntable is and what it produces, which is not even real music but meta-music (again, more on this in a moment).

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