Looking for the Perfect Beat

An inside look at DJ culture explores the beats, history, and personalities that have carried this once underground music into the mainstream

Autorentext
Kurt B. Reighley is a Seattle-based writer, DJ, and entertainer. He is the author of four books and his writing has appeared in Details, Rolling Stone, Interview, Out, and Paper, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @KurtBReighley.

Klappentext
"It's your soul playing with the rhythm, flying around in the beats." -- DJ Q-Bert They are music's vanguard. The reshape today's sounds -- house, techno, hip-hop, rock -- direct our feet on the floor, and influence the way music is represented in our culture. "Don't look at the turntable as just this mechanism that you play records on. Apply yourself to it as if it were an instrument, and you can express yourself through the turntable." -- Rob Swift, The X-ecutioners From the rapid-fire editing of MTV videos, to underground parties and world-famous clubs, DJs have altered the course of music and video, moved into new media, and turned our generation on its ear -- literally. Meet these creative artists -- many of them celebrities in their own right -- who line up the most infectious beats, mix and program them, and make us dance talk and think about music -- and the world -- in entirely different ways. "We like to mix it all up and have a good time, a bit of a laugh." -- Ben Dubuisson, Purple Penguin Discover how they select their gear and choose tunes -- and pick up tips on how to mix.

Zusammenfassung
"It's your soul playing with the rhythm,flying around in the beats."
-- DJ Q-Bert
They are music's vanguard. The reshape today's sounds -- house, techno, hip-hop, rock -- direct our feet on the floor, and influence the way music is represented in our culture.
"Don't look at the turntable as just this mechanism that you play records on. Apply yourself to it as if it were an instrument, and you can express yourself through the turntable."
-- Rob Swift, The X-ecutioners
From the rapid-fire editing of MTV videos, to underground parties and world-famous clubs, DJs have altered the course of music and video, moved into new media, and turned our generation on its ear -- literally.
Meet these creative artists -- many of them celebrities in their own right -- who line up the most infectious beats, mix and program them, and make us dance talk and think about music -- and the world -- in entirely different ways.
"We like to mix it all up and have a good time, a bit of a laugh."
-- Ben Dubuisson, Purple Penguin
Discover how they select their gear and choose tunes -- and pick up tips on how to mix.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1: What is a DJ?

What is a DJ?

A fairly simple question. Not so long ago, the answer was just as succinct. A DJ -- an abbreviation for the slang term disc jockey -- was an individual who entertained an audience by playing prerecorded music. That definition, originally ascribed to practitioners on radio, and later at social functions and watering holes, still holds true.

More than half a century later, this tiny abbreviation invites countless interpretations, and they keep multiplying exponentially. DJs are celebrities, drawing crowds of dancers in the thousands, breaking world records for attendance. DJs are musicians, virtuosos who elevate turntables far beyond mere mechanisms for playing back vinyl LPs, integral members of chart-topping bands, seasoned nightlife veterans filtering underground trends into Top 40 hits. DJs are modern-day shamans. And they're salespeople, too.

DJs dictate what the people will listen to, dance to, and buy. We are the biggest promotion an artist can have. It's very rare for a radio station to take a record out of the box and put it on the air, unless it's an established artist. You can have a bona fide hit from a new artist, but radio won't touch it until it's already a hit in the streets. And that comes from the DJs.

-- DJ Skribble

But DJs also function as artists, educators, historians, and diplomats. They are constantly arranging and interpreting the multimedia stimuli that surround us. Via calculated juxtaposition of musical (and today, visual) materials, they influence social trends and provoke alternate ways of thinking, conducting business, or experiencing daily life. Their eclectic, mercurial collages embody our multitasking modern mind-set. And DJ techniques and aesthetics continue to infiltrate and shape other media: software, live performance, and even writing.

My parents once said, "Oh, a DJ...that's somebody who plays records." But my first priority is to be a musician, who seriously puts a lot of ideas together in a creative way. That's what really defines DJing.

-- Alec Empire

DJs have existed on radio since after the turn of the twentieth century. On Christmas Eve 1906, pioneering electrical engineer Reginald A. Fessenden broadcast a holiday program that included a Handel recording. As the medium grew in popularity, so did the role of the DJ, as entertainer, spokesperson, and -- most important -- a conduit for new music. With the advent of nightclubs and discotheques, additional platforms for DJs emerged.

The historical epicenter of the DJ movement as it exists in its myriad forms today is New York City in the mid-'70s. During this era, two concurrent musical trends -- rap and disco -- radically redefined notions of a DJ's duties while slowly increasing DJs' cachet as artists and entertainers.

In the Bronx, rap innovators like Kool DJ Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash expanded the musical abilities of two turntables and a mixer. Cutting back and forth between isolated snippets of sound with lightning-fast dexterity and physically manipulating the surface of the record against the needle to generate unfamiliar bursts of noise, they transformed slabs of vinyl into fresh creations. Meanwhile, at Manhattan discos, club jocks like Francis Grasso created inspired programs of interlocking songs and even began simultaneously layering passages from different records.

A whole new venue for entertainment was created, with the disc jockey, the dancers, and the turntables. Instead of having a [musical] group performing, you were playing a recording. The disc jockey segued the music. And the dancing became part of the performance.

-- David Mancuso

Subsequent trends around the globe added new dimensions to the art of the DJ. The Chicago house movement of the '80s advanced ideas of how a DJ could interface prerecorded music and additional sound generators to yield new compositions. Detroit's techno scene fostered unexpected common ground between diverse genres (funk, New York disco, European synthesizer pop) and deliberately altered records via pronounced changes in frequency levels, pitch, and speed.

In Europe, the melting-pot style that began life as Balearic on the Spanish isle of Ibiza opened up the dance floor to include an almost unimaginable variety of genres. Imported to England a few years later, it soon folded house and techno into the mix and snowballed into the 1988 Summer of Love, an explosion of music, clubs, and outdoor parties that has made dance music and pop music synonymous in Europe ever since. From these roots, the harder-edged sounds of hardcore techno, jungle, and drum and bass later emerged.

As DJs have risen in prominence internationally, the worlds of music and entertainment have changed to co-opt their talents and accommodate their needs. New formats like the twelve-inch single allowed DJs to play longer versions of songs their crowd loved, which in turn meant wider exposure and opportunities for increased sales. Inventions like record pools and exclusive promotional pressings made music availabl…

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