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Groove Music The Art and Culture of the Hip Hop DJ 1st
Edition Mark Katz Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Mark Katz
ISBN(s): 9780195331110, 0195331117
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 3.36 MB
Year: 2012
Language: english
Groove Music
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Groove Music
The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ
M A R K K AT Z
1
1
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Katz, Mark, 1970–

Groove music : the art and culture of the hip-hop DJ / Mark Katz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-533111-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-533112-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Turntablism. 2. Rap (Music)—History and criticism. 3. Turntablists. I. Title.
ML3531.K37 2012
782.421649—dc23 2011031319
Publication for this book was supported by the Gustave Reese Endowment of the American
Musicological Society.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Beth and Anna, and all the DJs.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I must thank all hip-hop DJs. I thank you for your artistry, for sweeping
dancers onto their feet and for transfixing audiences with your virtuosity.
I thank you for your alchemy, for creating musical gold by mixing bits and
pieces of song and sound in just the right measure. I thank you for your wisdom,
for sharing your vast knowledge of music. This book is about you, and it is
for you.
I mention many DJs in Groove Music, and I will start here by naming those
I have been fortunate enough to interact with directly, whether by interviewing
them, corresponding with them, hanging out with them, or all of the above.
Some of these DJs are internationally famous, some are of more local renown,
some come from the great cities of the United States, Europe, and Asia, and some
from around the area known as the Research Triangle in North Carolina where
I live. So let me take a deep breath, and say: A-Minor, A-Trak, Aladdin, Apollo,
B-Side, Baby Dee, Afrika Bambaataa, Billy Jam, Bro-Rabb, Cash Money,
Craze, Cutmaster Swift, Disco Wiz, Doc Rice, Food Stamp, GrandWizzard
Theodore, Grandmixer DXT, Hapa, ie.MERG, Immortal, J.Dayz, Pete DJ Jones,
Ken-One, Kid Koala, Killa-Jewel, King Britt, Kuttin Kandi, Kutzu, Maseo,
Miyajima, Mista Donut, Neil Armstrong, 9th Wonder, P, Pone, Qbert, Quest,
Radar, Revolution, Rhettmatic, Ivan “Doc” Rodriguez, Johnny “Juice” Rosado,
Sarasa, Shadow, Shortkut, SK, SPCLGST, Steinski, Steve Dee, Swamp, Rob Swift,
Ta-Shi, Tigerstyle, Trife, and Tyra from Saigon—I thank you for sharing your
insights with me. There would be no Groove Music without you.
As central as DJs are to Groove Music, there are many others whose expertise
informed and aided my work as well. I have been assisted by artists, filmmakers,
and photographers; battle organizers, promoters, and entrepreneurs; engineers,
producers, and a variety of other music industry professionals; scholars and
journalists; archivists and librarians; and musicians of every stripe. (Some of
these people—and damn them for being so multitalented—are DJs as well.)
viii Acknowledgments
Thank you, then, to Charlie Ahearn, Michael Beinhorn, Andrew Bernal, Lauren
Bernofsky, Martin Bisi, Kool Lady Blue, Ann Marie Boyle, Laurent Burte,
Michael Cannady, John Carluccio, Jeff Chang, Joe Conzo, Brian Cross, Cristina
DiGiacomo, Phil Ford, Rayvon Fouché, Kim Francis, Fab 5 Freddy, Laurent
Fintoni, Nicole Havey, Ellie Hisama, Catherine Hughes, Akitsugu Kawamoto,
Adam Krims, Johan Kugelberg, Bill Laswell, Tim Lawrence, Stephen Levitin,
Steve Macatee, Wayne Marshall, Robert Adam Mayer, Sally McLintock, Felicia
Miyakawa, Mark Naison, Tony Prince, Katherine Reagan, Miriam Rezaei, Travis
Rimando, Zane Ritt, Martin Scherzinger, Joe Schloss, Troy Smith, Jeremy
Storch, Dave Tompkins, Roger Trilling, Oliver Wang, Tachelle Wilkes, Kimberly
Williams, Raúl Yañez, Christie Z-Pabon, and Bernard Zekri.
In these days of blogging and self-publishing, it might seem that authors no
longer need help to get their ideas to readers. All I can say is that Groove Music
is a much better book for having been published by Oxford University Press.
I must first thank my editor Suzanne Ryan. It only took me about two minutes to
know that we would work well together. Cornering her at a conference, I pitched
my idea for this book and then asked, a bit nervously, “So, do you think you might
be interested?” She looked at me like I was an idiot, and responded, “Uh, yeah.”
That was more than six years ago, and since then she has helped me in so many
ways, whether by pushing me to “lose the bowtie” when I indulged in too much
academese in the manuscript, meeting DJs with me, brainstorming with me over
meals, or giving me just the right amount of slack at just the right time. Thanks,
too, must go to Adam Cohen, Gail Cooper, Anindita Sengupta, Norm Hirschy,
Katie Hellier, Natalie Johnson, and Niko Pfund for their professionalism, thought-
fulness, and enthusiasm. I suspect that they all did more for me than I realize.
Although this next group of people is not connected to OUP, I also consider
them part of my editorial team. Many people have read parts of this book in
draft form, but I owe a special thanks to two who read the whole thing and
gave me invaluable feedback: Christie Z-Pabon and Travis Rimando. Christie, a
widely admired hip-hop promoter, publicist, and activist, is also one of the most
careful and scrupulous critics I could want. She pulled me back when I wan-
dered onto thin ice, checked my facts, and offered her valuable perspective
throughout the process. Travis, also known as DJ Pone, has a deep knowledge
of battle history, DJ equipment, and really all things turntablistic, and constantly
proved himself to be a most perceptive, thoughtful reader. They deserve a tre-
mendous amount of credit. Also working diligently behind the scenes were sev-
eral UNC graduate students—Will Boone, Dan Guberman, Brian Jones, and
Tim Miller—who helped me greatly by transcribing interviews, doing research,
and assisting in a variety of other ways.
I wrote this book while teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, and I am grateful to many colleagues, administrators, and staff members
Acknowledgments ix
for their support, including Bill Andrews, Tim Carter, Annegret Fauser, David
Garcia, George Huntley, Jim Ketch, Dick Langston, Cary Levine, Carrie
Monette, John Nádas, Don Oehler, Terry Rhodes, Sarah Sharma, Diane
Steinhaus, Phil Vandermeer, Ken Weiss, and Susan Williams. I also owe a great
deal to the literally hundreds of students who read parts of Groove Music in
draft form, including those in my classes, The Art and Culture of the DJ,
Capturing Sound, and Introduction to Rock. Special thanks go to the members
of my seminar, Music, Technology, and Culture, who offered valuable feedback
on nearly the whole manuscript: Karen Atkins, Chris Dahlie, Ryan Ebright, Ben
Haas, Brian Jones, Erin Maher, Vanessa Pelletier, Chris Reali, and Kristen
Turner.
Crucial institutional support also came from the National Science Foundation.
In 2006, I was fortunate to receive, along with Rayvon Fouché, the National
Science Foundation Award SES-0526095 for the project “A Comparative
Investigation of Technological Transformation and Musical Expression.” The
award provided me with a semester’s leave and funded a number of research
trips, making it possible for me to interview many DJs in person and to visit
several DJ academies.
The sound of scratching and looped breaks did not pervade my house when
I was growing up, and I’m sure that my family never expected me to write a
book about hip-hop. But no one in my family has ever questioned why I would
do such a thing; to the contrary, they have been tremendously supportive.
Thank you to my parents, Evelyn and Warren Katz; to my sister and brothers,
Cheryl Anders, Ian Katz, and Michael Katz; and to my aunts, uncles, cousins,
nephews, nieces, and in-laws: your love and support means so much to me.
I especially want to thank my parents who, a few years ago, indulged me by let-
ting me read a part of Groove Music to them. Their genuine interest and enthu-
siasm buoyed me, and gave me hope that there may be a general audience for
this book.
I hope no one will begrudge me for saying that among all those I need to
thank, there are two who deserve it most: my wife, Beth Jakub, and my daugh-
ter, Anna Katz. Beth, if I could find a nice word that rhymes with your name, I’d
write a rapturous poem in your honor. It would be but a small token of my
thanks for the more than twenty years you’ve been a part of my life, influencing
me in the most positive ways as a person and as a scholar. It would the tiniest
compensation for the suffering caused to you by the all-consuming project we
semi-jokingly referred to as Groove Music: Ruining Family Vacations Since 2006.
In lieu of that poem, I simply say, I love you and I owe you. Anna, you haven’t
yet read Groove Music, and that’s okay, even though you’re almost eight and can
read just fine. Come to think of it, your mere existence often discouraged me
from working on the book, since I’d always rather spend time with you than
x Acknowledgments
stare at a computer screen. So really, you haven’t been much help, except that
you bring such joy to my life that I find it easy to work through the night know-
ing that you’re sleeping peacefully just fifteen feet away. That and the fact that
you love to scratch vinyl with your daddy.
As I look back over the last several paragraphs, just seeing all those names
arrayed in one place is humbling and awe-inspiring. I am very lucky to have had
all these people on my side. So once again, thank you.
Carrboro, North Carolina,

November 2011
To the musicologists of the twenty-first century our epoch may not be known
by the name of a school of composers or of a musical style. It may well be
called the period of the phonograph. . . .
—Alan Lomax, folklorist and ethnomusicologist (1960)
“Saga of the Folksong Hunter,” in Alan Lomax,
Selected Writings 1934–1997, ed. Ronald Cohen (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 173.
I don’t even know what hip-hop is, to be honest with you. Do you know what
hip-hop is? What is all this scratching of records?
—Milton Babbitt, composer (2001)
Interview with Frank J. Oteri,
New Music Box, 1 December 2001,
www.newmusicbox.org
Records + Turntable + Scratching = Music

—D-Styles, turntablist (2002)
Liner notes to Phantazmagorea (2002),
Beat Junkie Sound CD, PHAN-001
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
About the Companion Website xv
Introduction 3
1. The Breaks and the Bronx: 1973–1975 14
2. Mix and Scratch—The Turntable Becomes a Musical Instrument:

1975–1978 43
3. Out of the Bronx and into the Shadows: 1978–1983 70
4. Expansions: 1983–1989 100
5. Turntablism: 1989–1996 127
6. The Art of War—The DJ Battle: 1991–1996 153
7. Legitimacy: 1996–2002 179
8. Falling Barriers: 2002–2011 214
Conclusion: Full Circle 249

Appendices 254
Appendix 1: The DJ’s Instrument 255
Appendix 2: Raw Materials and Finished Products: Breaks, Tracks,
and Albums 256
Appendix 3: Major Battle Winners, 1981–2011 260
Notes 265
Discography 296
Bibliography 303
Index 313
ABOUT THE COMPANION WEBSITE
Oxford University Press has created a password-protected website to accom-

pany Groove Music. The site includes nearly one hundred sound and video
examples, as well as photographs, documents, and other materials. These audio-
visual materials are all linked to specific parts of the book, and are indicated by
a speaker icon . Since the art and culture of the hip-hop DJ is best understood
by hearing and seeing DJs in action, readers are strongly encouraged to take full
advantage of this site.
Groove Music
Introduction
A teenager walks into the Davidson Houses looking for his girl. As he wanders
the maze-like hallways of the South Bronx housing development, he turns
a corner and suddenly finds himself staring at a group of eight or nine
young thugs drinking beer and smoking weed. They stare back menacingly,
and start to move in. The boy is small and outnumbered—this will not be
a fair fight. But then one of the stick-up kids, as they were called, recognizes
him through the haze. “Yo, yo, it’s the DJ!” he shouts, waving off the others.
“Let him through, let him through!” They step aside, and the DJ lives to see
another day.
The DJ was Theodore Livingston, and though just fourteen or fifteen, he was
already making a name for himself as GrandWizzard Theodore. A prodigy
on the turntables, he was known from the local block parties as the kid who
came up with that record-scraping move that was later called scratching.
It was 1977 or 1978, and a new cultural movement was brewing in the Bronx,
one that combined music, dance, and painting. This brew came to be called
hip-hop.1
The story of GrandWizzard Theodore is, in one sense, the story of the hip-
hop DJ. Like many DJs of his time and since, he is a hardworking professional
and musical jack-of-all-trades. Unlike those swaggering, jewel-encrusted rap-
pers who capture the attention of the media, Theodore, like most DJs, is unas-
suming and quiet. Like most hip-hop DJs he is technologically savvy, having
honed the necessary skills to assemble, disassemble, and repair turntables,
mixers, and speakers quickly and under pressure. And like all good DJs, he
holds a musicologist’s knowledge of names, dates, tunes, and styles.
Yet Theodore is hardly representative of all hip-hop DJs. This is not so much
because of his historical importance and extraordinary skills, but because there
4 GROOVE MUSIC
is no one type of DJ and no one way to spin records. Theodore is black, was
born in the early 1960s and was raised (and still lives) in the Bronx, New York.
But some of the earliest hip-hop DJs were Latino and a few were women. Later,
Asian Americans and white Americans of various ethnicities became crucial to
the development of DJing, and it wasn’t long before DJs outside the United
States played important roles in the art as well.
DJs differ not only in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, and geography, but in
their approach to DJing. The hip-hop pioneers were mobile DJs—they toted
their own equipment to every party, whether in apartment buildings or com-
munity centers, on playgrounds or in school gyms. Later, some of them became
club DJs, taking residencies in dance clubs, using the equipment provided for
them. Some DJs worked at radio stations, employing their voices as much as
their hands. Others teamed up with rappers, essentially becoming the rhythm
section of a hip-hop group, and still others brought their craft to recording
studios where they composed beats for rappers, and came to be known as pro-
ducers. In the 1980s, turntablism emerged, in which DJs performed as self-
sufficient instrumentalists. Turntablists did not simply spin songs, but created
wholly new music through their complex manipulation of recorded sound. In
the process, these DJs developed a host of new techniques, often testing and
refining them in adrenaline-fueled competitions known as battles. To make
matters more complex, these categories—mobile, club, and radio DJs, produc-
ers and turntablists—are not mutually exclusive. Many DJs move from one to
another and back in the course of a career or even a few days. And some DJs
in the new millennium don’t even use records or turntables, but employ CD
players, laptops, or devices called controllers.
So what exactly is a “disc jockey”? At its broadest, a DJ is someone who plays
recordings for an audience. The term was first used in the early 1940s to describe
radio personalities who played phonograph records on the air—a novelty at a
time when much music heard on the radio came from live broadcasts of per-
formers.2 DJs were not originally held in high esteem, and many saw them as a
threat to the musicians whose livelihood depended on their live radio perfor-
mances. As Time magazine noted in 1942, “Some stations merely hired ‘disk-
jockeys’ to ride herd on swing records.”3 Imagine a caricature of a person
straddling an oversized record, riding crop in hand, and you get a sense of this
negative view of DJs. A 1946 article in the same magazine snidely defined a
“disc jockey” as:
A pitchman who knows how to change records. He exists because 1) radio

prefers hot air to dead air; 2) some listeners like to hear their favorite musi-
cians often, and an announcer and record library are much cheaper than
the high-priced orchestras and entertainers.4
Introduction 5
The taint of inauthenticity and inferiority never really dissipated, and still colors
the way many regard DJs, and even how DJs view themselves. Hip-hop DJs,
we’ll see, often feel the need to defend what they do as more than simply playing
records.
There are many types of DJs, but in this book I focus on what I call performa-
tive DJs, those who not only select recordings, but manipulate them in real
time for audiences. This manipulation can consist of repeating fragments of a
recording, mixing different records together, or distorting recorded sounds by
pushing a record quickly back and forth—scratching. Their audiences can be
dancers or listeners, spinning on their backs or bumping and grinding as cou-
ples, sitting at the judges’ table at a DJ competition or lounging at home with
headphones on. My focus on performative DJing means that we’ll only periph-
erally encounter radio DJs and DJs who make beats, or producers, important as
they might be.5 My focus on performance is motivated by more than the need
to keep this book to a manageable size. As I see it, performative DJing is the
signal contribution of the hip-hop DJ to modern musical culture. Put another
way, the purpose of this book is to chronicle and investigate the rise of a new
type of musician—the DJ—who developed a new musical instrument—the
turntable—and in doing so helped create a new type of music: hip-hop.
The story of the simultaneous rise of a new type of instrument, musician, and
music is a complex one. Actually, there are many stories to be told, and although
I have aspired to be thorough, I have had to be selective, and naturally, I write
from my own particular perspective. So let me say a few words about how
I have chosen to tell these stories and the perspectives from which I tell them.
I’m often asked how I became interested in this topic. Apparently, some think
it odd that a not-exactly young, not-exactly-hip white guy with a Ph.D. in musi-
cology would spend years researching hip-hop, hanging out with DJs, going to
battles, and even learning how to scratch. The assumptions underlying these
reactions are based on misperceptions—of musicology, of hip-hop, and of me.
Both musicology and hip-hop are more diverse than many outsiders realize.
And in my own defense, I’m cooler than I look.
In any case, here is my story. The sound of record scratching first entered my
consciousness in 1983; I was thirteen and had just heard the Herbie Hancock
song “Rockit,” featuring Grandmixer D.ST (now Grandmixer DXT) on the
turntables. More than anything, it was the sound of D.ST’s scratching that drew
me. It was so vivid, so fresh, I could almost taste the sound—it was the sonic
equivalent of biting into a crisp, tart apple. For me, a typical adolescent, my
interest in scratching was intense but short-lived, similar to my desire to score
red leather pants like the ones Loverboy’s lead singer wore on the video of
“Working for the Weekend,” or to perfect my backslide (a.k.a. moonwalk) after
seeing Michael Jackson’s effortless glide on TV. Still, this strange sound lodged
6 GROOVE MUSIC
in my brain, and lay dormant for more than fifteen years before my interest in
turntablism reawakened when I became an academic.
In 1999, I finished my doctoral dissertation on the impact of recording tech-
nology on the musical life of the early twentieth century.6 I was thinking of new
topics to explore as I expanded the dissertation into a book, and immediately
thought of turntablism. At the time, scratching had returned to the mainstream
and was surfacing in pop and rock songs on the radio. (Fondly or not, some
readers will remember Hanson’s “MMMbop,” Sublime’s “What I Got,” or Kid
Rock’s “Bawitdaba.”) Turntablism struck me as an obvious case study on the
influence of sound recording; after all, this music simply wouldn’t exist without
the turntable and vinyl discs. So for four years, I researched the music and cul-
ture of the hip-hop DJ, attending battles, studying DJ videos, and interviewing
DJs. The result was a chapter on DJ battles for my 2004 book, Capturing Sound.7
This chapter planted the seed for Groove Music.
When I embarked on Groove Music in 2005, I imagined it as a series of case
studies.8 These case studies would have focused on issues of technology, race,
and gender without regard to covering the whole history or scope of hip-hop
DJing. But after talking with DJs over the next few years, I started to question
this approach. I often ended my interviews by asking, “What would you like to
see in a book about the hip-hop DJ?” One answer changed the course of this
project. The answer, which came not from a single DJ but from many, was this:
History. It’s not as if the history of the hip-hop DJ had been completely neglected.
Yes Yes Y’all, by Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t
Stop, and Last Night a DJ Saved My Life by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton,
all covered hip-hop DJing as part of larger stories—and all, I want to state up
front, deeply influenced this book.9 But the DJs I talked to wanted to see some-
thing that hadn’t been written: a book that focused solely on the rich, decades-
long history of the hip-hop DJ. Some of the older DJs I knew lamented the fact
that their younger colleagues knew little about who and what came before them;
this generation, they told me, needed to know their history. As GrandWizzard
Theodore explained in Doug Pray’s documentary, Scratch, “You have to know
where hip-hop’s been in order to know where it’s going.”10
From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to reach a diverse audience of hip-
hop fans, general readers, and scholars. But it was also important to me that DJs
read and respect this book. I couldn’t have written it without their help; the least
I could do is write something they might want to read. So at the suggestion of
many of the DJs I had met and because no book had yet focused on the history
of the hip-hop DJ, I decided to make a fundamental change.
Groove Music is now a narrative of the development of hip-hop DJing, span-
ning the thirty-eight years from late 1973 to late 2011. Each of the book’s eight
chapters covers a cut of DJ history, a little less than four years on average, and
Introduction 7
each treats several developments, issues, or phenomena linked by a unifying

theme. My change in approach did not mean, however, that I was setting out to
write an exhaustive study of the hip-hop DJ. It would be impossible to give
space to every notable figure, to explore every significant trend and event, or to
range across the globe to hit every center of DJ activity. I could easily spend
several more years doing research and still not capture it all. Inevitably, some
readers will be disappointed by what they don’t see in these pages—I can only
hope that they understand why I have had to be selective, and find value in what
they do see.
The story I am telling is largely an American one, and this, too, is part of my
selective approach. I say largely American because I certainly acknowledge the
international influences on the Bronx-born art form. I would be negligent if I
didn’t discuss the role of the Jamaican sound system or of the influence of Latin
American music on the early hip-hop DJ. The French contribution to the inter-
nationalization of hip-hop, the British origins of the DMC battle, and the ubiq-
uity of Japanese technology must also be recognized. But I am telling this as an
American story not simply because hip-hop is American-born, but because the
development of the hip-hop DJ helps tell the story of the United States. It’s a
story of technological innovation and do-it-yourself entrepreneurship, of race
and gender relations, of the mainstream and the underground. The hip-hop DJ
and the country of its birth are deeply intertwined, and although this book is
not intended as a meditation on modern America, it offers a distinctive lens
through which to view its culture and ethos.
Given my focus on the United States, I hope that others will write in depth
about hip-hop DJing in all those places it has come to flourish over the last few
decades. So, to the amazing DJs Switch and Woody (England); Fly, LigOne, and
Netik (France); Rafik (Germany); Akakabe and Kentaro (Japan); and to the
many others whose work I do not cover here, I apologize. Your stories need to
be told and repeated.
Notice that I keep using the word story. This is no accident. The narrative
mode feels right when discussing hip-hop DJs, for although audio recordings
and videos as well as artifacts like flyers and posters help document their art
and culture, it is the stories that DJs tell that truly make sense of their past.
Stories are our most powerful conveyers of knowledge: they preserve traditions
and reveal the values of a community, they connect us to the past and keep the
dead in living memory, they illuminate the present and suggest possible futures.
Throughout this book, I relate stories about sounds and songs, people and
events. I retell the origins of hip-hop (Chapter 1); I untangle the story behind
the ubiquitous “ah” and “fresh” sounds known to nearly all DJs (Chapter 3);
I recount the legendary 1996 encounter between the X-Men and the Invisibl
Skratch Piklz (Chapter 5); I even spin a tale about a hypothetical DJ preparing
8 GROOVE MUSIC
for and competing in a battle (Chapter 6). And woven throughout the book are
stories about technology, about how DJs have reshaped turntables and mixers
to suit their needs. As historian David Nye perceptively observed, “the meaning
of a tool is inseparable from the stories that surround it.”11
Storytelling has its pitfalls, of course. Chronology is often imprecise; names
and places sometimes confused or forgotten. When different people talk
about the same event, the divergences can be stark: a single innovation may be
credited to multiple people, villains and heroes can switch places, important
characters can be left out of the story, and completely distinct events may be
conflated. I have been mindful of these problems, and whenever possible I have
sought multiple accounts of a particular event and checked stories against
verifiable facts.
Sometimes it’s a simple matter to straighten out a story. DJ Steve Dee, for
example, told me he first started developing the mixing technique that came to be
known as beat juggling in either 1986 or 1987, but he couldn’t (at least at that
moment) be more precise. In telling his story, however, he recalled how he had
just come up with a scratch called the Robocut, a name inspired by a movie he
had recently seen, Robocop. Robocop was released on July 17, 1987, so Steve Dee’s
beat juggling couldn’t have preceded that date. Similarly, I have used the release
dates of songs—songs often figure prominently in the telling of DJ stories—to
establish chronology. Some issues aren’t so easily resolved, like the origin of the
transformer scratch. As I explain in Chapter 4, multiple DJs claim that they
invented the technique, and there’s no clear consensus among the DJ community
about who really was first. In this case I make no judgment, but simply relate the
stories as clearly as possible. Although I would’ve liked to establish the facts defin-
itively, the existence of competing claims turns out to be more interesting than a
simple answer, for it reveals the high value DJs place on innovation and the dif-
fering roles of the individual and the community in the world of the hip-hop DJ.
My approach, then, is largely a combination of ethnography and history. To
me, this is a powerful combination, for together they account for the impor-
tance of the stories of the practitioners as well as the social, cultural, and his-
torical contexts in which they lived. Moreover, my approach emerged from my
research and is tailored to my topic, rather than having been imposed upon it.
In some academic scholarship the object of study serves to test, refine, or
develop a methodology; I’m more interested in DJing than any theories that
I might apply to it or derive from it.
That’s not to say that I’m anti-theory. I bring academic theory into the picture
when it helps make sense of the stories I tell. Most of the time theory lurks in
the background, informing my thinking without (I hope) calling attention
to itself. For the sake of scholars and other interested readers, however, let me
say something about those lurking theories.
Introduction 9
Technology scholars will recognize the influence of the social construction of

technology (SCOT) approach and the concept of co-construction, both of
which emerged from science and technology studies. The word construction
here does not refer to physical objects, but is used metaphorically to describe
the way meanings are created. SCOT holds that technologies do not determine
their uses and meanings; rather, these are determined (i.e., constructed) in a
social context by the people who invent, design, sell, and use the technologies.
Co-construction is a related concept that focuses on the end-users or consum-
ers of a technology and the often-unappreciated power of users to shape the
tools and machines that play such an important role in their everyday lives.
Therefore, when I spotlight the inventiveness of the DJs who tweaked, hacked,
and even redesigned their turntables and mixers, I am both revealing the influ-
ence of, and offering case studies in, SCOT and co-construction.12
Scholars of race, ethnicity, and gender will recognize that I embrace the idea
that identity is not inborn but—and here is that word again—constructed.
I don’t believe, for example, that men dominate the DJ battle scene because they
naturally embrace all things competitive and mechanical, though these are
common assumptions that represent what is called an essentialist view of gender.
Rather, I see the dominance of men as a manifestation of the way boys are often
pushed toward technical pursuits and encouraged to be overtly competitive,
while girls are frequently given to believe that such things are unladylike and
undesirable. I am similarly anti-essentialist when it comes to race and ethnicity.
The African Americans and Latinos who created hip-hop didn’t do it because
of some essential blackness or brownness. That’s not to say that their skin
color and heritage were irrelevant; rather, they were factors—alongside time,
place, class, economics, and the artistic contributions of certain individuals—
that went into the creation of a new form of cultural expression in 1970s
New York among marginalized working-class communities. Likewise, the
Filipino Americans who helped make the San Francisco Bay Area the world
center of turntablism in the 1990s weren’t driven by their common connection
to a distant archipelago. They, too, both shaped and were shaped by their
environment.
Non-academics may find all this talk of constructivism to be, well, academic.
Although I try to wear my academicism lightly, there’s good reason for drawing
attention to the idea of constructivism. I insist on the constructed nature of
technology and identity because the idea explicitly recognizes the power that
individuals and communities have in determining their identities, values, and
aesthetics. Put this way, it may seem like a commonsense idea, but unfortu-
nately there are equally common, but nonsensical, notions that propose other-
wise. Take the old and noxious stereotype that African Americans are born with
a good sense of rhythm and naturally take to singing, drumming, and dancing
10 GROOVE MUSIC
better than paler people. Here I’ll paraphrase a rebuttal in the form of a thought
experiment I once heard from the musicologist Guthrie Ramsey. Imagine an
African American baby boy is raised to maturity in complete isolation from any
music or community. Would he one day spontaneously break into a James
Brown shuffle and belt out, “I’ve got soul and I’m superbad”? Essentialist views
like the one Ramsey was refuting are not just illogical, they’re insidious and
disempowering. If black people are born with certain qualities or tendencies,
then it’s easy to dismiss or downplay their cultural achievements. It’s as if their
individual creativity and years of hard work are of no consequence. And of
course, this is simply not true.
My anti-essentialism extends to other races and ethnicities as well, and yes,
to white people, too. Just as blacks are sometimes thought to have been born
with rhythm, white people are often said to be born without it. I guess no one
told that to A-Trak or Z-Trip, Shiftee or Swamp, ie.MERG, Klever, Revolution,
or Vajra—all incredibly talented DJs who have earned the well-deserved respect
of their non-white peers. As I’ve mentioned, gender, too, is constructed, despite
the fact that the biological differences between men and women are greater than
those between people of different races. Yet the fact that men have parts that
women don’t, and vice-versa, does not explain why there are more male than female
DJs. Although there is nothing about DJing that requires a certain amount of
testosterone, plenty of people think otherwise. Several years ago I attended a DJ
showcase where I ended up talking with a female college student, the lone
woman in the crowd. Why, I asked her, did she think that so few women were
DJs? Her answer concisely reduced women to their anatomy: “Women are
pussies,” she sneered. At the time I had been teaching at a conservatory, one
filled with talented young classical musicians. During my years there I saw and
heard plenty of evidence that women could outperform men as singers and
instrumentalists. But for centuries, many thought that musicians of the “fairer
sex” could never be the equal of men. There’s no reason to think that the situa-
tion cannot change just as strikingly in the world of DJs, and there’s good reason
to think that it won’t take centuries.
In explaining my approach, I have yet to say anything about music. It’s pos-
sible to write a book about hip-hop DJs without delving into the music they
play and create, but Groove Music is not that book. Here is where my back-
ground as a musician and a music scholar comes into play. I was drawn to this
subject by a very specific sound—that wicki-wicki, that zigga-zigga that comes
from pushing a vinyl record back and forth underneath the needle of a record
player. (For the non-DJs out there, the needle is not dragged across the grooves
but stays within the grooves. Scratching doesn’t immediately ruin a record,
though it does gradually wear out parts of a disc.) But there is, as I’ll explain
over the course of this book, much more than that zigga-zigga sound to the art
Introduction 11
of the hip-hop DJ. In Chapter 1, I explore the musical nature of the short per-
cussion solos known as breaks that the first DJs extracted from records and
extended in order to generate dance music for the b-boys and b-girls. (The “b”
is typically understood to stand for “break,” but note that b-boys and b-girls
generally do not refer to themselves using the common term breakdancer.) In
later chapters I offer close readings of important songs, albums, and battle rou-
tines; for example, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of
Steel” (Chapter 3) and DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing. . . . . (Chapter 7).
My study of DJ music has involved not only my ears, but my hands. Before I
got my own equipment, I had played around on other people’s turntables, and
even took classes at the New York, Miami, and Los Angeles branches of the
Scratch DJ Academy as part of my research (more on DJ schools in Chapter 8).
In 2007, I finally acquired my own gear: two Technics 1200 turntables (specifi-
cally, the SL-1200MK5 model) with Shure M44-7 needles and a Rane TTM-56
mixer, a semi-high-end but common setup among battle DJs. I’m still not very
good, but I’ve gained a new appreciation of the art I was studying. For one
thing, it’s harder than it looks. Even the basic “baby” scratch requires finding a
particular part of a record and then holding the fingers and moving the arm in
just the right way. Once I learned how to scratch correctly, I became aware of an
almost physical bump when pushing a record back and forth across the attack,
or tip, of a snare hit. Done properly the result is a crisp and penetrating sound—
a “tight” scratch; done the wrong way the sound is barely audible, the rhythm
flabby. Trying to loop a beat—alternating between the same musical phrase on
two turntables—was the best way I could appreciate the exquisite timing and
control necessary to weave a seamless stream of music out of a brief fragment.
I also spent time searching for records to scratch and mix in record stores, thrift
shops, library sales, and the homes of friends and relatives. DJs call this digging
in the crates, the “crates” referring to the typical way records are stored. As I
discovered, it’s called digging for a reason—it’s tiring, hard on the back, and
often leaves the digger with dirty hands. But it can also be hugely rewarding,
and plays an important role in the education of DJs.
These hours spent handling vinyl have given me insights into the art and
culture of the hip-hop DJ that might have been lost on me if I had never gotten
my hands dirty. I understand why many DJs absolutely rejected the new breed
of CD players developed in the late 1990s that allowed scratching and mixing
through a simulated record platter. It’s not that they were anti-digital or stuck in
the past: it’s simply that these platters did not feel or handle like vinyl. I also
understand why many hip-hop DJs are perfectly happy to connect their turn-
tables to laptops using the digital systems like Serato Scratch Live, Traktor, and
Torq that started coming on the market in the early 2000s. Laptops might seem
fatally inauthentic to hip-hop DJs, but as I explain in Chapter 8, these digital
12 GROOVE MUSIC
systems are embraced because they allow DJs to use actual vinyl. If we under-
stand the centrality of vinyl, we can understand why the community of hip-hop
DJs has rejected one digital system and embraced another; more broadly, we
can understand the values and aesthetics of these DJs.
In the end, this book is about a community—far-flung, yes, but one whose
members often think of themselves as part of an extended family with common
interests and values—and its music, technology, history, and culture. When I
told the great DJ Cash Money that I was writing this book, his response came
with the weight of this community behind him: “We need you to get this right.”13
Others will judge whether I’ve succeeded, but I can assure him and the rest of
the DJ community that these words have guided Groove Music to its last page.
A NOT E O N THE INTER VIEWS
Because the dozens of interviews I conducted for this book form the single
most important documentary source in Groove Music, I should contextualize
this material. I conducted these interviews over the course of twelve years, from
1999 to 2011. Every interview was different—some were by phone or e-mail,
but whenever possible I conducted them in person, typically near where the
person lived at the time. The interviews tended to be in informal settings, and
although I always had specific topics I wanted to discuss, they often turned
into free-flowing conversations—more valuable, in my opinion, than formal
interviews with set questions.
Each interview is identified in the endnotes, which indicate when and where
the interview was conducted, or if the exchange took place by phone or e-mail.
A separate list of the interviews is provided in the bibliography. Interviews
before 2005 were conducted for my book Capturing Sound, though much of
what is quoted from those interviews in this book did not appear in the earlier
book; subsequent interviews were conducted expressly for Groove Music. All
interviews that I quote were recorded with permission, and with a very few
minor exceptions, all quotations from these interviews have been transcribed
from recordings rather than reconstructed from my notes or memory. In tran-
scribing these interviews I have removed “ums,” “uhs” and the occasional
repeated word (for example, one person I interviewed often said the word “like”
several times in a row), but otherwise the quotations are as they were spoken.
In most cases, I do not include my own questions or prompts, largely because
my words would, more often than not, disrupt the flow of the text without
illuminating the response.
Although my interviewees represent a wide variety of DJs and others, I wasn’t
able to speak with everyone I would have liked to interview. No one refused my
Introduction 13
request for an interview, but sometimes I was unable to make contact with a
person, and occasionally a planned interview fell through. Fortunately, most
of those I could not speak with have been interviewed before, and whenever
possible I have drawn on these earlier sources. I’m especially grateful for Yes
Yes Y’all, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, Scratch, John
Carluccio’s Battle Sounds documentary, and the interviews of Troy Smith and a
few others, for filling in gaps for me.
The interviews I’ve conducted have been some of the most memorable expe-
riences of my life, scholarly or otherwise. I interviewed GrandWizzard Theodore
in his car while he drove me around the Bronx; Steve Dee in his boyhood
Harlem apartment with his mother and daughter in attendance; Qbert in front
of his turntables in his California home; Disco Wiz at a UNC basketball game;
DJ Sarasa (a.k.a. Silverboombox) late at night at a Tokyo club; Grandmixer DXT
on a bench in Central Park, and so on. I can only hope that their words are as
vivid to readers now as they were for me when I first heard them.
1
The Breaks and the Bronx:

1973–1975
It’s all about the break.

If you hope to understand the art of the hip-hop DJ—and even the very
origins of hip-hop—you must understand the break. And to understand the
break, you can hardly do better than to begin with James Brown. Though he’s
best known as the “Godfather of Soul,” his music is also one of the crucial build-
ing blocks of hip-hop; Grandmaster Flash speaks the truth when he says, “no
James Brown, no hip-hop.”1 So listen to Brown’s 1970 opus, “Funky Drummer.”2
About four-and-a-half minutes in, Brown calls out to his band of nine: “I want
to give the drummer some of this funky soul we got here. When I count to four
I want everyone to lay out and let the drummer go. And when I count to four
I want you to come back in.” The groove continues for thirteen bars before
Brown counts off, calling out to drummer Clyde Stubblefield to “Hit it!” The
clouds part, and a ray of pure funk shines down, a simple but slightly off-kilter
call and response between the bass and snare drums, the hi-hat keeping time in
sixteenth notes. Brown can only keep quiet for two bars before he starts testify-
ing, exclaiming, “Good God!” and “Ain’t it funky!” All too soon, he counts the
rest of the group back in, and the moment slips away.
That moment was the break. A break is a brief percussion solo, typically
found toward the end of a funk song, though it may show up anywhere in a
song, and really, anywhere in music. The power of the break is in the way it
moves people, literally, compelling them to “get on the good foot” as James
Brown commands us in his song of the same name. And this power is only
heightened by its contrast with its surroundings. It lays bare a short stretch of
unadulterated rhythm as the singer and other instrumentalists abruptly drop
The Breaks and the Bronx: 1973–1975 15
out, and the effect, whether heard for the first or fiftieth time, is electrifying. “It’s
like all of a sudden the song took its clothes off,” suggests the DJ and break con-
noisseur known as Steinski.3 Steinski’s metaphor works on two levels: it not only
points to the stripping of the musical texture but also hints at the sexual tension
generated by the bumping and grinding of full-contact dancing. The break was
commonly known as the “get-down part” of a song, and it’s no coincidence that
“get down” had a double meaning in 1970s slang—to dance with abandon, or to
have sex.
Although the breaks may have generated extra heat among the couples on
the floor, it was solo dancers who made the breaks famous by bringing out
their showiest moves during these percussive passages. These dancers called
themselves b-boys and b-girls, their art later dubbed breakdancing by outsiders.
(Most insiders reject breakdancing and refer to it as b-boying, and sometimes
b-girling.4) This new style of dancing caused a sensation. In his 2008 memoir,
pioneering hip-hop DJ Grandmaster Flash vividly described his first encounter
with b-boying. It was 1975, and his friend Mike had come to see him in his
basement, demanding to hear “It’s Just Begun” (1972) by the Jimmy Castor
Bunch.
Mike was standing there with his arms crossed up, his head cocked to the
side, and his Chuck Taylors spread about three feet apart. Told me to drop
“Just Begun” by Jimmy Castor on the turntable. The music played but he
kept standing there. I looked at him like he was crazy. BAM! As soon as the
drums started [the percussion solo about two minutes into the song], Mike
went nuts. He was movin’ his feet and dancin’ all fast, but not in any kind
of steps I’d ever seen before.
“What the hell was that?”
“I just broke on you. And you can call me a b-boy.”5
This new, exciting style of dance could not have flourished without the inter-
vention of the disc jockey. This is for the simple reason that most breaks offer
insufficient opportunity for getting down: they were simply too short. 6 But by
laying hands on vinyl, a good DJ could breathe new life into the breaks. Here’s
how Breakout, an early hip-hop DJ from the Bronx, explained the DJ’s job: “Say
there’s a lotta singin’ on the record, and then the singin’ stops and the beat [i.e.,
break] comes on. You gotta make that beat last for a long time to keep the b-boy
keep dancin,’ cause once the words come on, he stops dancin.’ So you gotta be
able to catch that same beat, hit it, hit it, again and again.”7
At first, DJs would hit the break by setting the needle down right at that point
in the record, and then lift the tone arm and repeat it as desired. It’s harder than
16 GROOVE MUSIC
it sounds. The DJ must know the exact location of the break by sight and needs
a steady hand so as not to unleash the vibe-killing screech of a skidding stylus.
An experienced DJ will even be able to look at an unfamiliar record and find the
break; it’s a darker band within the track, a sliver of groove music. Later, as we’ll
see in the next chapter, DJs like Grandmaster Flash developed more sophisti-
cated ways of repeating breaks, using two copies of a record on two turntables
and employing a mixer to switch quickly and seamlessly between the two
discs.
Although the idea of repeating breaks for dancers may seem like a simple
idea, it represented a crucial reconception of both the nature of the break and
the function of the record and turntable. Hip-hop DJs (and the b-boys and
b-girls they catered to) did not just hear breaks as tantalizing; they heard them
as fundamentally incomplete, as fragments that demanded to be repeated.
These DJs also, and perhaps in consequence, came to see the tools of their trade
in a new light. Records were not inviolate; songs did not need to be played from
start to finish. A turntable therefore was not simply a playback device but a
means for manipulating sound.
It was the DJ’s manipulation of recorded sound that formed the basis of hip-
hop. If there is a Grand Unified Theory that underlies the arts of the DJ, the
b-boy/b-girl, and later, the MC (or rapper), the break is the unifying force.
Understand that in 1973 there was no separate musical category known as hip-
hop. It was not yet a distinctive genre, but more a performance practice, a way
of approaching other types of music. The performer was the DJ, and the prac-
tice was to isolate and repeat choice instrumental parts of popular songs—the
breaks—at dance parties. Later, vocal parts were added over top these repeated
breaks by MCs in the form of rapping. Eventually, what began as a practice
became its own genre, one combining dance with instrumental and vocal music.
Out of the collaboration between DJs and dancers, and in large part arising
from the musical and technological ingenuity of these virtuosi of vinyl, a rich,
new art form came into being.
BORN IN T HE B RONX
In January 1973, the New York Times ran a four-article series whose lurid head-
lines painted a dire picture of the southern part of the city’s northern borough:
“South Bronx: A Jungle Stalked by Fear, Seized by Rage”

“Gangs Spread Terror in the South Bronx”
“Rage Permeates All Facets of Life in the South Bronx”
“Future Looks Bleak for the South Bronx”
Twenty thousand residents had no running water, forced to carry buckets to

the nearest working fire hydrant; thousands more had no heat. Forty percent of
the residents were on welfare; thirty percent were unemployed. Among those
living in the area’s 600,000 substandard housing units were seven-year-old
alcoholics and ten-year-old mothers. One Bronx district recorded an infant
mortality rate more than sixty percent higher than the national average.8
Merchants shuttered their stores at sunset, fearing the thugs and addicts who
swarmed the neighborhoods. Arson was a daily occurrence, many of the fires
set in dilapidated apartment buildings at the behest of slumlords who stood
to reap the insurance payouts. (It only got worse. Some 30,000 fires were set
in the South Bronx between 1973 and 1977—the most notorious occurring a
mile from Yankee Stadium during the 1977 World Series. As the scene was
captured on TV before an audience of tens of millions, sportscaster Howard
Cosell famously deadpanned, “Ladies and gentlemen, there it is. The Bronx is
burning.”9) Crumbling schools came to resemble fortresses, though students
were at times no safer inside them than out. Violence and addiction surged,
disease ran rampant, buildings collapsed, and test scores plummeted; police
and fire departments shrank, teachers were laid off, and city services withered.
DJ GrandWizzard Theodore, a schoolboy of ten in 1973, could do little more
than repeat one word when I asked him to describe the Bronx of his youth:
crazy. “It was crazy, it was crazy because, see, back in the early ’70s, you know,
living in the Bronx—it’s like, all the buildings were burning down. That shit was
crazy, you know?”10 Dr. Harold Wise, founder of a medical center in the Bathgate
neighborhood, offered this bleak summation to the New York Times in 1973:
“The South Bronx is a necropolis, a city of death.”11
That summer of 1973, hip-hop was born. And it was born in the Bronx.12
The father was a hulking eighteen-year-old Jamaican-born DJ named Clive
Campbell, better known as Kool Herc. The story, however, really begins with
his sister Cindy. She wanted to throw a party, one that would raise money for
some stylish new school clothes. For the price of admission—a quarter for the
ladies and fifty cents for the fellas—partygoers got to hear the best new funk,
soul, and rock records played on a powerful stereo borrowed from her father
and manned by her older brother.
This was Herc’s first party as DJ. It was held on August 11, 1973 in the low-
ceilinged community room in the basement of his family’s apartment building
on 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, an address that has since come to be known as the
birthplace of hip-hop (see Figure 1.1). Buzz was generated with invitations
hand-written on index cards that listed some of the songs Herc intended to play,
like James Brown’s “Get on the Good Foot” (1972), or Mandrill’s “Fencewalk”
(1973). A few of these invitations still exist, and the childlike bubble lettering
adorned with stars and hearts offers a vivid reminder that hip-hop—now a
18 GROOVE MUSIC
Figure 1.1 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the Bronx. The site of Kool Herc’s
first party and, to many, the birthplace of hip-hop. (Photograph by
Mark Katz.)
multi-billion-dollar international and corporate enterprise—was started by

school kids (see Figure 1.2).
It was a warm summer night, the temperature still hovering around eighty
degrees after sunset, with the sweaty, tightly packed bodies of a hundred danc-
ers generating an additional heat of their own. The party was a success, the
revelry unmarred by the violence and desperation that permeated the borough.
Herc had sought to create a safe space for the partygoers, and later, speaking in
the third person, he explained the appeal of his parties in this way: “Hey,
’cross town on the West Side there’s a guy named Herc, Kool Herc, giving
parties, man. And it’s nice, ya know. Girls is there, ya know. You could do
Figure 1.2 Invitation to Kool Herc’s first party. (Reprinted from Johan Kugelberg, ed.,
Born in the Bronx: A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop [New York: Rizzoli,
2007], 70. Used by permission.)
your thing. All he asks is—don’t start no problem in here, ya know. He’s a big
guy.”13 “Herc stood six and change,” Grandmaster Flash noted, recalling the first
time he went to one his parties. “With his Afro and the butterfly collar on his
AJ Lester leisure suit turned up, he looked even bigger. He was a god up there,
the red and blue party lights behind him pulsing away on that big thumping
beat.” Flash also marveled at how members of six rival gangs were in atten-
dance, and yet “nobody was fighting . . . I mean nobody was swinging fists or
pulling pistols.”14
Herc continued to throw parties throughout the Bronx, and as his sound
system grew more powerful and his record collection expanded, his parties and
fame grew as well. His jams were held at the Cedar Playground (better known
as Cedar Park) just up the hill on Sedgwick Avenue, at the Police Athletic League
(P.A.L.) community center on Webster Avenue and East 183rd Street, and later
at clubs like the Executive Playhouse. These jams drew hundreds and left an
impression on visitors before they even arrived. Here’s how Flash described his
approach to a party Herc held in May 1974:
I was two full blocks from the park jam . . . but already it was loud. Really
fucking loud. I could name the tune he was playin; it was “The Mexican”
by Babe Ruth. And it was THUNDERING. BOOM-BOOM-BOOM! I had
never heard sound—let alone music—that loud before in my whole life.
And though the speakers made the ground shake, I could hear the highs of
20 GROOVE MUSIC
the trumpets as clear as I could feel the boom of the bass coming up
through my Super Pro Keds.15
Herc so dominated the scene that for a time no sensible DJ would even plan
a party for the same night as one of his.
Herc wasn’t the only DJ in town at the time, however. There were dozens of
others, though they focused largely on disco and played whole songs rather
than fragments. But in the Bronx River Houses, about three miles east of
Sedgwick Avenue, presided a kindred spirit to Herc, and in hip-hop mythology
he is the Godfather to Herc’s Father (Figures 1.3 and 1.4). In 1973, the Godfather
of hip-hop was a sixteen-year-old ex–gang member who went by the name
Afrika Bambaataa, having been inspired by the proud and powerful African
warriors he saw depicted in the 1964 Michael Caine film Zulu.16 Like Herc,
Bambaataa played only what he thought were the best parts of the record, but
his playlists were even more diverse. Bambaataa, known as “Master of Records,”
explained his approach this way:
It might just be slammin’, the people sweating, breaking, everything. And

I would just stop in the middle of the thing and throw on “Sweet Georgia
Brown,” [theme song of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team] and
Figure 1.3 Kool Herc, ca. 1979, at the T-Connection, an important early
hip-hop club in the Bronx. (Photograph by Joe Conzo, copyright
Joe Conzo Archives, 2011.)
Figure 1.4 Afrika Bambaataa, undated early 1980s

photo by David Corio. (Michael Ochs Archives/
Getty Images.)
then everybody’d just start doing that basketball-type dance. So when you
came to an Afrika Bambaataa party you . . . knew that you was going to
hear some weird type of stuff. I even played commercials that I taped off
the television shows, from Andy Griffith to the Pink Panther, and people
looked at me like I was crazy.17
Bambaataa’s eclecticism wasn’t simply a quirk; it set an example and shaped

the fundamental character of hip-hop, pushing DJs (and later producers) to see
all music as potential raw material. Grandmixer D.ST, a DJ from the earliest
days of hip-hop, but most famous for his scratching on Herbie Hancock’s 1983
hit “Rockit,” described the “master of records” this way: “Bambaataa was a
musical record connoisseur, he was a genius, he understood variety, he under-
stood the genre-less concept of music—that’s real hip-hop. And that’s what he
taught all of us.”18
22 GROOVE MUSIC
And like Herc, “Bam,” as he is often called, sought to create a safe space for
his partygoers. Although he had run with the Black Spades gang, even rising to
the level of warlord, he had always been more of a peacemaker than a fighter.
As a high school student, he established an organization that later came to be
known as the Universal Zulu Nation.19 Drawing upon cultural movements
and ideologies as diverse as his record collection—he has cited the Nation of
Islam and the “flower power” of the hippies as influences—Bambaataa pro-
moted “peace, unity, love, and having fun” through his massive dance parties.20
Sha-Rock, one of the first women rappers, remembers, “There was nobody that
could come into an Afrika Bambaataa party and start any trouble, because
you had the Zulu Nation that made sure that there was no trouble whatsoever.
So if you went to an Afrika Bambaataa party, you expect to be safe.”21 Ironically,
this safety was ensured by the implicit threat of violence, apparent to all by the
menacing ex–gang members arrayed in front of Bambaataa’s sound system.
Not all parties were free of violence. “Back then it would happen for noth-
ing,” reports DJ Disco Wiz.22 “You step on someone’s sneakers and they’d fuck-
ing kill you, murder you right there.” Wiz carried a gun and, like Bambaataa
and others, was always accompanied by a security team. Remember that these
DJs were what’s known as “mobile DJs,” and had to cart their equipment and
records to every gig, often late at night and frequently on foot. They were vul-
nerable, so security and a fearsome reputation were necessities. DJ Baby Dee, a
member of the Mercedes Ladies and one of the first women hip-hop DJs, kept
a double-barreled shotgun with her to protect the group’s sound system and
records. Once she was DJing at a party when the audience, frightened by nearby
gunshots, stampeded in her direction. She pulled the gun out from underneath
the table and brandished it in front of the mob, which immediately switched
course. She didn’t have to fire it. “Crowd control,” she called it.23 A delicate bal-
ance between violence and peace thus existed in the early years of hip-hop,
which Disco Wiz summed up in this way: “I know that a lot of people like to say
that hip-hop was just this lovefest. Yeah, that was the premise to it, but at the
end of the day, it was the Bronx.”
“It was the Bronx.” This simple fact remains a key to understanding the con-
tributions of hip-hop’s pioneering DJs and the rise of their unique style of
DJing.24 But before revisiting the subject of the Bronx as a shaping force in hip-
hop, let’s return for a moment to Kool Herc’s party of August 11, 1973. Why is
it invested with such deep significance that 1520 Sedgwick Avenue is practically
a holy site?25 The answer isn’t obvious. There was no rapping at the party, there
were no backspinning b-boys on the linoleum, and Herc wasn’t scratching
records, all things we might expect from a hip-hop jam. No one at the time
knew this was hip-hop, and the music was not literally hip-hop as we know it
today—it was largely funk, soul, and rock. Moreover, Afrika Bambaataa, one of
the pillars of hip-hop culture, was spinning an eclectic mix over at the Bronx
River Houses before Herc’s first party, apparently as early as 1970.26 He wasn’t
looping breaks, but then again, neither was Herc, at least at first.
So why exactly should Herc’s party be considered the birth of hip-hop? One
reason is practical: it has a specific date tied to it, and a flyer to back it up.
Moreover, the components of hip-hop music—DJing, b-boying, and MCing—
all coalesced around the practices witnessed at Herc’s parties, and it’s reasonable
to look to this event as the beginning of it all. Finally, and this might be the most
compelling point, the story of Herc’s party is widely embraced as hip-hop’s
origin story. Origin stories aren’t like birth certificates; their significance lies not
in the facts they disclose but in the values they reveal. And what this origin
story reveals is the veneration of the pioneer, the visionary who forges a new
path. More generally, the story reveals a deep desire to claim for hip-hop a dis-
tinct identity. Hip-hop is more than dancing to funk breaks or rhyming over
records. It is a unique art form and cultural phenomenon, and having a birth
date proves that it is a living, growing entity.
Even if we can identify hip-hop’s precise place and date of birth, we’re still left
with two important questions unanswered: how did the break-loving hip-hop
DJ—and thus hip-hop itself—arise in the Bronx, and why in the early and mid-
1970s? After all, if the only necessary ingredients were turntables, records, and
poor people of color to play them, hip-hop would have arisen decades earlier.
To answer the question we must investigate two broad forces, one musical and
the other geographical. The first is a constellation of musical traditions whose
songs, sounds, and practices shaped this emerging art. The second force is the
Bronx itself, which DJs simultaneously resisted and celebrated through their
sound systems.
T HE MU SICAL IN F L UENCES
It is a DJ’s business to know music, and the best ones deploy a vast store of
knowledge in their work. DJs are also some of the most broadminded of musi-
cians; their creed might well be Duke Ellington’s motto, “If it sounds good, it is
good.” I was initially surprised when, for example, GrandWizzard Theodore
told me that Queen and Kiss—two white, gender-bending, glam-influenced
rock groups—were among his favorites. But he simply loves the music, and for
him, that is justification enough. When Grandmaster Caz was asked what he
listened to when he was growing up, his list included not just James Brown, Al
Green, and the Jackson 5, but Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, Elvis Presley, the
Osmonds, and Simon and Garfunkel. “I listened to everything,” he explained.
“I have an appreciation for music, period, not just black music.”27 Given that the
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From Soul to Hip Hop The Library of Essays on Popular

The Men of Hip Hop 1st Edition Judy Dodge Cummings

Beyond Christian Hip Hop A Move Towards Christians and Hip

Eminem Hip Hop Stars 1st Edition Dennis Abrams

Beastie Boys Hip Hop Stars 1st Edition Dennis Abrams

Women Rapping Revolution Hip Hop and Community Building in

Oxford New York

Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Katz, Mark, 1970–

Carrboro, North Carolina,

Records + Turntable + Scratching = Music

About the Companion Website xv

1. The Breaks and the Bronx: 1973–1975 14

2. Mix and Scratch—The Turntable Becomes a Musical Instrument:

3. Out of the Bronx and into the Shadows: 1978–1983 70

4. Expansions: 1983–1989 100

5. Turntablism: 1989–1996 127

6. The Art of War—The DJ Battle: 1991–1996 153

7. Legitimacy: 1996–2002 179

8. Falling Barriers: 2002–2011 214

Conclusion: Full Circle 249

Oxford University Press has created a password-protected website to accom-

A pitchman who knows how to change records. He exists because 1) radio

each treats several developments, issues, or phenomena linked by a unifying

Technology scholars will recognize the influence of the social construction of

A NOT E O N THE INTER VIEWS

The Breaks and the Bronx:

It’s all about the break.

“South Bronx: A Jungle Stalked by Fear, Seized by Rage”

Twenty thousand residents had no running water, forced to carry buckets to

multi-billion-dollar international and corporate enterprise—was started by

It might just be slammin’, the people sweating, breaking, everything. And

Figure 1.4 Afrika Bambaataa, undated early 1980s

Bambaataa’s eclecticism wasn’t simply a quirk; it set an example and shaped

Story Books for the Young.

BOOKS AT ONE SHILLING.—continued.

Beeton’s Good-Aim Series.

The Hans Andersen Story Books for the Young:—

1. The Christmas Tree.

Child’s First Book of Natural History. Illustrated. Crown 8vo,

Published by Ward, Lock, and Co.

2. Where hyphenation is in doubt, it has been retained as in the original.

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