'Turntablism' - scratching and mixing vinyl records - is now an advertising cliché for anything hip and urban, and many still regard any guff about the technique of the turntablist with raised eyebrows. But treating theturntable as a musical instrument has a colourful history, writes Jim Carroll.
Onstage, the DJ they call Tu-Ki is working up a sweat. In front of him are two turntables and a mixer, and his hands glide over these at warp speed. You hear a snatch of one record, the ripping sensation of a couple of complex scratches and backspins, some dextrous manipulation of sounds and suddenly there's the booming chorus or bassline from another record and you're whisked off in a totally different direction. Naturally, within the time it takes him to grab another record from his bag, there's a repeat performance and the journey continues to twist and turn.
As Tu-Ki scratches up his show-stopping performance, the crowd at the Irish finals of DMC Technics World Championships this month hoot and holler. Some have been here since the qualifying rounds earlier this afternoon which began with 16 wannabes, some have just turned up for the final battles, but all eyes are now on Tu-Ki. Because of his performance tonight, Tu-Ki can consider himself to be the best turntablist in the land for the next 12 months and will head to the world finals in London in September to represent Ireland.
Ever since French scientists developed the phonoautograph in the 1850s, Tu-Ki and thousands like him have been messing around with gramophones, record players and turntables in the name of art. Not content to simply adhere to the manufacturer's instructions on how to play one record and then another, they prefer to treat the turntable as if it's a musical instrument and use it to produce new music from existing ingredients. While it took until 1995 for someone (DJ Babu) to coin the term "turntablist" to describe this particular enthusiast, the art of scratching and mixing has a long, colourful history.
Yet many still regard any guff about the technique of the turntablist with raised eyebrows. It doesn't help that they're used, along with graffiti writers and breakdancers, to cliché point in advertisements by clueless creative directors as visual shorthand for anything hip or trendy. Whatever about the confusion raised in the minds of those who can't believe that people still use turntables, there are many music fans who refuse to accept the notion that there's anything other than wilful musical contrariness to the work of your everyday turntablist.
In truth, it was probably always like this, even on hip-hop's holy ground, the Bronx, where the first turntable magicians emerged in the 1970s. In fact, there were probably people standing around shaking their heads and saying it would never catch on when Kool Herc used two turntables to create a seamless flow of music for the first time at a party in a local hall.
Originally from Jamaica, the DJ saw that people were going wild to the instrumental breaks in records like the Incredible Bongo Band's Apache and James Brown's Give It Up or Turn It Loose so he took two copies of the same record and extended the breaks. Add a microphone and someone chatting on top and you've hip-hop in the house for the first time.
Herc is still in demand as a DJ. "I'm always looking for that perfect beat," he explains. "I'm always watching the skills that each generation adds to it. It's showing kids that it's as respected as being a basketball player and you can make money from it. This is something that the cops can't come and arrest you for. For me to be the person who started and created a culture, that's awesome. After all, only two types of music were born in America - the first was jazz and the second was hip-hop."
For much of the 1970s and 1980s, New York was where hip-hop and turntablism thrived. DJs like Grandmaster Flash, Afrikka Bambaataa, Grand Wizard Theodore and other flamboyantly monikered men fronted various hip-hop crews around the city, reflecting the importance of the DJ rather than the rapper or live band. A 1981 record like The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels Of Steel remains a fascinating insight into the state of turntablism of that time, with Flash cutting up snatches of Blondie, Chic and Queen tunes. That record, and especially Herbie Hancock's groundbreaking Rockit two years later, spread the word about what you could do with a turntable to kids around the world who adopted the culture for their own ends. San Francisco turntablist and one of the most popular scratch DJs around, DJ Q-Bert, remembers Rockit as "the record that changed everything for me. "That song is still hella fresh. It's one of the things that inspired me to be a turntablist."
However, the likes of New York producer Steve Stein or Swiss-born artist Christian Marclay saw possibilities in turntablism that extended beyond wanting to be a DJ. As one half of Double D & Steinski, Stein pieced together hundreds of vinyl sources to produce innovative records like Lesson 3 and The Motorcade Sped On.
Marclay first witnessed hip-hop DJs in action while at college in New York in the late 1970s and has gone on to use the turntable as his instrument in galleries, concert halls and museums around the world. Using dozens of records on multiple turntables at a time, Marclay creates mesmerising sound collages with no unifying beat or groove. Scratching, warping, breaking and destroying vinyl, you could call it extreme turntableism.
But Marclay recognises the differences between his work and that of the hip-hop DJs he was initially intrigued by. "The similarity is that we used records as instruments to create new music out of old music but they were doing dance music and I've never tried to do dance music," he points out.
"Hip-hop really made DJ-ing more of an accepted craft. MTV helped by giving the scratched sound a gesture, showing the hand of the DJ backspinning. It became such a cool gesture and now everybody wants to scratch - I see kids now air-scratching while walking around with their Walkman. That sound and the way it was used in hip-hop, scratching a beat and hearing the record go back and forth, has become so natural in the pop music landscape. It's a normal sound now, but it was a revolutionary sound in the 1980s and it really made the use of found sounds acceptable in pop music."
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, hip-hop giants like Public Enemy and Gang Starr were at the forefront of turntablist innovation, promoting their DJs Terminator X and Premier at live shows and on record. DJ battles like the DMC Championships and the International Turntablist Federation emerged and crews like the Beat Junkies, the X- executioners and the Scratch Perverts began to arrive on the scene.
However, it took a quiet Californian called Josh Davis to take the game to the next level. As DJ Shadow, his records such as In/Flux and the Endtroducing début album were to usher in a new golden age for turntablism. Highly emotional, deeply soulful and sonically innovative, Shadow's grand instrumental narratives would prove to have the same impact on turntable art as Rockit or Adventures On The Wheels.
"All I can do is just make the kind of music that I want to make and be true to the original aesthetic and the original codes and just go from there," is how he sums up his work. "To me, being true just means not being afraid to try new things and that doesn't mean recycling the same old formula. What attracted me to hip-hop was the marriage of genres of music. Bambaataa and Flash, when they were DJ-ing, would not just mix only funk and soul, but rock, Kraftwerk, TV themes and comedy albums. They could get away with it, that was what was interesting and entertaining the dancefloor at the time."
Shadow's success has certainly opened a brand new chapter for turntablists. Interest in the likes of US West Coast hip-hoppers Jurassic 5 is as much about the presence of DJs Cut Chemist and NuMark as it is tunes likeConcrete Schoolyard, while Cut Chemist's collaborations with Shadow on Product Placement and Brainfreeze mix albums have had huge commercial success. Dublin's Choicecuts club (Fridays at Mono, Wexford Street) is the mecca for Irish turntablists with regular visits from the likes of DJ Noize, DJ Craze, Q-Bert and many more.
And, inevitably, it has spread to the big screen. There have been numerous attempts to capture the art of turntablism on celluloid, from the old-school fun of Wild Style to John Carluccio's Battle Sounds, but last year's Scratch is the current standard-bearer. A comprehensive and engrossing feature-length documentary, it pans from the birth of the hip-hop DJ and the invention of scratching to the current state of turntablism. With interviews and performances from all the leading players (including a rare live collaboration between Steinski, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist), it turns out to be quite a story.
As director Doug Pray noted in an interview to promote the film, the art of the turntablist is to turn the familiar into the unfamiliar. "What sets turntablists apart is that they are creating completely different music from existing records. These guys are taking vinyl to places none of us could ever imagine." And that journey certainly isn't over yet.
