| Paul D. Miller on Mon, 28 Apr 2003 13:27:44 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
| <nettime> The Turntable |
well... another round bringin the noise the theory scene...
Paul
_____________________________________________________________________
CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 26, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
Article 126 03/04/24 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
The Turntable
==========================================================
~Charles Mudede~
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
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).
Scratch 3
---------
In Tone-Loc's 1989 video for his wildly popular single "Wild Thing,"
his DJ (or the actor who pretends to be his DJ) plays something that
is half a guitar and half a turntable. There are two reasons for this
monstrosity. One, "Wild Thing" sampled Van Halen's "Jamie's Cryin'"
(without permission), and so the guitar/turntable contraption
functions as a symbol for this gimmick: hiphop sampling rock.
Furthermore, this symbol (hiphop sampling rock) is held (or played,
or closer yet, replayed) by another symbol, that of the DJ, who in
the video is a code for what sampling is: an advanced digital form of
the initial and manual DJ practice/science of scratching and
connecting breaks into a sonic series.
The second reason has to do with the turntable's relative newness.
Even in 1989, long after its departure from the actual production of
hiphop music (the turntable was at the this point, like a DJ in the
video, nothing more than a reference to the essence of hiphop), there
was still some confusion as to what exactly it was -- meaning, what
does it resemble? Which family does the turntable belong to? What is
it actually doing? Making music? The contraption in the video asserts
that it is not very different than a guitar. Indeed, the "Wild Thing"
video says, if you were to hold a turntable flat against your stomach
and attach a neck to it (no strings or keys -- so it is a pure neck),
then this fact would be apparent. The turntable is a musical
instrument.
Scratch 4
---------
The "Wild Thing" video seems silly -- and at the level of promoting a
silly pop rap song it is. But on another level, the level of its
relationship with other music videos and music forms, it is dead
serious. The video attempts to explain to rock and soul skeptics what
this new thing, which is used in a particular/peculiar way by the
hiphop DJ, is. The "Wild Thing" video assumes that due to the
turntable's shape, traditional musicians are unable to recognize it
as an instrument. In a pure instance Platonizing the reality of an
image, the video invents this thing, this useless contraption (which
is not a guitar, nor a turntable -- you can't scratch that way
without the record falling off) that has the form of an electric
guitar so that the skeptics can finally recognize the turntable's
essential sameness with other, traditional instruments.
Scratch 5
---------
To replay a record with your hands is different from playing an
instrument with your hands. The one object (the turntable) says to
the hand, "Don't touch me, for I'm must complete my cycle and fulfill
that which is recorded on the 12inch"; the other (the musical
instrument) says to the hand, "If you don't touch me, if you don't
pull my strings or strike my keys, I'm nothing, I'm a useless
object." The turntable is always wrenched out of sleep by the hand
that wants to loop a break or to scratch a phrase. In a word, the
turntable is awakened by the DJ who wants to make (or, closer yet,
remake), music (or, closer yet, meta-music); whereas the instrument
always sleeps when it is used to make real music. Indeed, even during
the performance of the loudest rock song, the instrument is fast
asleep in the hands of the long-haired thrasher.
Scratch 6
---------
The turntable is a repurposed object. It is robbed of its initial
essence. But the void is soon refilled by a new essence which finds
it meaning, its place in the hiphop universe, in the service of the
DJ.
Scratch 7
---------
A thing (Kant) or implement (Heidegger) or commodity (Marx) that is
repurposed does what it is not supposed to. It is made by the hands
of a manufacturer (Kant), an artisan (Heidegger), a laborer (Marx) to
perform (and literally disappears into) a specific task, but the
repurposed object ends up doing something else. Think, if you will,
of a film projector, which is used to show a movie. That is its
purpose: to show a movie, not to make a movie -- a filmmaker uses a
camera for that. And yet this is what a turntable is forced to do; to
make meta-music (music about music) instead of playing previously
recorded music.
Scratch 8
---------
Hiphop is less "music," per se, and more "about music" -- so radical
is its difference from previous methods or modes of music production.
Hiphop doesn't so much make music the way, say, The Average White
Band, or James Brown, or The Police made music; it instead makes
music out of and about real music -- meaning, it makes music its
subject. "Punk, rock, new wave and soul" (G.L.O.B.E) are subjected to
the reproductive logic of hiphop. In this respect, hiphop is, as
Afro-futurist/culture critic David Goldberg points out in his essay
"Put The Needle On The Record," meta-music -- music made out of and
about other music.
Scratch 9
---------
Real Hiphop does not sample real sounds, like the toilet flushing in
Art of Noise's "Close (To the Edit)" (1984), but samples copyrighted
music. The hiphop DJ does not shape raw sound into a form recognized
as music, but shapes information into a sonic form recognized as
meta-music.
Scratch 10
---------
I borrow the term "repurpose" from David Goldberg, who in his short
essay "Put The Needle On The Record" used it, as I do here, to
explain what exactly happens when a hiphop DJ handles (or mishandles,
or best yet, manhandles) a turntable. Goldberg writes: "The scratch
explodes all previous relationships to sound by completely
repurposing the turntable, and by bringing a real-time interactivity
to the manipulation of what was originally intended to be a permanent
archival medium. Because the scratch is based on a recording, it
becomes the manipulation of information and not just the vibrational
properties of air."
Scratch 11
---------
In an article I wrote for _The Stranger_ in the fall of 2000 about a
bridge in Seattle that is used as a self-willed exit from this world
as reliably as it used by cars to cross a body of water, I explained
repurposing in this way:
The German philosopher Heidegger once wrote that the essence of
a tool (like a hammer) is only noticed when it is broken. If a
hammer works, then it is nothing more than an extension of your
hand, but if it breaks, you notice its 'hammerness.' This is
close to what I mean by repurposing; the added and unexpected
uses of the Aurora Bridge (e.g., the way it has been used to
express political and environmental concerns, as in 1997 when
Greenpeace protesters hung from it by huge ropes and prevented
two American fishing trawlers from heading to the Bering Sea)
knocked it out of the slumber of its primary function, and it
is now wide-awake, alert, alive. Indeed, like Heidegger's
broken hammer brings out the hammer's hammerness, repurposing
brings out the 'bridgeness' of the Aurora Bridge.
A repurposed turntable brings out a turntables's turtableness.
Scratch 12
---------
Because it is doing what it is supposed to be doing, a musical
instrument is fast sleep when in the process of making music (Indeed,
the very fact of this may explain why Jimi Hendrix frequently lit his
electric guitar on fire or played it with his teeth -- anything to
wake the damn thing up!). Turntables, on the other hand, are always
wide awake or "enstranged." This is why the beloved heavy metal
practice of smashing a guitar or kicking over a drum set at the end
of a show cannot be translated into hiphop terms; how can a DJ break
something that is essentially broken when serving his/her hiphop
needs? To smash a turntable after it has been man/mishandled by a
hiphop DJ seems like a terribly cruel thing to do.
Scratch 13
---------
Enstranged, not estranged. Enstranged is a neologism that
approximates the Russian word "ostranenie," which means "making it
strange," or to defamiliarize something that has been smothered by
habit. The Russian Formalist, and Victor Shklovsky specifically,
argued that enstrangement is what distinguished poetic language from
everyday language.
Scratch 14
---------
During the heyday of European ethnic gangsters in North American
cities, violin cases were famously repurposed for gangland wars.
These cases which carried Tommy guns were wide-awake when in the
hands of the gangsters and fast asleep when in the hands of
classically trained musicians.
Scratch 15
---------
A musician's case contains an instrument; a DJ's case contains
information.
Scratch 16
---------
Marx, like Heidegger, recognized the significance of enstranging an
object. For Heidegger, a broken object exposes its thingness; for
Marx, it exposes its source, the laborer, the one who has transferred
his/her body's energy into the substance of the object. In _Capital_,
_Volume One_, Marx writes: "[I]t is generally by their imperfection
as products, that means of production in any process assert
themselves in the character of products. A blunt knife or weak thread
forcibly remind us of Mr. A., the cutler, Mr. B, the spinner. In the
finished product the labour by means of which it has acquired its
useful qualities is not palpable, has apparently vanished." A broken
object is also wide awake or enstranged. Indeed, a broken hiphop
turntable is a bizarre (if not the most bizarre) thing. When it's
actually broken it can't be repurposed (or broken) by the
(re)creative hands of the DJ.
Scratch 17
---------
The production of one form (replayed music) occurs outside of the
text/recording; the other (played music) within -- if it is recorded
at all. Indeed, hiphop doesn't really "vanish into thin air" in the
manner evoked by jazz genius Eric Dolphy, but returns into the album
sleeve to be replayed on another day.
Scratch 18
---------
In the notes for "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" (which is the most important essay of the 20th
century), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) offers this quote from Leonardo
da Vinci (1452-1519) which echoes the words of Eric Dolphy
(1928-1964), which in 1996 were sampled by Parisian DJ, DJ Cam
(1973-), on his CD _Mad Blunted Jazz_. da Vinci writes: "Painting is
superior to music because, unlike unfortunate music, it does not have
to die as soon as it is born...Music which is consumed in the every
act of its birth is inferior to painting which the use of varnish has
rendered eternal."
Scratch 19
---------
Hiphop is the first musical form to break completely with traditional
music in terms of production -- how it is made, who makes it, and so
on. Even dub, the closest form to hiphop -- which was born in 60s and
employed dub plates in ways that are analogous to hiphop's use of
records -- has vital connections to live musical performance that
hiphop doesn't. Dub is constituted by two significant practices that
are not completely separated or in opposition: One, is to make dub
with live musicians -- a practice that finds its representative in
Lee "Scratch" Perry and is related in many ways to electronic music,
like Kraftwerk's; the other is to make a "version" (a remix) of a
recorded piece of music -- a practice that finds its representative
in King Tubby and is distantly related to early, early hiphop, like
Afrika Bambaataa's -- whose "Planet Rock" famously sampled
Kraftwerk's, "Trans-Europe Express" (sans permission). This is why
dub presents significant theoretical problems; its mode of production
is never as clear as hiphop (the total break), but always in a dub
haze of live instruments and electronic equipment. Nevertheless, dub
is the only link (or, more closely, a ghost of a link) between hiphop
meta-music and instrument-based music.
Scratch 20
---------
The real break began in the mid-70s when New York DJs invented the
practice/science of looping a break from scratch. What the DJ
establishes with the back and forth, blend and blur, is a series
(loop after loop) of repeated information that forms a total sonic
mix (or matrix) into which the rapper is inserted. The rapper does
not perform _with_ a band but _within_ the meta-music.
Scratch 21
---------
Started in the 70s, the looping of the break anticipated the sampler.
The sampler digitally assembles multiple parts into a master mix.
With the arrival of the sampler in the early 80s, the DJ abandons
real turntables (at the club or in the park or the radio station) for
the mixing-board.
Scratch 22
---------
If you open up and then fold the note sleeves for the soundtrack to
_What's The Worst That Could Happen_? (2001) in a certain way, the
image of Eric Sermon on the mixing boards will be faced with the
image of Marvin Gaye on the keyboards. Unlike the folding of the new
$20 bills to produce what looks like the burning Twin Towers, the
matching of Eric Sermon's method of producing music with Marvin
Gaye's method of producing music is not accidental.
Image 1. [image available in on-line version: www.ctheory.net]
Scratch 23
---------
Similar to the guitar/turntable contraption in the "Wild Thing"
video, the matched images attempt to explain what is not yet fully
understood or realized by making it correspond to something that is
familiar. Meaning, the mixing-board is the hiphop version of the
piano: The piano has keys, the soundboard has knobs; both have wide
surfaces; both require that the pianist or mixing-boardist sit down
and use the tips of their fingers -- therefore: both are instruments.
But these parallels are only visual not factual. The mixing-board is
not an instrument, that is not its essential purpose. The
mixing-board was made, designed, installed in a soundproof basement
to record instruments. It is repurposed by the hiphop DJ who, now a
producer, concentrates both the recording and production of music
within the mixing-board.
If rearranged in such way that the living hiphop producer Eric Sermon
is on top and the ghost of Marvin Gaye is on the bottom looking up,
we would have a better representation of what is actually taking
place in the production of hiphop music. The phantom of the musician
exists within the electronic depths of the soundboard. The musician
is the subject of the hiphop producer.
Image 2. [available in on-line version: www.ctheory.net]
But even this is not close enough. A more precise representation of
modern hiphop production should look something like this.
Image 3. [image available in on-line version: www.ctheory.net]
The modern mixing-board replacing the DJ who repurposed the LP that
was produced by a live musician.
Scratch 24
---------
The early practice of manually running or matching records on
turntables, anticipated the current, virtual production of hiphop on
mixing-boards in the way that dadaist practices at the end of the
19th century anticipated cinema. Here, of course, I'm referring to a
passage in Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction," which argues that "one of the foremost
tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be
fully satisfied only later." Benjamin writes: "The history of every
art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to
effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical
standard...The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear,
particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from
the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such
barbarisms were abundant in dadaism. It is only now that its impulse
becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial -- and
literary -- means the effects which the public today seeks in the
film."
Scratch 25
---------
The sampler is not a musical instrumental (in the traditional sense
of a musical instrument), it is instead repurposed to turn one DJ
repurposing two turntables into a thousand mini DJs repurposing two
thousand virtual, mini turntables.
Scratch 26
---------
"One Day in '81 or '82 we was doin' this remix," says DJ Marley Marl
in Tricia Rose's book _Black Noise_ (1994), "I wanted to sample a
voice from off this song with an Emulator and accidentally, a snare
went through. At first I was like 'That's the wrong thing,' but then
it was soundin' good. I kept running back and hitting the Emulator.
Then I looked at the engineer and said. 'You know what this means?! I
could take any drum sound from an old record, put it in here and get
the old drummer sound on some shit. No more of that dull DMX shit.'
That day I went out and bought a sampler." The drum machine, which is
an instrument, is "dull...shit" to the DJ, what is desired is a
machine that does what a DJ essentially does when running LPs or
singles on the turntables: remixing, replaying "old records."
Scratch 27
---------
The following passage from a wonderful article, published in _The
Face_ (December, 1997), describes an encounter between Staten
Island's Wu-Tang Clan and the Scottish pop band Texas in an NY
recording studio. It not only makes abundantly clear the difference
between the production of modern hiphop (which has its essence in the
turntable) and the production of pop or proper music (which has its
essence in the musical instrument) but also how hiphop is made
nowadays -- not with turntables but mixing boards and samplers that
emulate turntables:
RZA goes to work, feeding a succession of sample-laden discs
into a sampler. He has a diffident, genius-at-work charisma
about him as he sits with his back to the room, keyboard at
side. With a flick of his prodigiously ringed hand he reaches
out and conjures up a brutal bassline. The speakers pulse
violently. RZA takes a sip of Hennessy. 'Record this, right
here!' he tells the bewildered-looking engineer.
RZA has decided to dispense with the original master tapes,
shipped over from Britain. He wants a completely new version,
recorded rough-and-ready without the standard safety net of a
time-code. This convention-trashing, wildstyle approach to
recording elicits some consternation from the studio's
engineer, a central-casting white guy who warns RZA: 'You won't
be able to synch to this, you know.' RZA waves him away and
turns to [Texas' Bassist and leader] Johnny McElhone.
'This riff is in E,' McElhone tells RZA. 'Maybe we should try
it in the original key, D.'
'What are you saying? I understand no keys,' says RZA.
Scratch 28
---------
The real turntable has been dead for many years now; it's no longer
used to reproduce music. The sampler has replaced it in studio and
the DAT machine at live shows. (Indeed, when the Anti-Pop Consortium
performs a live show they often say, "Let's give it up to our DAT
machine" instead of "Let's give it up to our DJ.") The turntable is
now a ghost machine within the complex circuitry of the mixing
machine. When we see a DJ at a nightclub scratching records and
reproducing music on the turntables -- which by the way have not
progressed or significantly improved in over 20 years; what was used
to scratch records in the early 80s, if not earlier, are essentially
the same Technics that are used today -- we are watching something
from the past, and, because of this, something that is almost
ritualistic.
Like the saint he or she is, the 21st century DJ who cuts and runs
the break of our favorite song is not innovative, they are not
looking forward but backward, giving praise thanks to his/her great
and departed ancestors -- Jam Master Jay and DJ Scott La Rock -- on
what is now the altar of hiphop: the two turntables.
--------------------
Originally from Zimbabwe, Charles Tonderai Mudede is the book
editor for _The Stranger_, an alternative Seattle weekly. An
adjunct professor at Pacific Lutheran University, Mudede is also
a founding member of the Seattle Research Institute
(www.seattleresearchinstitute.org).
_____________________________________________________________________
* CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology and
* culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in
* contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
* theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
*
* Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
*
* Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Paul Virilio (Paris),
* Bruce Sterling (Austin), R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Siegfried
* Zielinski (Koeln), Stelarc (Melbourne), Richard Kadrey (San
* Francisco), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (NYC), Timothy Murray
* (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen
* Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross (NYC), David Cook (Toronto), Ralph
* Melcher (Sante Fe), Shannon Bell (Toronto), Gad Horowitz
* (Toronto), Deena Weinstein (Chicago), Michael Weinstein
* (Chicago), Andrew Wernick (Peterborough).
*
* In Memory: Kathy Acker
*
* Editorial Correspondents: Ken Hollings (UK),
* Maurice Charland (Canada) Steve Gibson (Canada/Sweden).
*
* Editorial Associate: Ted Hiebert
* WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET)
* WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman
_____________________________________________________________________
To view CTHEORY online please visit:
http://www.ctheory.net/
To view CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA online please visit:
http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/
_____________________________________________________________________
* CTHEORY includes:
*
* 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory.
*
* 2. Electronic articles on theory, technology and culture.
*
* 3. Event-scenes in politics, culture and the mediascape.
*
* 4. Interviews with significant theorists, artists, and writers.
*
* 5. Multimedia theme issues and projects.
*
*
* Special thanks to Concordia University.
*
* No commercial use of CTHEORY articles without permission.
*
* Mailing address: CTHEORY, Concordia University, 1455 de
* Maisonneuve, O., Montreal, Canada, H3G 1M8.
*
* Full text and microform versions are available from UMI, Ann Arbor,
* Michigan; and Canadian Periodical Index/Gale Canada, Toronto.
*
* Indexed in: International Political Science Abstracts/
* Documentation politique international; Sociological Abstract
* Inc.; Advance Bibliography of Contents: Political Science and
* Government; Canadian Periodical Index; Film and Literature Index.
_____________________________________________________________________
============================================================================
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe
they are free...."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com
Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
Office Mailing Address:
Subliminal Kid Inc.
101 W. 23rd St. #2463
New York, NY 10011
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]