Couriers of Cool
RL Grime @ the 2018 Trillectro Music Festival (photo courtesy of Will Colbert)
Have you ever been in a room so humid the walls drip sweat? It’s all the building can do to not combust. A DJ inhabits a corner, manipulating space and time. Bass defies physics, bouncing off and through boundaries. Unwritten fire codes are violated as bodies collide on the dancefloor.
This is the power of the DJ. A being one-part showman, one-part shaman. An architect who forges the future through the past. A change catalyst of not only music but culture.
Sound Breaking Barriers
In the ‘50s, Alan Freed triggered a seismic shift in music. The groundbreaking radio disk jockey popularized the phrase rock & roll. A turn of phrase that would alter the axis of music and signal a nascent threat to conservative gatekeepers.
This “new music” blaring from suburban transistor radios was an appropriation of rhythm & blues. A repackaging of black music that became wildly popular with white teens. J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t a fan.
The infamous, hate-mongering, former FBI director labeled rock and roll a “corrupting influence on America’s youth.” The G-men launched a crusade to stymie the influential DJ. They hit Freed with 26 counts of commercial bribery for what we now call “payola.” Then came the tax evasion charges.
“The boundary-smashing, trend-setting evangelist of rock and roll.”
Freed’s career and life were marred by the Feds, but not before he built a runway for future DJs. Radio personalities like Wolfman Jack, Frankie Crocker, and Hal Jackson would continue to break barriers and change broadcast radio.
Natural Selection
One of music’s chemical properties is community. This unifying alchemy was evident during the disco era. In the ‘70s, club-goers would gather to get high off inclusivity—as well as, cocaine, amphetamines, ethyl chloride, angel dust, quaaludes, acid, PCP, MDA, poppers, and countless other empathogens.
DJs were the titans of an underworld of sex, drugs, and tempos clocking in at 120 beats per minute. Mythic figures like David Mancuso, Larry Levan, ‘Jellybean’ Benitez, and Frankie Knuckles were gods. Deities with the power to shift popular opinion.
During disco’s influential heyday, labels would hand-deliver new vinyl to popular club DJs. A spin at Studio 54, Paradise Garage, or Sanctuary could revive a recording artist’s career. Ironically, the resurrector would eventually need resuscitation.
“Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” The Oscar Wilde quote would not be true for disco. Excess sealed the genre’s fate. The record industry’s commodification of disco emphasized quantity over quality. The engorged glitzy cash cow was led to the slaughter. A bloodletting heralded by the chants “death to disco.”
Like the mythological phoenix, disco’s demise was not absolute. New electronic music would emerge from the ashes. Chicago house, Detroit techno, Baltimore club, UK garage, German hard house, and many others owe a debt to their dance music predecessor.
The Legend of Hercules
Born in the Bronx...once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the address: 1520 Sedgwick Ave. Hip hop’s holy ground. It’s here, in 1973, that a teenage Clive Campbell became DJ Kool Herc.
As a youth, Campbell would watch rudeboys stroll into Jamaica’s notorious Trenchtown dancehalls. It was in the dance that selectors held high office. DJs like King Tubby, Duke Reid, and Coxsone Dodd were the undisputed people’s champs. During a time of post-independence instability, they were the prime administrators of ‘big tunes.’
The late ‘60s bass and drum patterns characteristic of the reggae played at ‘sound clashes’ would become the island nation’s primary export. Campbell ushered the Jamaican seeds that would grow into hip hop through US Customs. The slash and burned terra firma of the Bronx is where the music would blossom.
“Them said nothing good ever come outta Trenchtown. Well, hip-hop came out of Trenchtown.”
The apartment rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue was where the budding DJ Kool Herc spun records for neighborhood kids. It wasn’t long before the news spread of Herc’s ability to stitch together a song’s percussive breakdown.
The legend of DJ Kool Herc, and his contemporaries, looms large. Grandmaster Flash added polish to Herc’s invention, Grand Wizard Theodore invented the scratch, and Afrika Bambatataa used hip hop to bring peace to the warring Bronx.
Long Live the DJ
Recently, the DJ has reclaimed the spotlight. Whether it be pandemic savior, DJ D-Nice, who lifted our spirits during a trying year, or Calvin Harris who can earn a six-figure payday from one set at an EDM festival.
It’s difficult to predict music’s next innovation. If history is any indication, DJs will be the bellwethers of change. After all...
Radio DJs paved the way for new musical genres, broke bigotted barriers, and shifted business models. Mixmasters concocted cocktails of escapism, inclusivity, and ecstasy to create club culture. Jamaican selectors fashioned a new genre that emphasized the tastes of the dancehall and influenced Bronx DJs who like seamstresses sewed breakbeats together to craft hip hop.