Hip-Hop Turntablism, Creativity and Collaboration
University of North Carolina (US)
Even for readers of this journal and devotees of the art of the DJ, the advanced form of record manipulation that Sophy Smith spotlights in her 2013 monograph, Hip-Hop Turntablism, Creativity and Collaboration, may seem rather recherché. Watch, for example, the British DJ crew (and one of Smith’s featured groups) known as the Scratch Perverts in action. Two men stand before a long table lined with gleaming Technics 1200 turntables, their restless hands twiddling knobs, flicking sliders and manhandling vinyl discs, transforming bits of prerecorded sounds into completely new music. The tempos, timbres, textures and rhythms change every few seconds; what would clear a dance floor in record time (so to speak), instead draws the rapt attention and enthusiastic applause cheers of the crowd. (I can always tell newcomers to a turntablist showcase when they try, always unsuccessfully, to dance.) It is the collaborative musical transformation of groups like the Scratch Perverts that fascinates Smith, a musicologist, composer and performer who teaches at De Montfort University in England. Smith’s particular goal is to develop an analytical framework for studying this music, a project she undertakes in order to “demonstrate that hip-hop music is worth academic attention not just in its role within popular culture, but as music itself” (2).
After the introduction, the first four main chapters provide the historical and cultural background for the art of turntablism, as it has come to be known. The context in which Smith places hip-hop turntablism is less hip-hop itself (or related African American expressive practices) than the modernist and postmodernist experimental music of Pierre Schaeffer and John Cage and their successors. Smith seems to drawn by an impulse (not uncommon among scholars, and one that has impelled me at times) to defend hip-hop by connecting it to practices and traditions that fellow academics recognize as legitimate. The problem is that hip-hop turntablists have little connection to those traditions. Just because John Cage picked up a record player’s tone arm and set the needle down in rhythmic patterns in 1939 does not mean that he had any influence on GrandWizzard Theodore (who long ago stopped going by “DJ Theodore”, as Smith identifies him) when he did the same in 1977.
To my mind, the real contribution of the book comes in Chapter 6 when Smith, drawing on her observation of various DJ teams (also known as crews) in rehearsal, explores the collaborative process of developing collective turntable compositions. Of particular value is when Smith brings out the musicians’ voices, as when she cites Beni G describing his group’s musical process: “The only way I can explain it is it’s like two, three or four artists all holding the same paint brush wanting to paint one picture and they’re all trying to paint it in a slightly different way” (62). These musicians think of themselves as innovators, and their process of collective innovation could be of great interest to those who study the interaction among musicians within a group. As Beni G explains elsewhere of turntable groups, “Their sort of innovation and their attitude—they’ll look at the turntables and ... be like how can we mess with the equipment? How can we mess with this to make it completely different? To me, that’s crazy good, to keep pushing it in that way” (57) (Smith would have benefited from books such as Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1997), though I should point out that the performances that Smith studies are not improvised).
The most substantial portion of this book comes in the chapters in which Smith carefully develops her analytical methodology. Although this work is impressive in many ways, I have to wonder whom is really served by it. When, on pages 140–45, Smith sums up her analysis of various performances (the videos of which readers have no easy access to, by the way), most of her conclusions might seem obvious, for example: “The routines consist of smaller sections” or “Tempos alter in most sections”. It’s not clear how these observations would guide the listening or deepen the appreciation of those first encountering this music, or help the musicians themselves understand their own art. Put another way (and to soften my criticism), Smith’s contributions in this book are strongest when she analyzes processes rather than products, using her keen ears and eyes to give us access to a vital musical tradition that transforms technologies of sound reproduction into instruments of musical creation.
Monson, Ingrid. 1997. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
“The Scratch Perverts @ Skratchcon”. 2006. YouTube. <http://youtu.be/MqvWrK_jf3w> (accessed 27 April 2014).