Don't Stop the Beat
What's it like to go into a club now and see DJs using digital turntables?
Well, you still have to know how to DJ. If you was wack on vinyl, you'll be wack on digital, too. And if you were good on vinyl, well, digital is less work, so you should be phenomenal. It's just that now DJs can walk around with 20,000 records inside of a laptop. You're still physically playing—you still gotta move the record in a backward-forward motion—but the music's on that record in a wave file. So you don't have to carry two boxes of records.
Do you still collect vinyl?
Yeah, I have to.
Because you love it?
Yeah, I'm straight up in love with it. I'm a fiend. When you're the inventor of something you've been doing for 33 years, and then what you have done is now converted into a different format, it takes a little bit of getting used to.
What do you think about hip-hop today?
I look at commercialization as a vehicle. When I was doing this in the Bronx in the early '70s, the only way this music was being heard was if someone was fortunate enough to get a cassette of our performances. And that cassette might go to Philadelphia, it might go down south—but it wasn't going across the world. Today, they talk about Grandmaster Flash in Germany, in Australia, in Japan, in England and in Paris. There are more countries and more places to perform than I'll probably ever in my lifetime see. And when you can find something that you love, and make a living at it, then I have no problem with commercialism.
Would the 18-year-old Flash ever have envisioned such mainstream success?
Never in my wildest dreams. When I started doing this, I always thought about how if this could just get out, to be talked about, to be heard by other genres of people, they'd be hooked. But never did I think rich white suburban kids would be listening to it. Or that if I'd go to places like India or Burma or Africa, that I'd be looked at as some kind of superhero.
How have mp3s changed what you do?
It's a gift and a curse. The joy of finding that hit record is gone now. It's just too easy to acquire a jam. Other than that, I'm a scientist, and modern technology is great.
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Member Comments
Posted By: Krohn @ 10/09/2008 7:43:33 PM
Comment: They harassed her until she registered to vote six times!:
http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=3145562&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/
Posted By: Krohn @ 10/08/2008 11:49:34 PM
Comment: "Not all Democrats agree with Mr. Frank that such policies are off-limits to criticism. Last week Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama said in a statement: 'Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership, when in retrospect, I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.'
"Mr. Davis is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus."
'Rank snobbery'
Camille Paglia, who supports Sen. Barack Obama, has nothing but scorn for the way the media has treated Sarah Palin.
"The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses," Miss Paglia writes at www.salon.com.
"The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality."
Posted By: Krohn @ 10/06/2008 6:06:37 PM
Comment: The Antichrist!:
When George Soros failed to obtain the election of his candidate, John Kerry, in 2004, he brooded for a while, even said he might get out of politics altogether, but he just couldn???t stop himself. He has stated publicly that he wishes to burst the ???bubble of American supremacy,??? because he says our preeminence in the world is a detriment to global ???equilibrium.??? So far, he has failed, but he keeps on trying.
And Mr. Soros has made no secret either of the fact that he sees the shortest way to effect political shake-ups, what he terms ???regime changes,??? is through very difficult economic conditions.
America has not yet felt the full force of Soros style economic shock treatment. But others have.
Soros made his first billion in 1992 by shorting the British pound with leveraged billions in financial bets, and became known as the man who broke the Bank of England. He broke it on the backs of hard-working British citizens who immediately saw their homes severely devalued and their life savings cut drastically in comparative worth almost overnight.
When the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 threatened to spread globally, George Soros was right in the thick of it. Soros was accused by the Malaysian Prime Minister of causing the collapse with his monetary machinations, and he was branded in Thailand as an ???economic war criminal??? who ???sucks the blood from the people.??? Right in the middle of this crisis, Soros dashed off his book, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, which demanded a ???third way??? toward economic stability.
Wake up, America, before it is too late!!!!