Somewhere between Liberty’s unsmiling gloom and Twice As Nice’s collective superiority complex, Cream of Da Crop is UK garage perfectly poised midway between ruffneck moodiness and pop effervescence. You’ll hear baleful B-line dubplates next to Posh Spice promising ‘this tune’s gonna punish you’ as guest vocalist on Truestepper’s chart smash ‘Out Of Your Mind’. The club’s vibe is pleasant, too, thanks partly to a sizeable contingent of Asian youth, who tend not to project as much attitude as their white and black counterparts. It’s the latest stage in the long-running infatuation between Indian kids and Caribbean culture, from bhangramuffin MC Apache Indian to Talvin Singh’s tabla-laced drum and bass. Cream of Da Crop’s dance floor is like backstage at Miss Asian Subcontinent. Small and dapper, the boyfriends weave bhangra moves into their dancing, bringing a sinuous fluency to garage’s characteristic taut sashay.
This slice of 2step heaven is sandwiched between nasty slices of reality, though. On the way to the club, I witness the aftermath of a racial attack: sheltering in the entrance of a 7/11, an Asian boy clutches a tissue to the back of his head to staunch the blood while his friend tells their story to a policeman. Leaving Cream of Da Crop at 6 a.m., I’m stalked by a junkie beggar who eventually threatens to jab me with an AIDS-infected syringe – this, after I’ve already given him a pound coin and a cigarette!
UK garage’s good times are hard won, precarious. Underneath the positivity veneer of songs like Brasstooth’s ‘Celebrate Life’, there’s a premonition that global capitalism, aka Babylon Inc., is gonna knock the ground from under you again, real soon – so grab the high life while you can. There’s an image that crystallizes the scene for me: a black guy, supersharp in an ankle-length leather overcoat, shadowboxing with a bottle of Moët clenched in one fist. The soundtrack is a chart-bound anthem that’s played at least once an hour at every club I visit: Wookie’s ‘Battle’. Its staccato, one-note melody is tense and militaristic; the lyrics warn about wearing masks and the struggle to survive. The radio mix goes into full-on uplifting Brit-soul, promising ‘we will overcome’. But the mix that rules the clubs is darker – a roiling, ominous bassline and just that first, white-knuckle verse, the one that starts ‘Every day is like a battle’ and ends ‘Your soul it will be lost’. The redemption, the release, never comes.
TWENTY-ONE
IN THE MIX
DJ CULTURE AND
REMIXOLOGY
What is a DJ? Someone who plays other people’s records – for a living, for love, ideally for both. The majority of DJs – at weddings, parties, bars, rock clubs, discotheques – ‘play’ records in the rudimentary sense of the word: slap them on the turntable one after the other. But in hip hop and house, and in all the rave and club-based hybrids of those two black American musics, the DJ plays records in a different sense – one that’s closer to playing an instrument, or playing with a plastic, mutable substance. As this element of ‘play’ got ever more re-creative, the DJ came to be considered an artist.
The ascent of the DJ-auteur began as early as the mid-seventies. The wind beneath his wings (then and now, it’s too often a ‘he’) was technological: the invention of the 12-inch single, and the development of turntables and mixers specially designed for the DJ’s needs. The first 12-inch singles started to appear in 1975 as DJ-only promos. Not long after came the first commercially available 12-inch, Double Exposure’s ‘Ten Per Cent’, on the New York disco label Salsoul. With its deeper grooves spread over a broader span of vinyl than the 45 r.p.m. 7-inch single, the 12-inch offered better sound quality and made it easier for DJs to locate precise points in the track, thereby enabling accurate mixing. The extended versions of tracks on the 12-inch offered a plethora of stripped down, non-vocal passages and percussion-only breakdowns, which in turn provided entry points for mixing into the next record.
If the 12-inch was the software element of the DJ revolution, its hardware equivalent were the DJ-oriented turntables developed by companies like Technics, whose SL-1200Mk2, launched in 1979, rapidly became the professional jock’s deck of choice. With the SL-1200Mk2, the key DJ-friendly innovation was ‘pitch adjust’ (a slider that allowed the DJ to slow down or speed up the r.p.m. of a disc by a factor of plus or minus eight) and a high-torque direct-drive motor which could take a record from standstill to full speed in less than a second. Pitch adjust facilitated the synchronizing of records of different tempo. The quick-start function is useful when bringing in the new track on beat, and is used in tandem with ‘back-cueing’ – rewinding the track in slow motion and listening through headphones until you find the precise drum hit from which you want to kick off.
Synchronizing and seamlessly segueing tracks of different b.p.m. is called ‘beat-mixing’, and it’s the basic DJ skill. Beat-mixing is comparable to driving a car: with enough practice, most people can learn to do it. ‘It’s not that hard,’ says DB, one of America’s top drum-and-bass DJs. ‘But it is hard to be good at it, to hold a mix for a minute or more without wavering, without the kick drum and the snare drum falling out of synch and sounding like a drunk guy falling down the stairs.’
There are basically two different kinds of mixing: smooth and rough. House and trance, styles based around the pump and pound of the four-to-the-floor kick drum, are oriented around ‘the long mix’, says DB. ‘The records are constructed so that they fit together very well. As one track is ending, the bassline will drop out, just as the bassline on the next record is about to drop in. The drums will naturally break down – the middle chunk of the record will be the full drum kit, but then gradually the percussion and the hi-hats will stop, and you’ll end up with just a kick drum. And the other track will usually start with just a kick drum.’
The other major style of mixing is the choppy, cut-up mode associated with the hip-hop tradition of breakbeats and syncopated basslines, as extended by jungle. Here the cross-fader on the mixer (the machine that allows the DJ to fade or cut between two turntables) is used to hurl into the mix brief snatches of the coming track, teasing ear-glimpses that whip up anticipation, or to oscillate violently back and forth between the two tracks. With jungle, the duration of the mix – the period when both tracks overlap – is usually much shorter than with house or trance.
If beat-mixing is the basic skill that most can master, there’s a whole dimension of turntable trickery that’s perhaps comparable to stunt driving. Using two copies of the same record, DJs can set the second disc running a beat behind the first and cross-fade back and forth to create stutter effects, where a beat, lick or vocal is doubled or even tripled. Keep the fader dead centre, and the two copies of the same record running out of synch creates a woozy effect called ‘phasing’, ‘flanging’ or ‘swirling’. Then there’s the array of hands-on tricks that involve the direct manipulation of the disc’s speed of rotation. ‘That’s my trademark,’ says techno DJ Richie Hawtin. ‘I do a lot of spinning things up faster and then slowing them back down. I’ll slow records down to about half their original speed, ’cos when you slow rhythms down, other rhythms start to emerge out of them. In some ways, you’re bringing the energy down, but in other ways, at half speed, more notes and sounds become apparent, and it becomes more intense.’ Then there are DJs like Carl Cox and Jeff Mills who use three turntables rather than the standard pair; and whose strenuous slam-jam sets involve the lightning-fast concatenation and cross-hatching of the most explosively exciting sections of a huge number of tracks.
Virtuoso DJs like Hawtin, Cox and Mills are quite scarce, though. Most of the time, what separates top DJs from the rest of the pack isn’t so much their technical skills as their sensibility. If DJing is like driving a car, what counts is the DJ’s ability to ‘take you on a journey’ (which is how DJs tend to describe their art). And that comes down to taste, combined with an intuitive sense of what the ‘passengers’ (the audience) want to experience. The DJ constructs the raw material of sundry tracks into a meta-track, an abstract emotional narrative with peaks and lows (alongside �
��journey’, the other metaphor favoured by DJs is ‘telling a story’).
‘There’s a lot more to DJing than just mixing two records together on beat,’ says Paul Oakenfold, one of the most successful DJs in the world. ‘Anyone can learn that, like you can learn to play guitar. You’ve got to know keys and arrangements, structure and depth. That’s what makes a good DJ stand out.’ Like a lot of veteran DJs, Oakenfold waxes nostalgic for a bygone golden age of DJ artistry, before the business became so lucrative that soulless artisans entered the field looking for glory and big bucks. Derrick May, a veritable DJ-philosopher, has a similarly mournful take on the ‘lost art’ of set-building and mixing. ‘Most of that philosophy has been lost. There’s very few guys who really follow the art of mixing, the art of blending. Anybody can slash, cut and do all that fun stuff with the cross-fader. But not many people really know how to blend records and make records speak to each other. Make music out of music . . . You can elevate people just from the power of a mix, you can make people truly believe in you. Nowadays, most people go to a club and the DJ is like a jukebox. Even if he’s playing the best records, he’s not playing them with any sort of emotion or any sort of personality.’
What can it possibly mean to say that a DJ playing someone else’s records – music in whose creation he had no part whatsoever – can exhibit a personality that makes all the difference? For DJs, the expressive element of what they do resides in the juxtaposition of these already finished artworks, the connections made between different tracks, the transitions and contrasts between moods, the up-and-down dynamics of a set. With their juxtaposition of classics, obscure tracks, unjustly neglected oldies and new tunes, the best DJs are constructing a sort of argument about the historical roots of the music and where it should head in the future. In this respect, DJs are closer to critics than the traditional conception of the artist. Indeed, DJs love to talk of what they do in terms of ‘educating the listener’. This means exposing the audience to music they might not have encountered, pushing the envelope of a particular scene’s collective sensibility, and hipping newcomers to the roots of that scene’s sound.
The etymological root of ‘educate’ is ‘lead’. The ‘good’ DJ is shepherd to an audience that is implicitly posited as a flock of dangerously impressionable and easily impressed sheep. The ‘bad DJ’ is, paradoxically, the crowd-pleaser, the mercenary who leads the flock astray by only giving them what they already love (anthems). In his suggestive essay ‘The Booth, the Floor and the Wall: Dance Music and the Fear of Falling’, Will Straw pinpoints a tension in DJ culture between populism and connoisseurship. Pander to the crowd’s will too much and you’ll get the reputation of being a ‘cheesy’ DJ. But play only ‘deep’ music and you’ll find yourself playing to a semi-deserted dance floor, sparsely populated by cognoscenti – the sort of people too cool to emit the kind of fervour that creates a killer vibe. Noting that DJs are notorious for never dancing, Straw argues that being ‘hip’ is cerebral, about being in possession of disembodied knowledge, and has nothing to do with the conventional connotations of the word ‘hip’ (hip-shaking, sexuality). The DJ in his booth and his head-nodding acolytes clinging to the club walls are contrasted with the implicitly feminine abandon and hysteria of the dance floor proper. The DJ labours to elicit uncontrolled physical responses that he, as a member of the connoisseur class, disdains and denies himself. He is the maestro, seducing and arousing the ‘female’ crowd, guiding it through a multi-orgasmic frenzy.
Although female DJs like Mrs Wood, DJ Rap, Lisa Lashes and Sandra Collins achieved high profiles in their respective scenes, DJ culture remains distinctly masculine. The presence of women on the dance floor is not reflected by the proportion of women in the DJ booth. The gender imbalance is, if anything, even worse when it comes to the production of techno, despite the ‘white collar’ nature of electronic music (its reliance on computing skills that aren’t physically taxing, and that are transferable from information-based professions in which women are strongly represented). Partly this can be attributed to the homosocial nature of techno: tricks of the trade get passed down from mentors to male acolytes. Partly it’s because DJing and sample-based music go hand in hand with an obsessive ‘trainspotter’ mentality: the amassing of huge collections of records, the accumulation of exhaustive and arcane information about labels, producers and auteurs, the fetishization of particular models of music-making technology. Collecting goes hand in hand with the music-critical discourses that construct canons and genealogies.
Like criticism itself, DJing depends on a certain arrogance, a propensity for characterizing oneself as an authority (in both the knowledge and leadership senses). As well as seeing themselves as educators, DJs often style themselves as soldiers crusading for a cause. Certain DJs become identified with a particular sound or subgenre – Jeff Mills and minimal techno, Grooverider for the dark, techy strain within drum and bass – and function as the ambassadors and public figureheads for a whole community of producers. Known as the Godfather, Grooverider has a stable of ‘boys’ who make tracks with his vibe in mind and offer them to the DJ in DAT form. For a long period, Groove has the exclusive right to play these prerelease tunes, which he will get pressed up at his own expense as ‘dubplates’ (10-inch metal acetates that last for about thirty plays before wearing out). Sometimes producers talk of being inspired by a particular DJ’s sensibility or technical style (Randall’s ‘double impact’ mixing at AWOL, for instance) and rushing home from a gig to make a track. This peculiar deferential attitude and the displacement of creativity from the artist to the turntable selector can sometimes be hard to fathom. Far from dismantling the rock-star system in favour of a radically democratic anonymity, dance culture has shifted the impulse to worship onto the DJ-as-virtuoso. The DJ-as-godstar phenomenon has a lot to do with Ecstasy. The drug generates overwhelming emotions and sensations, plus a peculiar will-to-believe, that must be given a focus. Just as it’s possible to fall in love with someone you’ve only just met while under the influence of E, similarly that hyperemotional charge rubs off on the DJ, who seems to have a lot to do with the feelings coursing through your nervous system. This is not to deny the importance of the intuitive sense of what an audience wants to feel, where it wants to go, that experienced DJs develop. But in the throes of Ecstasy, it can feel like the DJ is actually reading the crowd-mind, playing the dancers’ bodies.
Legendary DJs owe their godlike status in part to being at the right place at the right time. Most of Britain’s ruling DJs – Oakenfold, Sasha, Carl Cox, Fabio and Grooverider – began their career in the thick of the 1988 – 90 acid house/Madchester explosion. By the early nineties, the network of commercial raves and rave-style big-room clubs had created a ‘guest DJ circuit’ with the leading DJs travelling up and down the country. In pre-rave days, DJs tended to have residencies, regular club nights. But now they became nomadic guns for hire, earning fat fees for performing short sets on bills crammed with other stellar DJs. Smaller clubs maintained loyal followings purely through their vibe, but the big-capacity ‘superclubs’ needed the drawing power of big-name jocks and were prepared to cough up the money. By the mid to late-nineties, Britain’s first-division DJs – Sasha, Jeremy Healey, Pete Tong, Judge Jules, Tall Paul – could charge fees in the region of £2,000 to £5,000 for a two- or three-hour set. These celebrity DJs could afford to keep a driver on salary to shuttle them between gigs and maybe even another assistant just to lug the record boxes. Factor in half a dozen lucrative gigs over the course of a three-day weekend, plus midweek sets, excursions to Europe or America, the rise of dance-music festivals like Tribal Gathering, and the tripling of fees at New Year’s Eve, and you’re talking about certain DJs getting close to being millionaires, just for playing other people’s records. In 1999, the Guinness Book of Records identified Paul Oakenfold as the world’s most successful DJ, earning £728,000 purely from his record spinning.
Successful DJs get extra income from mix-CDs, remixing singles
by pop stars and rock bands, playing shows on radio stations, endorsing products and producing their own tracks. With all the dosh, adulation and fringe benefits (first-class flights and hotel suites, top-brand booze from promoters, free drugs from hangers-on, even DJ groupies), little wonder that the DJ became the new rock star, what EveryBoy dreamt of becoming. ‘Turntables are outselling guitars,’ crowed Oakenfold.
As early as 1996, though, there were stirrings of a backlash against the guest DJ circuit. DJs were getting sick of the travel-induced stress, the burnout caused by sleep deprivation and jet lag. Many were frustrated by having to play brief sets and started to talk wistfully of the old days when they could take audiences on five-hour journeys through peaks and lows. Clubbers, meanwhile, increasingly resented the inflated ticket prices for name DJs who turned up five minutes before they were due on, and who played with no idea of the club’s vibe or what music had been played earlier in the evening, leading to the same handful of current ‘big tunes’ getting played again. Promoters were struggling with the huge fees and expenses demanded by celebrity DJs and their booking agencies. The result was a return to the idea of the residency, albeit in modified form: instead of the resident DJ as someone actually resident in the town in question, these were guest residencies, superstar DJs contractually bound to play a particular club on a regular basis. The most famous example was London-based Paul Oakenfold’s 42-week stint in 1997 at Cream in Liverpool. For Oakenfold, the Saturday-night residency provided both the comfort of routine and the opportunity to take risks: longer sets offered more space for breaking new tunes, while the residency meant a faithful audience prepared to go with the DJ’s flow.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 60