Turntablism on the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary is defined as “the art of changing and mixing recordings to make new sounds, by touching and moving the records on a turntable.” It is known for its popular baby scratch technique for moving the disc back and forth to create a mixed synth noise. Although very popular with various techniques created, turntables are fairly new instruments introduced into the last two decades. . The knowledge of modification to the turntables along with hip-hop culture is necessary to understand the subcultural art of turntablism.
To familiarize yourself with exactly what turntablism is, the turntables are originally derived from the invention of the phonograph in 1877 and are progressively improving since its establishment. Thomas Edison, a famous scientist, created the phonograph, an innovation which could essentially play sounds. Edison’s motive was to simplify relaying messages and daily activities. Although another invention had been conceived in France, Edison’s invention was entirely original. In 1881 Emile Berliner, a German scientist, created the gramophone which had better quality than the phonograph and played rubber discs. This replaced the use of cylinders and was optimized for multiple plays unlike the phonograph. The discs were mass produced and easier to create, and its popularity (which hadn’t sprouted until the 1950’s) spread like wildfire. “Emile Berliner not only revolutionized the playback of pre-recorded material, but would go on to create the recording industry.”(Newman) Their inventions made record playback possible and Emile made it easier by simplifying the usage of records. The simplification of distribution made innovation and creation easier to culturally progress; subsequently more people will have easily accessed this technology.
Furthermore, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, Kool DJ Herc, Herbie
In his essay Murray Forman, Represent: Race, Space, And Place in Rap Music. Forman talk about how rap music went from national to regional and locally. He argued that territories were claimed through the ongoing cultural practices that occurred within their bounds and were reinforced by the circulation of those who recognized and accepted their perimeters (Forman 196). He further explained how early DJ sound systems featured a series of practices that linked the music to other mobile practices, such as graffiti art and tagging that only way they were able to construct place based identities.
Web. 15 Feb. 2014. <http://www.sciencetech.technomuses.ca/english/collection/disk_play.cfm>. Edie, Paul C. "History of the Victor Phonograph." The Victor-Victrola Page.
Since the decade of 1920, America has been the setting for a progressive "Black Arts Movement." This African-American cultural movement has taken shape in various genres, gaining mass appeal, through multiple capitalistic markets. Even with the use of capitalism this cultural arts movement has stayed set upon its original purpose and direction, by aiding in cultural identity awareness. The knowledge of the duel-self through community awareness as it pertains to economic perceptions and other social boundaries or the metaphysical-self; what W.E.B. Du Bois coined as "twoness," or a division of one’s own identity as a African-American. (Reuben 2) A realization of the existence of two beings within one’s mental identity, where time alters attitude and identity through environmental influence of passing events. The discovery of the "New Negro" in the Harlem Renaissance marks the beginning of this essential philosophy contributing to the 1960’s Black Arts Movement and the Civil Rights Movement; continuing to be evident in current forms of black art, such as within the lyrics of hip-hop music. These revolutionary Ideals of reform have been voiced in the lyrics of many rappers of urban realism, like the New York M.C.’s Rakim, Run-D.M.C. and west coast rapper Tupac Shakur. Though this form of expression is opposed by most academic elitists and fundamental conservatives due to their vulgar expressions of sex and violence depicted within the genre of Hip-Hop; it in opposition actually presents an internal cultural conflict revealed through the redefinition of one’s own identity with poetic lyrical expressions of realism.
Hip-hop music is a popular type of music admired highly across the globe for its famous style, art and mode of expression. This highly admired music genre can include love, broken families, racism, hard times, sexism and adversity as its main theme. It has the power of evoking a different kind of mirth and sentiment in you. When it is sung at its full peach with a DJ, the listeners become ecstatic. If you are music lover or fond of pop song, you are sure to reach a different kind of state- a state of forgetfulness that is far ahead of the common ebullience of life and rustic mirth.
In the words of rapper Busta Rhymes, “hip-hop reflects the truth, and the problem is that hip-hop exposes a lot of the negative truth that society tries to conceal. It’s a platform where we could offer information, but it’s also an escape” Hip-hop is a culture that emerged from the Bronx, New York, during the early 1970s. Hip-Hop was a result of African American and Latino youth redirecting their hardships brought by marginalization from society to creativity in the forms of MCing, DJing, aerosol art, and breakdancing. Hip-hop serves as a vehicle for empowerment while transcending borders, skin color, and age. However, the paper will focus on hip-hop from the Chican@-Latin@ population in the United States. In the face of oppression, the Chican@-Latin@ population utilized hip hop music as a means to voice the community’s various issues, desires, and in the process empower its people.
From its conception, hip hop has been branded as music for uneducated street hoods. But, the debut album of the obscure group, Midnight Voices, shatters this stereotype with its thought-provoking commentary on the Black experience in urban America. Featuring saxophone, keyboards, guitar, bass, and percussion, along with the scratches and cuts typically found in rap, Midnight Voices delivers its urgent message of racial injustice with its equally impressive music. The group merges the styles of hip hop and funk to create a refreshing alternative to mainstream rap, which is often characterized by the repetitive sample of beats. In doing so, the band effectively expresses the lyrical content of the songs through its music, and succeeds in creating a complementary blend of provocative lyrics and musical ingenuity.
Rap music became popularized in Atlanta and the rest of the South in the early to mid-1980s. The first rap to come out of the city of Atlanta was uptempo party music with heavy bass and very obvious Florida influence. Hits like “Whoomp! (There It Is)” by Tag Team, and “Jump” by Kriss Kross defined the pre-Outkast era of Atlanta hip-hop. While these songs were immensely popular (“Whoomp!” is ranked by Billboard as one of the greatest songs of all time (“Greatest of All Time”) while “Jump” was one of the top 3 selling songs of 1992 (“Week Ending May”), groups from the city, for the most part, were commonly seen as “novelty” and “kiddie crews” (“Kriss Kross: Da Bomb”). While the emergence of relatively simple but enjoyable music was going on in Atlanta, rap as a whole began to truly explode. The newest major music genre entered its golden era; “Ready to Die” by Biggie Smalls, “Illmatic” by Nas, and “Me Against The World” by 2Pac were all albums that were rated “five mics” by The Source (“5 Mics?”) The “five mic” rating from The Source indicated an exceptional and rare hip-hop album. In this time of growth in hip-hop culture Atlanta, and the South as a whole was in large part left out. People were enthralled by cross country feuds between rap superstars; but just when it seemed like there was no space at the time for rap from anywhere but New York or California, the duo of Andre “3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton, better known as Outkast single-handedly redefined rap music. Andre 3000 played an instrumental role in defining not just rap, but music as a whole in the 1990s and 2000s. His presence transitioned Southern rap from being viewed as nothing more than exciting, throw away party music to music that could be timeless an...
Hip-Hop is a cultural movement that emerged from the dilapidated South Bronx, New York in the early 1970’s. The area’s mostly African American and Puerto Rican residents originated this uniquely American musical genre and culture that over the past four decades has developed into a global sensation impacting the formation of youth culture around the world. The South Bronx was a whirlpool of political, social, and economic upheaval in the years leading up to the inception of Hip-Hop. The early part of the 1970’s found many African American and Hispanic communities desperately seeking relief from the poverty, drug, and crime epidemics engulfing the gang dominated neighborhoods. Hip-Hop proved to be successful as both a creative outlet for expressing the struggles of life amidst the prevailing crime and violence as well as an enjoyable and cheap form of recreation.
Have you ever wondered how a record player works? Probably not. After all, who still listens to records? Surprisingly enough, turntables are making a come back. With the recent surge of interest in hip hop music, popular attention has been turned towards the turntable, used by DJs to provide beats, loops and scratching for virtually all of today's hip hop groups.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” It is not a mystery that minorities were oppressed throughout the history of the United States. In 1990 70% of African Americans and Hispanics in their mid to late twenties held a high school diploma or higher compared to the 86% that their white counterparts achieved. The disparities were obvious throughout the decade. The hip-hop culture gave minorities a voice and a realm to express themselves. There were always minorities who experienced the same lives as the majority of America did, but hip hop mainly spoke to those minorities in urban neighborhoods who were entrapped by violence and negativity. Most of these minorities were young people who were reaching the peak of their adolescent years. Their attitudes could be seen in the lyrics of Notorious B.I.G. when he chants, “I don’t want to live no more. Sometimes I hear death knocking at my front door,” in the song “Everyday Struggle.” Without hip-hop music I believe there would be more minority violence because this was the only genre of music that spoke specifically to minorities, especially those in the inner cities. Hip hop was monumental because it did not apply to one group of minorities; every aspect of the minority population was represented by artists who presented different lyrical content and cultural messages. The genre also gave those who were not minorities a look into the insight of those who were being oppressed, ultimately creating some form of understanding. The majority population could never fully understand the minority population because they never would have the opportunity to experience ...
Hip hop has multiple branches of style and is a culture of these. This essay will examine Hip Hop from the point of view of the following three popular music scholars, Johnson, Jeffries and Smitherman. It will delve deeper into their understanding of what hip hop is and its relation to the different people that identify with its message and contents. It will also identify the history of Hip hop and its transition into popular music. In particular this essay will focus on what hip hop represents in the black community and how it can be used as a social movement against inequalities faced by them. This will then open up the discussion for the how this has influenced society, and the impact it has had in terms of race issues which hip hop itself often represents through music.
Music is one of the most powerful and influential language which to many people in
Edison decided to change the idea by using a tin foil wrapped metal cylinder instead of the paper. The final cylinder phonograph had 2 diaphragm and needle units. One would be for recording date and the other would be for playing it. For the machine to work, one would have to speak into a mouthpiece and the sound vibrations would be imprinted on the cylinder. Then the recording needle would create some sort of groove pattern on the cylinder. The data can then played by back by the data from the created grooves.
In today’s modern world the DJ has become a musician; the turntable, his instrument. It took fifteen years for this amazing resolution. DJ's have actually been around for years; mixing and scratching however, it did not come along until the late 70's or early 80's (“Disc Jockey 1”). A lot of people were doing this. But the main front line man was and still is Granmasterflash. Granmasterflash, one of hip-hop's founding fathers and the creator of the Quick Mix. He was the first person to change the arrangements of songs by using duplicate copies of records and manually editing/repeating the climatic part by rubbing the record back and forth (“Grandmaster Flash”). But now the DJ has changed. The kinds of DJ’s are different, the equipment is different, and the scratching is different.
” In 1930, RCA Victor launched the first commercially-available vinyl long-playing record” (About Vinyl Records 2). Vinyl records are round plastic discs that have about a 12-inch diameter. To listen to a vinyl record, you have to place it on a record player, which was invented in 1877. The record player was introduced by Thomas Edison and is a more updated and improved version of ...