In his new meditation on the turntable in ctheory, Seattle writer Charles Mudede calls upon Heidegger, Marx, Walter Benjamin, Afrofuturist David Goldberg, DJ Marley Marl, Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and, unfortunately, Tone Loc to shed light on the true essence of the turntable. Worth a read, as he goes miles beyond the typical turntablist refrain that “the turntable is an instrument!” Pullquote:
Real hip-hop does not sample real sounds, like the toilet flushing in Art of Noise’s “Close (To the Edit)” (1984), but samples copyrighted music. The hip-hop DJ does not shape raw sound into a form recognized as music, but shapes information into a sonic form recognized as meta-music.