Kids Today…

I went to school at the University of California at Berkeley. This makes me an official geek. Go Bears!

Anyway, Berkeley has long had the reputation of being a school full of super smart kids and hippies. Sometimes the super smart kids are actually even hippies. Besides having world renowned professors, the university also has world renowned absurdity. This is brought up from time to time when they offer a small unit class on something like Tupac Shakur, or, currently, Radiohead. I don’t find those things absurd: the Naked Guy– that was pretty absurd, but not classes taught about cultural or pop influences. Time will tell if these courses are considered folly or groundbreaking.

Now our relatives on the east coast are disturbing not only the serious teaching community, but raising the ire of the classical music community as well. Berklee College of Music in Boston is teaching a turntablism class. This brings up the age old debate: is the turntable an instrument?

My opinion? Hell, yeah!

How long has hip hop been around now? Like 25 years? And scratching has been an instrumental part of its development. Find a good beat and a good rhythm, and it works. You don’t really need a band sometimes, just a great sample. I’m not talking that P.Diddy crap – where he basically takes the musical bed of one song and raps his own stuff on top of it. I’m talking about finding a really great bit of music, just about 3 seconds, maybe a little more, and messing with it – live, on a turntable – and creating a whole new collage or new version of the original track.

You can start with something everybody knows like Run DMC’s 1986 release “Walk This Way,” which had everyone bobbing to Aerosmith who got the wicky wicky wack treatment – to the masterful opus Brainfreeze from Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow, where they mixed two insanely groovy 20 minute sets out of a beautiful collection of soul 45s they’d gathered over the years. DJ Faust released an amazing record called Man or Myth in 1998 which, if I heard it in a club, could be played start to finish and I would be dancing the whole time. An awesome piece of cut and paste turntablism that just doesn’t stop, and I bet DJ Faust is sweaty and tired by the time he’s done doing it. That’s the stuff they’re teaching at Berklee.

So why should this be discounted as an instrument? You have to learn to play guitar, you have to learn to play piano, and you have to learn to play the turntable. Beat matching is a skill; it requires a trained ear or it results in a train wreck. Watching skilled turntablists (for me, anyway) is akin to watching a guitar player go nuts – they love it, they work it, and the joy is contagious.

I’m also really happy that turntables have kept a place in this world. The advent of CDs was a threat, but old purists like me enjoy vinyl too much, and the DJs really keep it alive.

When I worked in college radio, I trained the new DJs. It’s not very hard to teach people how to use the equipment involved in DJing, but I was shocked by the number of students I had who had never owned, much less played, vinyl. Later, I spent some time working in a record store and had one especially memorable question: “Do you guys have those… um… you know… they’re kinda big, like this (spreads hands apart), but like black CDs?” “Do you mean records?” “Oh, yeah! I guess.” I had other people ask about vinyl who had never dealt with it before – that’s just the best example I can remember.

So sure – teach about records in school! And what you can do with them on a turntable! There’s a lot of music out there to be heard and yet to be created. I’m not a musician, so I’m not going to come up with it, but I can’t wait to hear what’s next.