Music: Rock’s New Spin

Get out your old record player. It’s probably somewhere down there in the basement behind your broken-down Betamax, a Rubik’s Cube or two, and a vinyl copy of Synchronicity. Cue up a record, and let it play. Congratulations–you’re a musician. There may even be a spot for you on the rap-rock Family Values Tour.

Disc jockeys, of course, have been around for decades. In the 1970s hip-hop founding fathers Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash helped turn record spinning into an art. And rock acts–Aerosmith, R.E.M. and others–have long sought to bottle the lightning of hip-hop by collaborating with rappers. Today, though, something new is happening: more rock groups–from Limp Bizkit to Sugar Ray–are making deejays fully fledged members, on equal footing with the guitarist and drummer. A couple of years ago, being a deejay in a rock band was maybe the equivalent of being the backup vocalist-designated tambourine player: sure, you were with the band, but groupies weren’t exactly asking you to sign their chests. Now deejays are core members.

When DJ Lethal joined Limp Bizkit a few months before the band recorded its debut album, he changed its sound. “It was more of a punk band–it had a punk edge,” says Lethal, a Latvian emigre who had been a member of the Irish-American hip-hop band House of Pain. “What I brought in was more of a hip-hop side.” He is working on a solo album.

DJ Homicide was working as a hip-hop radio deejay in Los Angeles before he joined the pop-rock band Sugar Ray in 1994. At first he was a mere sideman–on the band’s 1995 album Lemonade and Brownies; he’s not even in the group photo on the back cover. Then again, the picture is a supremely geeky shot of the band riding on a roller coaster, so maybe being left out was a blessing in disguise. In any case, Homicide says, today he’s “cut in on publishing and merchandising, and I’m a full-fledged member.” He’s still figuring out, though, how to convey the full range of what he does in the band’s music videos. Sometimes he just waves around a pair of records. “You are not going to see me programming a drum machine in a video,” says Homicide. “It just doesn’t look cool.”

Even some established musicians are taking up the craft. Three years ago, Ben Watt, of the pop group Everything But the Girl, put down his guitar and bought a pair of turntables. “I got tired of playing the guitar–it’s simple as that,” says Watt, who now does a weekly deejay stint at a London club and whose scratching is featured on Everything But the Girl’s new CD Temperamental. “For the moment, working on my deejay skills seems like an interesting area to explore.”

There are two schools of thought about the deejay-rock boom. The first school holds that deejays in rock bands are part of a new multidimensional wave of artists who, instead of composing with just notes, compose with whole chunks of songs. The second school of thought holds that people in the first school are what’s wrong with education today. Says Jim Tremayne, editor of DJ Times: “It seems to me some rock bands are just trying to cultivate an air of coolness with the kids.”

Multi-instrumentalist Moby, whose new album Play (V2) is heavily sample-based, is skeptical about the idea that deejays will ever be regarded as true artists. “I think being a deejay is a creative act, but I have a hard time seeing it as a musical act,” says Moby, who worked as a deejay for about eight years and recently deejayed at the MTV Video Music Awards. “I see a good deejay as being a really amazing technician as opposed to a being a musician.” Still, a good deejay can be a canny promoter. At the MTV awards, Moby says, “90% of the records I played were my own.”

Homicide, however, disagrees. He says he is “usually the foundation” for most of the songs Sugar Ray writes. He finds a good beat, a cool sample, and lyrics and melody are layered on from there. With his arsenal of records and drum machines, Homicide says he’s able to reproduce a wide range of sounds, from guitar strumming to percussion. “I could be anyone in a band,” says Homicide. “It helps out live and opens up doors creatively.”

There are also those who question whether deejay culture is being homogenized by merging with rock. DJ Premier has been busy of late: he collaborated with Limp Bizkit, he provided scratching on Lilith Fair veteran Paula Cole’s new album and he worked on rapper Mos Def’s brilliant new CD, Black on Both Sides (Rawkus). It’s a sign of how divided feelings are that, on his album, Mos Def takes a lyrical swipe at hip-hop tinged rock-pop acts, including one his producer DJ Premier worked with, Limp Bizkit. “I ain’t tryin’ to slow your groove,” Mos Def raps about Limp Bizkit’s music. “But that ain’t the way I’m tryin’ to move.”

In Europe, deejay culture is more widely accepted. Bands like Roni Size’s Breakbeat Era–whose new album, Ultra-Obscene (XL/ 1500/A&M), is a winner–and Portishead–whose 1994 album, Dummy, is a classic–build their sound around the turntable. But in the U.S., turntable rock is just starting to have a real impact.

What effect it will ultimately have on rock is still unfolding. A passage in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five describes a race of aliens who have transcended time. Past, present and future exist all at once for them. These aliens “look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.”

Deejays bring the same feeling to rock. By sampling from various genres and eras, they make the past the present and vice versa; they turn rock into hip-hop and back again, throwing everything into the mix, making boundaries illusory. Lethal, for example, has 60,000 LPs in his collection, from different decades and different genres. DJ Skribble, who has performed with the hard-rock band Anthrax and who is the co-host of mtv’s Global Groove dance show, says, “People are now into groups and artists and not specific genres of music. Deejays are making music less segregated.” Not to mention giving hope to people who can’t play guitar.