“It’s just not true though”: John Paul Jones and the sacred art of DJing
It’s a stubborn sniffiness that still won’t budge to this day. Among the stuffier end of rock purists and mothballed musos, the sampling and turntable bedrock of modern hip-hop is somehow seen as a lesser art than the traditional routes of learning a conventional instrument. Never mind the emerging software technology that has yielded a generation of digital electronic artists to conjure meticulous crunches of glitchy etherea, for many, sampling is merely a cheap and underhanded form of artistic theft that doesn’t warrant respect.
Just as blood pressures were rising from the discourse around synthesisers being the supposed shortcut for non-musicans to hit the charts, in came hip-hop to royally rub the rockists the wrong way. A working-class creative movement that took MCing and instrumental breakbeat turntablism to a new variant of disco, the evolving digital sampler technology heralded by the arrival of the E-mu SP-1200 and the Akai MPC opened up a new universe for budding beatmakers and new school hip-hop groups to raid their funk and soul collections for new interpretations of old hits and deep dives.
Rooted in the South Bronx block parties following DJ Kool Herc’s pioneering deck dexterity, the mastery of the scratching technique and lightning-fast mixing skills demanded a completely new understanding of music and how different components work and play off each other. Further perfected by New York’s Grandmaster Flash, it took Double Dee and Steinski’s ‘Lesson’ series of mixes to pave the way for how densely and intelligently packed sampling could be, lighting the way for the Bomb Squad’s collage productions for Public Enemy’s classic LPs.
Notwithstanding the bad blood, one big name in rock has always been a passionate defender of the aptitude lying at the heart of new technologies. Perhaps owing to his voluminous history as a session artist and arranger for hundreds of acts before lending his bass and keys to stadium behemoth Led Zeppelin, John Paul Jones is armed with a fierce understanding of music’s diverse and eclectic scope of practice and expertise.
Jones ranted to Classic Rock in 2010, “…saying that people aren’t as [musically] adept because they use samplers or turntables… People say, ‘Oh, they’re not real musicians’. Oh yeah? Well, here’s a turntable and a sampler—go and make a fucking killer record! It’s different skills, that’s all. You’ve still got to have it all up there [taps head], to know what sounds good and how to put it all together. It’s just that you don’t necessarily do it by playing guitar.”
For the committed naysayers, there’s just no recognition of the hours of practice poured into a sampler or DJing a pair of decks, and no appreciation for the meticulous focus on the sonic components Dr Dre or RZA would obsess over with fastidious love and deep engagement. The new school wave of beat makers and beyond are artists who learnt their craft and instrumentation as studiously as Jones did his bass or Jimmy Page his guitar.
Forged in hip-hop and beyond into dance’s grand cosmos, DJing is indeed a sacred art that demands focus and is a unique art form in music culture. From the beat match to the manipulation of samples, it has inspired a slew of wannabes but only heralded a handful of greats, just like any other strand of popular music.
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