© Jean Christian Bourcart/Rapho, Paris
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DJ democracy:
made in Japan
In the past decade, computer-operated musical
devices have been replacing the human musician, while hard-drives and portable digital
recording gear are making tape-based recordings obsolete. These increasingly affordable
digital tools are reaching a new breed of musicians who previously had little or
no chance of breaking into the mainstream music industry. With Japanese companies
like Akai, Roland and Yamaha churning out the latest in DJ gadgetry, there is no
better place to witness the revolutionary changes in digital music than Tokyo.
The “Made in Japan” label, which was hitherto seen only engraved on the back of these
electronic instruments, is now proving to be a marketable cultural export product
as well. In fact, Japan is enjoying a sort of pop-culture renaissance as DJs like
Ken Ishii, Tsuyoshi, Fumiya Tanaka and DJ Krush find success in the European and
American music markets.
Ken Ishii, 30, is the most famous of these rising stars. About ten years ago, Ishii
sent a demo tape to the Belgian techno label R&S, which immediately signed him
on with a contract, not only shining an international spotlight on the young maestro
but also enabling him to gain recognition in his own country for the first time.
However, Ishii’s now blossoming career (currently fuelled by the powerful marketing
muscle of Sony Records in Japan) represents only one side of the cyberpunk artist-turned-Cinderella
story.
In the quiet urban sprawl of Tokyo’s Komaba district, Kisei Irie, 28, and Takashi
Saito, 24, are trying to follow in the footsteps of their rising techno gods. In
Irie’s one-bedroom apartment, the duo are cranking out a fervent mix of techno grooves
under the name A/F+BAD KARMA. These two bedroom DJs cashed in years’ worth of savings
(about $2,000) to press 300 vinyl copies of their four new tracks at a Czech record
plant.
But producing the music is only one step in the struggle. Distribution is a veritable
battle as the growing number of “bedroom DJs” compete to get local record stores
to purchase and display their vinyl creations. “Sure Japan has profitable stars like
Ishii, but that doesn’t mean the industry, record stores or clubs are trying to cultivate
new talent,” says Irie. “Guys like us have to start at the bottom.”
Meanwhile, the skyrocketing number of DJs has yet to trigger an explosion in creativity.
“Everybody sounds the same,” says Zatiochi Nakano, 35, a studio engineer and digital
instrument expert. “But that’s the case everywhere because kids want to create ‘cool’
sounds to please as wide an audience as possible.” For Nakano, the new digital instruments
are revolutionary because they allow the musically untrained to create their own
material. However, the personal pleasures of creativity should not be confused with
talent. As Nakano concludes, “Good music requires good creators and that’s as old
as the hills.”
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The rise of the disc jockey
from record-spinner to music producer begins in the historical world capital of disco,
New York City
 Disc
jockeys have been spinning records for decades. But when in the 30-year history of
electronic dance music did they rise to become highly influential cultural icons?
Not only have club DJs become gatekeepers within local music industries; some are
now cast as highly paid musical ambassadors, traveling around the globe to spread
the latest musical trends.
Is this because club DJs know best how to cast a spell on a dancefloor, how to “work”
a record in a way that makes it seem at once familiar and excitingly new, how to
bring a crowd to a peak not just once during an evening, but several times? Or is
it simply because DJs are finally being paid handsomely and enjoying the celebrity
status that comes with money and media exposure?
The answer probably is “all of the above” or “somewhere in the middle.” The place
to go looking for the roots of DJ culture are the urban centres long known as hotbeds
of musical creativity. Places like New York City. Even a brief history of club deejaying
must begin here, in the pre-disco era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the crossroads
of African American expressive culture and collectively realized gay sensibilities
which together form the core of contemporary social dance culture.
Dance music culture, whether associated with disco, club, or house music, has its
roots in the Big Apple. New York became the disco capital of the world by the mid-1970s,
thanks to a vibrant underground dance culture with local African American and Latino
gay men at the helm. The city’s legendary discotheques, such as Sanctuary, The Loft,
Better Days, Paradise Garage, among others, emerged from the fusion of three distinct
types of social dance environments prevalent in the 1960s, which featured recorded
music with or without a DJ. The first precursor was based on the French discotheque,
exemplified in Manhattan by exclusive establishments such as Le Club, and later Arthur
and Cheetah. Their design and clientele reflected the post-war idea of a disco as
an exclusive watering hole for a jet-set clientele.
This elitest conception changed, however, in the late 1960s and early 70s as the
discotheque absorbed the social changes transforming American society at large. Most
importantly, young urbanites—particularly ethnic minorities, women and gays—who had
been (or felt) pushed to the margins of American society, became increasingly vocal.
These groups included anti-establishment pre-Woodstock hippies, struggling poets,
musicians, actors, and other artists, as well as a mix of working-class Caucasians,
African Americans and Latinos. Though they did mingle to some extent, they tended
to frequent separate dance establishments, based mainly on their sexual orientation.
Heterosexual crowds gathered at clubs like Electric Circus or Zodiac, where DJs played
an eclectic repertoire of rock, rhythm & blues (R&B) and early forms of what
is now marketed as world music. In contrast, young gay men and women socialised at
neighbourhood clubs or bars, either legal or unlicensed, generally in ethnically
homogeneous areas like Harlem, the Hispanic barrios of Harlem or the Upper West Side.
While the music pumped from either a juke box or a DJ set, older men (sometimes in
drag) often acted as initiators and at times protectors of younger gays into “the
Life” (a socially and sexually active, yet often secret, life). Some of these local
gay bars were regularly raided by police, a practice which ended with the legendary
Stonewall Riots of Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969. There, for the first time,
gays fought police harassment collectively and successfully, to the extent that after
Stonewall, many lesbians and gays began to see social dancing not simply as a pastime
but also as a powerful means of building a sense of communal identity.
While the first gay disco in New York State was probably in Cherry Grove on Fire
Island, the first urban venue that made disco notorious, forbidden, and attractive
all at once was the Sanctuary on Manhattan’s West 43rd Street, which in 1970 became
the model for later underground gay discos. The Sanctuary also gave birth to the
first club DJ as pop star. Dancers and groupies alike flocked to see and hear DJ
Francis (Grasso), who had mastered a new instrument, consisting of two turntables
and a mixer, and a new stage: the DJ booth with its controls of sound and light to
fire non-stop, wall-to-wall dancing on the adjacent floor.
By 1973, national magazines such as Billboard and Rolling Stone and NYC radio stations
began featuring “disco” hits and programmes. Fans who couldn’t hear enough of the
music on the radio and in clubs began buying records in numbers that forced recording
companies to pay attention to music they’d been ignoring. Like their forebears on
radio in the 1950s, club DJs became influential enough to “break” or introduce new
records to the public. This rising status enabled them to have direct input into
the records themselves. For example, New York DJ David Todd introduced R&B producer
Van McCoy to a Latin dance called the Hustle, leading to the production of an eponymous
record which became a big hit for McCoy while Todd went on to develop the disco department
at a major company, RCA Records.
Fighting
off “the death of vinyl”
Between 1975
and 1985, the lines between studio producers, engineers, songwriters and DJs became
increasingly fuzzy. Instead of just spinning records at clubs, DJs ventured into
the recording studios, bringing the same workplace concepts and techniques of mixing
music, creating new sounds and re-mixing songs. As remixers, they used the technological
tools in ways their designers never dreamed of. For example, a simple synthesizer/sequencer,
the Roland TB-303, marketed in 1983 for rock musicians looking to emulate a bass
guitar, became the staple of the acid house sound. DJs didn’t just use the little
box but “played” its pitch, accent, resonance and frequency controls, similar to
the way they “played” records. By adding sequencers and drum machines, they not only
increased and diversified their own club repertoires, but produced new tracks and
versions to be sold to the public. In the process, disco became house music.
Many lesbians and gays
began to see social dancing
not simply as a pastime
but also as a powerful means
of building a sense
of communal identity. |
As this transfer of technologies
and aesthetics between the recording studio and the DJ booth increased, so did dance
music’s profitability. Since the rise of tapes and compact discs, DJs have been the
main economic force in fighting off the “death of vinyl” (records). The main institutions
of the dance music industry—the independent label, the record pool (companies distributing
promotional records to DJs who in return issue feedback sheets), the underground
club, the specialty retail store—tend to be staffed by DJs who base their activities
on an ever-expanding concept of their art and skills as musicians and performers.
The increase in status from record-spinner to remixer and record producer has transformed
the club DJ from cult figure to cultural icon. Dance music is now a global phenomenon,
traveling with a set of DJs who have spun their own version of the worldwide web:
the “Internet of dance music” is made up of axes linking local dance cultures.
For New York DJs, the first major axis ran through other U.S. cities with vibrant
or emerging local dance cultures. From New York, Danny Tenaglia moved to Miami where
he spent his formative years as a DJ before returning to Manhattan where he is now
one of the most in-demand remixers (creating new versions of old tracks by other
artists). Another New York DJ, Frankie Knuckles, moved to Chicago, following an invitation
to become the resident DJ at the Warehouse, a gay black club. Noteworthy is that
both Tenaglia and Knuckles continuously traveled back and forth to New York, bringing
back new sounds while stocking up on local records. They also have since returned
to the Big Apple to live and work as DJs and remixers.
New
tradewinds
The second
axis leads across the Atlantic, from Chicago through New York to London. Around 1986/7,
after the initial buzz surrounding house music in Chicago, it became clear that the
major recording companies and media institutions were reluctant to market this music,
associated with gay African Americans, on a mainstream level. House artists turned
to Europe, chiefly London but also cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Manchester,
Milan, Zurich, and Tel Aviv. The rest is the history of what became rave culture,
a European youth dance phenomenon which is still going strong.
A third axis leads to Japan where, since the late 1980s, New York club DJs have had
the opportunity to play guest-spots to audiences who are as much removed geographically
and culturally from African\American and gay sensibilities as are their European
counterparts. Still, local dance cultures formed and continue to expand in Tokyo
and other major Japanese cities. At the turn of the millennium, the tradewinds of
the DJ are reaching new destinations, like Sao Paolo, Mexico City and African capitals
like Dar Es Salaam. There, a new generation is enriching a tradition which so far
has no textbook or manual, nor has it received comprehensive documentation. Rather,
it is carried forth orally, by DJs who learned from those who came before them. Keep
on!
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