STEINSKI
Fergus Murphy on Steinski / Illustration Max
Enter the teleport! It’s back in the day, as they used to say; New York 1983 and the pioneering hip hop label Tommy Boy Records needs to get some movement on one of their new releases. The tune is “Play that beat (Mr. DJ)” by G.L.O.B.E and Whiz Kid, and they decide to have a remix competition. Destiny draws a line across town connecting with a pair of music nuts who do clubs like religion. Douglas di Franco, a successful audio engineer, and Steve Stein, a Dj and record collector are hooked on records. They spend week in week out at The Roxy where the true school expansive foundation of hip hop is being laid out nightly by Djs like Africa Bambaata and Jazzy Jay.At this time Studio 54 and its infamous disco excesses were still going strong. The Roxy was different however. The Roxy was very very big; as a former bus depot it had to be big enough to drive a bus in and turn it around without backing up. Steinski recalls some other distinct differences.
“Studio 54 was a refuge for obnoxious people with a lot of money who thought what you looked like and what you did for a living was probably the most important thing you do on earth. One of their door policies at studio 54 was to have large groups of people begging to get in, and they thought that this was just the greatest thing. Of course it was very demeaning and horrible whereas at the Roxy everyone got in. Absolutely everyone who waited on line got in. At the Roxy they frisked you, gave a full body search, and you had to open your mouth and your bag.Most of the time it was fun but there were times when I was standing behind people and the search would yield up a knife or a gun or a bottle of liquor and they would just take it away and give the person a claim check so they can get it back after the gig. This would absolutely not happen today. Absolutely not, but it was rather thrilling and I used to take any of the women I was going out with there as a kind of a test for ‘Ok, can you hang? Can you get through a full body search?’ It was a very interesting dating ritual on my part.”
Around this time a friend tells Douglas and Steve about the Tommy Boy remix competition. They decide to enter. Using his skills as a commercial audio engineer Douglas (soon to be know as Double D!) di Franco cut and spliced tape with magic precision while Steve (soon to be Steinski!) Stein supplied records, beats, sounds, samples and ideas. It was pure and simple craftsmanship, pushing buttons, cutting tape, recording to 8 track tape flying in stuff from turntables and two track tape recordings. As you guessed, by now they were the runaway winners of the competition turning G.L.O.B.E and Whizkid “Play that Beat (Mr. Dj)” into “Lesson1: The Payoff Mix”.Cut cut snip.Within days radio had it playlisted on rotation and within weeks radio station air check tapes were trading for serious money on the streets of London and New York.
The buzz was on.Double Dee and Steinski had double handedly elevated the notion of the mastermix to new dexterous levels with humour, groove and a distinct pop sensibility. With over 24 different samples in the remix the Tommy Boy lawyers soon made clear it was never going to be an option to release it commercially.Undeterred they followed it up with “Lesson 2: the James Brown mix”, and “Lesson 3: the History of Hip Hop”, creating a sample heavy canon of lessons that set a new standard of coherence for the mastermix.Think of Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Dada or the Fluxus art movement. Think of things appropriated, in this case sounds, taken out of one context and made a coherent point or counterpoint of a new composition. This is big stuff in the world of avant garde music and art. They love the notion of the “altered piece”. When it comes to pop culture things get trickier.When Steinski and Double Dee went their separate ways and Steinski moved out of the consultant backseat role into a more direct, hands on position getting to grips with the new digital processes of Pro Tools himself and chopping to his hearts content to create what he calls “a blanket of me” on the project ‘Mass Media’. His most famous piece “The Motorcade Sped On” is a dark deliberation on the Kennedy assassination and features the distinctive voice of one Walter Cronkite. Walter Cronkite is an iconic figure of American radio, a part and parcel of the very texture of contemporary America.
The owners of the rights to Cronkite’s voice and legacy, in this case CBS, certainly did not want his voice used for a sound collage with political overtones. The piece was destined for illegality and criminality.In many ways Double Dee and Steinski’s very first mixes for that Tommy Boy competition raised the bar on Copyright.Steinski famously said he “agrees with copyright in theory but not in practice” and has always been very vocal about copyright criminality and the right to copy, to engage with popular culture.The appropriation of sounds and samples is a very modern engagement with popular culture and pop music.In the United States now copyright law is changing. It used to be that rights were granted for the life of the person plus twenty years. Now it’s the life of the person plus eighty years. Copyright just keeps getting extended.” The implications of this are not lost on Steinski.
“The idea that one cannot use and borrow pieces of previous culture is something new and different in the development of mankind and basically awful. Because you know… Corporations controlling how the culture grows. This is not a good idea. Corporations do not have anyone’s or cultures best interests at heart. All you need to do is look at things like pollution and any number of other things to understand that they don’t give a shit.”
“Almost all art work is derivative. There is no such thing as a completely new work of art. Even Mickey Mouse is based on previous characters. It’s a function of culture to look back and take what its sees looking back and move forward with it. What’s happening now in the US is that looking back is being erased.”
Parts of this story are based on an interview conducted by the author with Steinski on behalf of the redbullmusicacademy info session in Paris 2006
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