Cyrus McNally Cyrus is a fouth-year neuroscience student who currently spends his time synthesizing truth serums for the CIA. If you e-mail him at nougat@ucla.edu, he promises not to bite. Click Here for more articles by Cyrus McNally

Word. Today I want to take you on a trip through time – a brief tour through the early history of one of the most influential yet widely unrecognized arts of today.

With roots going back as early as the 1940s and branches sticking out into today’s fringes of post-modern experimentalism, the art of DJing has evolved multi-dimensionally: mixes between two cuts made into remixes, remixes into other remixes, remixes of remixes, etc.

Through the past half century or so, the profession of the “DJ,” or disc jockey if you’re not cool with the whole brevity thing, has gradually changed from customer service to artist: the turntable acting as paint brush, the vinyl as paint, and the speaker setup as canvas.

As sonic pioneer and turntable virtuoso DJ Q-Bert once described the growing acceptance of the artistry inherent in being a DJ, “A turntablist is like any other musician – its just playing a turntable ... But we’re at the kindergarten level right now. It’ll keep evolving.”

And why shouldn’t it? The turntable has several obvious advantages over any conventional instrument. It is also capable of reproducing the sounds of any instrument or arrangement of instruments that have ever been recorded on vinyl.

The warmth intrinsic to analog sound is now usually preferred over harsh digital reality in the average club or rave event, and is part of the reason why the turntable never became extinct, even though it came close when disco went out in the early-80s.

But prior to the ’70s – before Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, when Ecstasy was only used by lab rats, and even before the monolithic idea of hooking two turntables together – there was the early AM DJ, circa 1944, whose primitive technology consisted of a single record player (no slip mats) and whatever music had been pressed on the precious vinyl that was not already tied up in the war effort.

By 1950, the radio was gaining popularity and the demand for live music was taking a dive. The listener loyalty to radio had become so firmly established that the success of any record depended on the tastes of the DJ, or however much money the record company had pumped into the radio station to ensure it would get played. This practice, known as “payola” was squelched by a 1959 national investigation, although many radio station corporations have found ways to get around the word without actually using it.

Skipping a dozen years or so, we find ourselves in the early 1970s, swooping down over the West Bronx. Probably the first man to hook two turntables together (a process now standard to all DJs) was DJ Kool Herc. He had recently moved to New York from Jamaica, attempting to incorporate his Jamaican style of DJing with the soul and funk music present in the embryonic urban club scene of the time. Herc created not only the modern DJ prototype but possibly the first rap crew as well, with friends shouting ad-libbed rhymes over instrumental breaks. With Herc’s setup, it was now possible to mix two copies of the same record together to extend these breaks indefinitely, or for as long as the vibe of the crowd demanded.

In 1975, Herc moved into the recently opened Club Helvalo, where his parties became mandatory events for up-and-coming MCs, DJs and the original “B-Boys.” The more sophisticated DJing at clubs like Herc’s Helvalo, Larry Levan’s Garage and Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse (the original location to hear “house” music) influenced a whole generation of hip-hop artists, rappers and aspiring fellow DJ revolutionaries.

Interplanetary electro futurists like Afrika Bambaata (“Planet Rock”) and Grandmaster Flash (“The Message”) started out as DJs in the Bronx and became thundering hip-hop gods, developing novel ways to smooth the transition of the mix. Flash perfected the technique of building vocal phrases by switching between several records in a row, taking a word or two from each.

Even a few years before the release of the electro genre defining “Planet Rock” in 1982, Bambaata was already regarded as hip hop’s foremost DJ, combining the phat beats of hip hop with the industrialized synth-pop of Kraftwerk. His legacy inspired a whole string of more modern hip-hoppers known as the “Zulu Nation Collective,” which includes De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest, among others.

Though today’s hip-hop or turntablist DJ might be radically different from their early ’80s ancestor, the ethos of turntable as instrument remain the same.

As the gateways to more musical and stylistic possibilities are explored, such as improvised scratch solos, beat-box accompaniments and the use of more than two turntables simultaneously, the DJ garners more respect as an artist in its own right, and the evolution of technology in music reaches new heights.