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April 22, 2006
A-Trak at UNC, April 2002
In 1997, during what might have been the peak of press hype about "turntablism", 15-year-old DJ A-Trak became the youngest DJ ever to win the DMC World Championship. These days, the 24-year-old turntable wizard tours the globe not as a battle DJ but as the official tour DJ for multiplatinum rapper Kanye West. As a matter of fact, A-Trak and Kanye are apparently rocking a coliseum in Wilmington as I type this. Over the next month, A-Trak will be going solo for awhile, touring in support of his newly released Sunglasses is a Must DVD. And that got me thinking back to a time many years ago when I had just moved back to Carrboro...
Exactly four years ago this weekend, A-Trak came to UNC-Chapel Hill as part of an event put on by the Carolina Electronic Music Symposium. Things got started in the Carolina Union with some workshops/talks. For his part, A-Trak got on the overhead projector and started explaining in great detail the written notation system that he had developed to describe scratching. Talk about takin' these muh-f*ckers back to school!! I certainly hadn't taken the prerequisites for this class (Flares and Crabs 101?), but it was fascinating to see someone put so much thought and analysis into the various noises that a scratch/battle DJ can make and the various ways that those sounds could be structured/organized in a composition.
Renowned bhangra DJ Rekha was also in the building, and after she spent some time discussing her experiences in the NYC bhangra scene, everyone adjourned outside for live DJ sets on the steps of the South Building (of all places!). A-Trak went first and tore it up. I'm not sure what everyone expected from a talented turntable virtuouso who had just finished explaining his own musical notation system, but our little stairstep party got rocked by way more than mere technical trickery. A-Trak used all sorts of records to keep the crowd excited, building one really memorable routine around current Missy and Jay-Z hits. "Come on the track like duh duh da-da!". With some pitch control thrown in to make Jay's singing more, uh, Steve Miller-like. The whole set was just ridiculously good. I stood on the top step with a huge grin on my face, taking lots of pictures and marvelling at the skills of this kid who wasn't even old enough to drink.
It doesn't look like I'll get to see A-Trak on this upcoming solo tour, so Sunglasses is a Must may actually have to be a must. In any case, I gotta say that I think A-Trak totally deserves all of the glitz-and-glamour success that he's been having and Kanye deserves some major credit for specifically choosing the kid to be his DJ instead of simply settling for whatever conventional choice (or DAT machine) the industry execs or tour managers offered up. As the AllHipHop.com interviewer suggests in this A-Trak feature, Kanye having A-Trak as his DJ seems like a bit of a throwback to the days when the biggest rappers often had the best DJs behind them. Here's hoping that A-Trak actually gets to put his own DJ routine somewhere towards the end of Kanye's third album!
Posted by Tim at April 22, 2006 08:42 PM