Wyllys and The World Party: State of the Union Address Part I of III
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Artist:
I usually have some form of download for you guys; some up and coming mix by the crate digging souls of this great planet. However, I felt that a State of the Union address was important to this column moving forward. We’ve all heard the age old saying that in order to conquer the future, we must first understand our past. In this installment of Wyllys and The World Party, we will give a quick history lesson to educate a generation of people who missed the rave culture at its peak, then move into the present day dance culture to try and understand where the future of dance music is going. School is in session. Grab your Roor. Put on some Aphex Twin…
The story starts in The Bronx on a set of belt driven turntables next to a pile of old funk records. In 1972 Jamaican born DJ Kool Herc had the vision to take these records and isolate the “break” or drum section and mix two records together with an archaic stereo mixer that had a cross fader which was significantly different from the Disco style of mixing at the time, which would just cross fade between two tracks once the original track reached its end. He then took these breaks from the same two records and mixed the two together creating what we all know today to be Hip Hop and laid the base for Turntablism as an art form. Spoken word, or “rapping” quickly caught on fire over these breaks and the MC was born. Grandmaster Flash and Africa Bambatta were two of the first to cop Herc’s style and push the genre forward with great success. Not only were these DJs making history, they were giving the youth of the ghetto a ray of hope that maybe one day, they could MC or DJ and find a way out of the projects for good.
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Kool Herc’s style invented “mixing”, the centerpiece of dance culture for quite some time. This skill was not easy to do, especially back then. Any manipulation of vinyl on a belt driven system was incredibly hard to do with precision. Direct Drive turntables would become the norm some years after mixing was invented and the DJ culure would expand the world over. Everyone has an impression that DJ culture was a European thing. It became very popular in Europe and is much more widely celebrated there, that much is true. But the very core of the art form was born in the Bronx. HOLLAH!
Fast forward a few years to 1977 to the height of the Disco phenomenon. Studio 54 was all the rage but people needed other places to dance. Larry Levan got his start in the underground, well….underground, at the infamous Continental Baths beneath the Astonia Hotel in New York City. He then became the head resident at The Paradise Garage, where he would make the DJ the centerpiece of the entertainment, as opposed to the social entertainment aspect of “Disco”, where the music, while still important, was peripheral. Levan’s sets became things of legend, being name dropped on major NYC radio stations with some stations basing their playlists around Levan’s Homeric dance excursions. The Paradise Garage closed in 1987, but not before Levan became a world -wide phenomenon especially overseas. Levan, like he did at The Paradise Garage, designed the speakers for Ministry of Sound in Europe; one of the world’s most prestigious institutes of dance music. The Disco he began playing in the 70’s would develop into what we know as House music, but not in NYC. This story takes place in the heartland of this great nation. Representative of the Midwest…….Welcome to House 101! See you next week. Don’t forget your homework……..
Wyllys Homework Week 1:
Kool Herc Mix
Larry Levan
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