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If you thought hip-hop was all about the effeminate rapping of Fred
Durst or the posturing gangsta bullshit of every other big rap
talent that can rhyme "air" and "care," you
need to haul your ass down to the Little Theatre and catch Doug
Pray's Scratch,
a wickedly cool, no-frills documentary that charts the
popularity of DJing over the last 30 years. No, not the
phony-voiced "deejays" you hear on commercial radio,
but DJs – the people with the fader, two turntables, and the
wicka-wicka-wicka.
Pray,
who also deftly documented the rise and fall of Seattle's grunge
scene in Hype!,
tackles his subject here in a similar fashion. And Scratch
nearly follows the same trajectory, as well. After reaching a
glorious crescendo in the mid-'80s (with Breakin'
2: Electric Bugaloo, I think), it seemed like DJing and the
other three arms of hip-hop culture (MCing, breakdancing and
graffiti) would go the way of the Atari 2600 as America
collectively returned to listening to Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen.
Scratch shows us that
the spinning and scratching never really stopped.
Pray
introduces us to about a dozen DJs, ranging from the old and
generally unknown (GrandWizzard Theodore, Jazzy Jay, GrandMixer
DXT) to people you may have actually heard of (Qbert, DJ Shadow,
Mix Master Mike). The subjects who weren't there in the
beginning all point to DXT's Grammy performance with Herbie
Hancock (remember "Rock It"?) as the defining event in
their lives, which seem to be comprised solely of a love of
music and a bizarre infatuation with outer space. We hear them
all talk about how they got started and how they were
influenced, and, most importantly, we get to see them in action.
Be prepared to pick your jaw off the floor, because some of
these scenes look like they were sped up for dramatic effect
(but they weren't).
Pray
also clears up a common misconception – DJing isn't all about
cribbing entire songs from Sting or Buffalo Springfield. It's
about finding the "break" in a song (i.e., the good
part – the one that lasts for two or three seconds) and using
it to create something new. There's a scene in Scratch
where one of the DJs manipulates a Robert Johnson song into a
very un-Robert-Johnson-sounding concoction. And when was the
last time you shopped for records? In Scratch, we accompany actual DJs to actual record stores and watch
as they hunt through actual stacks of dusty vinyl for that one
"break" that could make their next performance at a
competition.
This
doc reminded me a lot of Dogtown
& Z-Boys, which beat Scratch
in the documentary competition at the Independent Spirit Awards.
Both are among 2002’s best. Each focuses on the history of a
very specific section of the entertainment community about which
many know very little. And both films give props to significant
people who seem fairly content to sit back and watch the new
generation make piles and piles of dough while they scrape by.
You don't need to be a hip-hop fan to appreciate Scratch
(though if you downright hate that style of music, the film
might be a tad much), and that's the mark of a documentary that
works.
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