Today I went to a female DJ workshop taught by DJ EarthOne and DJ Soyo. Even though I’ve come across DJ’s in the past, it still is amazing how much DJ’s impact music and yet are barely known. The MCs are the ones everyone knows by name and the ones who are recognized and the ones given the credit for having sparked hip-hop’s existence. But without the DJ, what could an MC do? They could go acapella of course but then could that be hip-hop? They could use instruments but again, would that be hip-hop? Probably not. Hip-hop has a special signature, a specialized voice and the DJ gives that voice to it. The workshop was a lot of fun and informative. Some people think that being a DJ is simply putting on some vinyl on a turntable and just moving the vinyl around. It’s more than that, there is an art behind it as the EarthOne and Soyo showed. The talents of DJs makes a difficult art form look ridiculously easy but looks can be deceiving. EarthOne gave us an example of a typical set up for a gig. Four or Five vinyls for a party? Ha, yeh right, think again. For a four-hour party you’d need at the very least 2 full milk crates of vinyl records to keep the party going. And then on top of that you’d need your equipment. Two turn tables (at least $400 each!), a mixer, cords, cords and more cords, mic cords, connector cords, extension cords, and then of course there are the needles. Vinyl doesn’t play without needles. And needles cost around $70. The price of being a DJ is expensive. But, as Soyo said, “if you have a love for something just do it…whatever you want to do, just go for it”.
The unique part of this workshop was that it was taught by two women. Just like DJs are many times overlooked by hip-hop fans, women are also overlooked and sometimes not taken seriously. When the women are overlooked, history begins to give the impression that women did not play much of a role in the music or in the culture itself. This thought is incorrect though, “women have always had a lot of influence”. As DJ Soyo pointed out, one of the first DJs in the hip-hop scene got his start thanks to his sister who helped to organize parties for him or to get him gigs at parties. She paid for much of his equipment and financed his DJ career. Other women have been instrumental in the scene but unfortunately have been placed in the dustbins of history.
I’m hoping that there will be more workshop’s or programs like these in the future because not only do they tell a story, but they give the chance to hear the progression and evolution of hip-hop through time. Especially when the younger people come out, it becomes an even better event. They get to hear what they might not normally be exposed to due to the saturation of garbage playing on the airwaves in the entire country. A wide range of people are pulled to this hip-hop culture, the true hip-hop culture because so many different people can identify with it. Hip-hop voices us as a community. I saw kids at the event probably three years old, saw mostly black people but also saw Latinas, and some white people as well. Hip-hop does that, it can bring much to people and it can open people up. Soyo pointed out that she wasn’t really an English speaker when she first heard hip-hop but she loved it so much that she began to learn more of it so she could understand what was being said, what was being spoken, what they were spitting and it opened her up to a different culture. This is true hip-hop. This workshop covered a lot of material within a less than two hour time frame, and though there was a pretty solid group, it would have been nice to have seen a larger number of people come out for something like this.
