With the rise in popularity and hence, commercialism of the hip-hop subculture nowadays, the urban lifestyles various facets have naturally been pushed into the mainstream.
Not without the help of MTV and its various offshoots, a lifestyle that just a few years ago was still underground is now common fodder for soft-drink commercials, billboard ads and even NBA games. It's not uncommon nowadays to ask a 50 year old Caucasian farmer from the Midwest who The Fresh Prince is and get a correct answer (uh, that would be Will Smith in case you're wondering).
It's only natural then that the street arts that make-up the backbone of hip-hop has also gained international pop attention. Graffiti writing, break-dancing, rapping and beat-boxing (making rap beats with one's mouth) used to be confined to the urban ghettos of the main cities of America like New York and Los Angeles. Now spray-painted (aerosol) art can be seen on the walls of Berlin, national break-dancing competitions in Seoul are televised globally, and rappers are a dime a dozen in the cities of the Philippines. One can truly say hip-hop has gone pop when Iraqi kids scramble to get their hands on posters of 50cent. The saying "music knows no boundaries" becomes a colossal understatement indeed in light of this.
'Deejaying' or the more accurate term- turntablism, is one of the last nuances of hip-hop to come out of the urban jungles of America. According to battlesounds.com, a website created for hip-hop deejays by hip-hop deejays, a turntablist can be defined as "one who has the ability to improvise on a phonograph turntable." DJ Babu of the world-famous Beat Junkies (an award-winning turntablist crew) defines a turntablist as "one who uses the turntable in the spirit of a musical instrument". Still, a more detailed definition- "a musician: a hip-hop disc jockey who in a live/spontaneous situation can manipulate or restructure an existing phonograph recording (in combination with an audio mixer) to produce or express a new composition that is unrecognizable from its original ingredients."
The word hip-hop was said to have been coined from the way early turntablists 'hopped' from one turntable to another in a 'hip' fashion during live shows with rappers. Indeed, the DJ has come a long way from being a rapper's sidekick during hip-hop's infancy. Now they can be seen playing in rock bands like Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Incubus- packing stadiums throughout the globe with their fusion of rock and hip-hop music.
Some people say the rise turntablism and hip-hop as a whole is just a fad and that it will die down soon. I'm not so sure about this- everything that comes with this magnificent African-American sub-culture has surely brought more color to the urban lifestyle of today's youth. There are now lots more ways to express oneself in terms of fashion, music and arts. One thing I can say for sure though- The more the merrier!
