With the Red Bull Thre3style DJing grand final this coming weekend, we look at 10 of the most influential DJs to have graced music.
Here, we introduce the first five – check out redbull.com tomorrow for five more trendsetters.
Kool Herc (pictured, above)
Who, you might wonder, is DJ Kool Herc? In short, he is widely regarded as the founding father of hip-hop as we know it. Born Clive Campbell in Jamaica in 1955, he grew up hearing early forms of DJing where the disc jockeys would use ‘toasting’ – effectively talking while DJing – at dancehall parties in capital Kingston. Much later, and by now living in New York and running parties where he would use two turntables to play records, Kool Herc (he’d been nicknamed ‘Hercules’ because of his fondness for weightlifting) began to notice that dancers went mad during the part of the song with drums only, so began playing these ‘breakbeat’ sections continuously using two identical records that he would flick between to create one long break. He coined the term ‘b-boys’ (and ‘b-girls’) for these ‘breakdancers’, encouraging them with ‘toasting’-style MCing, telling them to touch their toes. Though Herc never went on to release his own music, his impact on what was to become hip-hop and breakdancing is incalculable.
Paul Oakenfold
Paul Oakenfold is a trance DJ – except that he happens to be a former funk DJ of the 1970s, the Beastie Boys’ and Run DMC’s former agent, and remixer and producer of artists from U2 to Madonna to The Rolling Stones. His latest album features The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Not bad for a trance DJ. An early advocate of the Balearic sound, Oakenfold is a legend of the Ibiza scene, as is the Perfecto record label he set up in 1988, releasing supertracks such as Not Over Yet. Hollywood soundtrack credits range from The Bourne Identity to Shrek 2, and TV show Big Brother is synonymous with Oakenfold’s theme for the opening credits. And naturally, he is still touring as a DJ on the wheels of steel.
Carl Cox
Times have changed since Carl Cox started out in the 1970s as a 15-year-old mobile DJ, but Cox has moved with them. After playing New York Hip-Hop in the 1980s, he started dropping a pioneering tune called Acid Trax by Phuture into his sets in 1987, setting himself on course to be integral to the Chicago house boom that followed, then rave. 1991 saw his first release, the breakbeat masterpiece I Want You (Forever), on Perfecto, which enjoyed chart success, and then headline status at raves like Fantazia, but when Cox’s interest in the rave scene started to wane as it moved away from his kind of techno, he headed back underground. He set up his own Intec label in 1999, which after its initial 2006 closure is now enjoying a new lease of life as Intec Digital. And Cox still tours the world and makes new music. “The story still continues in a massive way,” he says on his website. “There’s so much more still to come.”
Slipmatt/Seduction
If you went to UK raves during the 1990s, you can’t fail to know either of these two DJs, who make this list together because you can’t mention one and leave the other out. Slipmatt, aka Matt Nelson, started out as Raindance’s resident DJ in 1989 and moved with the development of rave, having a huge chart hit with fellow DJ Lime as SL2 with On A Ragga Tip in 1992. Seduction, aka John Kalkan, came on the scene in 1991, and though he never really troubled the charts, he was huge in underground hardcore breakbeat and later happy hardcore (though he reportedly hated the latter term). He and Slipmatt often headlined huge rave events like Dreamscape and Fantazia, all the while remixing each other’s tracks (on their own respective record labels), and influencing one another. Listen to Seduction’s Live Together (later remixed by SL2) below and see if you can spot a theme… Both continue to DJ and produce hardcore music today.
Boy George
Life’s never dull for the man born George Alan O’Dowd. Boy George went through a phase as the androgynous (at least to some eyes) pop superstar in Culture Club, then enjoyed a largely successful solo career in the later 1980s and 1990s, despite various travails. But more recently he has also found a niche – enough of one to be voted in at number 90 in DJmag’s top 100 – as a turntablist, and one who tours the world with two to three gigs every week.
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