He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper
Posted Mar 13 2006
The walls of the DJ Project's Horizons wing are painted in electric, hypermodern colors and decorated with drawings from a class assignment that asked the kids to illustrate what they think a "pimp" is -- one shows a blue cartoon dude with a single gold tooth. There's also plenty of graffiti provided by local artists Juan and Frisko Eddy, who, along with emcee Lady Tragik, serve as Horizons' youth leaders. A poster on one wall displays photographs of all the hip-hop royalty who've guest-lectured or facilitated workshops here, including Sake 1, Azeem, DJ Zeph, Jahi, J. Boogie, and DJ Quest.Lady Tragik's all-female DJ class meets Monday, Tuesday, and Friday afternoons. On a recent Friday, eight girls are gathered around computer screens, cobbling beats on a studio software program called Reasons. A girl named Melissa plays hers for the class: a slowed-down reggae loop spliced with a melodic, groove-driven backing track, and jangling with snare and high-hat sounds to give it more of a rattletrap, hip-hop feel. Melissa explains that she composed her own drumbeat by scrolling through the program's Dr. Rex sampler, poaching loops from different synthesizers and tweaking them.
Cari Campbell, who helms the production and sound-engineering side of Lady Tragik's class, explains that a few years ago, people had to make beats with outside synthesizers and then write code into computer programs to trigger the results. But now everything is packaged in high-speed software programs like Reasons: samplers, loop players, drum machines, and synthesizers with tons of effects, all accessible with one mouse click.
These ultra-user-friendly apps are the bane of many older-school DJs, who came up digging for records in flea markets and painstakingly minting original beats on expensive, high-tech equipment. "We come from a school where there's more work ethic involved," explains Oakland Faders co-founder DJ Platurn. "People respect you more when you're not just pushing a button." But on the flipside, the fact that such programs are cheap and easy to use makes them accessible to kids who can't afford fancy hardware or spare the time to learn old-school methodology, and it gives them an easy portal to swap ideas with their peers.
Feinman explains that he hooks kids from low-income areas by providing the two things they're most interested in -- hip-hop and making money -- but envisions a day when inner-city kids won't rely on the rap game or pro-athletics to get out of the hood. "My bottom line isn't about the music business," he says. "It's more of a social bottom line."
Of course, each of the three groups has a different way of interpreting Feinman's vision. At Unity, DJ Project instructors David Castillo and Daniel Zarazua -- who also teach math and history while moonlighting as DJs Changó and Domingo Yu respectively -- laid out stringent GPA and attendance requirements for kids who wanted to participate, along with an application that includes two letters of recommendation and a personal essay. Zarazua explains that the idea is to teach them important life skills: not only how to use studio equipment but, on a more basic level, how to share files, communicate via the Internet, and make deadlines. They also encourage a lot of race and gender analysis through a hip-hop lens, stuff like picking apart the Destiny's Child song "I Need a Soulja" to show that it's really just another example of guns deployed as a metaphor for Lil Wayne's 'nads.
On a lazy Friday afternoon, the teachers are recovering from another long school day. Castillo flips through a copy of Oakland's snarky new rap rag Bootycrack before shuffling to a pine-paneled annex at the back of the classroom, where the five Unity DJs -- Tone, Roman, Ana, Evelyn, and Carla -- are sitting at computers and plunking beats on keyboards. Ana and Evelyn (whose beats bear traces of the reggaetón and dancehall joints they favor over hip-hop) ask their teacher for help choosing which voicings to layer on top of their piano loop. While Castillo sifts through the string, brass, mallets, and guitar samples, the girls whisper to each other in Spanish. Tone, meanwhile, is busy remixing a track he downloaded from Raparations for the forthcoming DJ Project single, "Better Days."
Castillo saunters over to a pair of turntables and cues up Lil Jon's "What They Gon' Do" while Ana tentatively scratches with one hand. Zarazua, meanwhile, is flipping through Bootycrack, and stops at a page emblazoned with the headline "Nympho Info," accompanied by an article that skewers R&B starlet Goapele for having a white boyfriend. The instructor shakes his head. "Um, yeah, you'll see there's less testosterone here than in other programs," he deadpans. Or, for that matter, in the hip-hop scene at large.
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