“Play it for punk rock/play it for hip-hop…”
– Double Dee & Steinski, “The Payoff Mix”
Stuck in traffic again: That’s the Angelenos’ common status. So here I am in this man-made parking lot on the 405. Cars are coughing, horns are honking. The only saving grace now is music. I roll up the window, press “Play” on the CD player, and turn up the volume: A snippet of Otis Redding’s spoken introduction to “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” taken from D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Monterey Pop, immediately breaks into a funky backbeat and a voiceover of some math teacher from the 1950s says, “Lesson Three.” Yes, I’m listening to Steinski.
Now I’m a novice when it comes to hip-hop. But as I grow older and wiser, I’m really starting to dig this stuff, from the political to the playful and everything in between. And for me, Steinski soars above them all.
A Jewish kid working for a top advertising firm in the Big Apple, Steve Stein got together with sound engineer and fellow pothead Douglas Di Franco to form one of the greatest hip-hop producing teams of all time, Double Dee & Steinski. In 1983, the duo created their first remix tape, entitled “The Payoff Mix,” entering it in some audio-mixing contest that was advertised in Billboard. After blowing away their competitors, they kept on cutting together more and more innovated sample-based tracks throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.
The duo called these sound collages “lessons,” but I think they are more like mini-audio answers to James Joyce’s epic modern novel Finnegans Wake. Just like Joyce, who used historical and cultural references – Celtic mythology, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Shakespeare, Giambattista Vico, the Holy Bible and the Qur’an – throughout his work, Double Dee & Steinski tossed up a pop culture salad in their “lessons,” stealing everything they could find on radio, records, television and movies: Odetta; John Coltrane; Groucho Marx; R&B singer Junior; Muddy Waters; comics Robin Williams and Gilbert Gottfried; Dion and The Belmonts; Little Richard; The Supremes; “Tonight Show” announcer Ed McMahon; The Rolling Stones; UC Berkeley activist Mario Savio; John F. Kennedy; Glenn Miller; The Incredible Bongo Band; Sly and the Family Stone; footage from Glengarry Glen Ross, Dirty Harry, The Pajama Game, The Maltese Falcon, Diner, Orson Wells’ radio program “War of the World,” Bollywood movies, and various science class films; and of course the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, James Brown, whose music is the backbone to every rap song out there.
Steinski’s later solo work ventured more into political commentary, focusing on topics like the first Gulf War and the 9/11 attacks. His most controversial work was “The Motorcade Sped On,” an astonishingly danceable deconstruction of CBS news broadcasts on the Kennedy assassination.
Nowadays as DJs all over the world copied his copying style, Steinski has packed up his magnetic tape, gone back to his old name, and left the music business. I don’t know how old he is, probably around my age. So Stein has retired to the suburbs, and I am here trapped on a L.A. freeway.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a disc jockey for KZAP-FM, spinning 33s, 45s and 78s for a few hours in the morning. Well, it seems that Steve Stein lived my dream, except his “radio shows” were in six-minute increments and were passed around on cassette tapes. So, children, what does it all mean? Hm, I’m not really sure.
So, who else out there wanted to be a radio DJ?
The history of hip-hop, according to Double Dee & Steinski
