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The Music of Fantasy Cinema by Janet K. Halfyard (review)

Throughout its consideration of nearly forty years of history, Groove Music stays resolutely focused on hip-hop DJs, which is perhaps its greatest strength as well as its most significant flaw. In his introduction Katz writes: “In some academic scholarship the object of study serves to test, refine, or develop a methodology; I’m more interested in DJing than any theories that I might apply to it or derive from it” (p. 8). Unfortunately, this laudable attention to the hip-hop DJ often translates into a specific resistance to link the activities of DJs to other musical practices or to broader ideas in culture. For example, while considering the DJ scene in the 1990s, Katz writes: “The more turntablist technique advanced and the more intense the competition became, the more insular the battle scene turned. As the 1990s wore on, battle routines became ever more complex, sounding less and less like anything mainstream hip-hop fans could sing along with or dance to. Even to many hip-hop fans it was a closed world” (p. 178). To a musical scholar, this seems directly analogous to the development of bebop in the 1940s and 1950s, yet Katz resists making this comparison explicit, a comparison which has the potential to be illuminating both to hip-hop and bebop scholars. Similarly, Groove Music features little discussion of copyright or intellectual property, a topic which is one of the main concerns of scholars in a variety of fields studying hip-hop and other contemporary popular music practices. This is a particularly striking omission since hip-hop DJs make extensive use of copyrighted records (however transformed) during their performances, yet they do not pay royalties. Even as hip-hop DJs have made tentative partnerships with corporate record companies and sought recognition and success in the mainstream music industry, they have largely been able to operate outside of the sphere of copyright surveillance. An investigation of how and why they have been able to do so could provide an important link between the hip-hop community and writers and activists theorizing alternatives to the current copyright regime. One hopes that these aspects of hip-hop DJing not explored by Katz will be pursued by other scholars, and their omission here does not mar an otherwise exemplary study, one that mixes history and ethnography to paint a compelling portrait of an underappreciated aspect of hip-hop. Groove Music’s insightful and intelligent consideration of the world of the hip-hop DJ will be a landmark for years to come.