July 02, 2008 @ 5:00 pm

Steinski, "What does it all mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective"

by: Jeff Chang

­­All so important to the history of hip hop music.

­Back when “mash-up” was still mainly what you did to potatoes, long before DJ Shadow’s 1996 Endtroducing... (Mo’ Wax), Danger Mouse’s 2004 The Grey Album, and the bloody trail of intellectual property lawyers in their wake—the early ’80s, to be precise—there was a Jewish advertising exec/DJ who entered a remix contest with his engineer friend. Steinski and Double Dee’s “Lesson 1: The Payoff Mix” 12" shocked hip hop and dance music pioneers, downtown hipsters, and a global underground of budding turntablists and beat producers—then they did two more Lessons just because they could. Steinski went on to remix religion, war, assassination, protest, and best of all, sex. The tracks on this stupefyingly essential, surprisingly cerebral, legally questionable (yes, get it while you can) two-CD retrospective of Steinski’s mastermixes/breakbeat pranks are all so important to the history of hip hop music, they should come with a textbook. (Thankfully, we do get VIBE contributor Hua Hsu’s appropriately bugged liner notes.) But we wouldn’t be talking about them if the records weren’t so fun and funky. The second disc, a dense, in-joke-ridden BBC radio mix, is like an extra layer of cream on the pie. Maybe those lawyers should try tasting a little of what they’ve just been hit with.

Article tags: Revolutions, Steinski 

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