Session Transcript:
Cut Chemist
Red Bull Music Academy, Sao Paulo 2002

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

In 1983, L.A.'s Lucas MacFadden began to DJ. At 12, he entered his first battle at Hollywood's For Breakers Only clothing store. "I was the only white kid there and I was 12, so just on that basis alone I made it past the preliminaries. I wasn't really very good." Fast forward to now and Cut Chemist is one of the best turntablists in town, respected worldwide for his place in Jurassic 5 and for the 'Brainfreeze' mix of super-rare Funk 45s he created with DJ Shadow. Digging it seems, came naturally.
»To prepare for my first digging trip, I went to the library and I looked up all the record stores. I had it all properly advanced.«

Cut Chemist: »I'd like to start with a little piece of Brazilian music history, that I understand has been mentioned, but not really touched upon here at the Academy, and that's the history of soul and funk in Brazil.

The huge popularity of national styles like samba and bossa nova kind of overshadowed the fact that there was a huge influence of American soul music in Brazil in the '70s.

One major exponent of bringing soul to Brazil was a DJ from Rio, called Pedrinho. He brought over a lot of underground soul, playing it on his radio show. Songs like Hook And Sling by Eddie Bo, a huge hit from New Orleans. Another important figure was Tony Tornado, a singer that was probably the closest thing to James Brown that Brazil ever saw. So I'm a big fan of his.

A lot of bands were remaking songs like Hook And Sling or stuff by James Brown, the JB's, Kool And The Gang, etc.

Fast forward to 1979 with Rapper's Delight causing a sensation everywhere. There's a Brazilian version Melo Da Tagarela by Gang Do Tagarela, kind of an answer to Rapper's Delight, in Portuguese.

Brazilian music has always been progressive, incorporating various styles of American music and funk and soul has played a big part in that.



Just so you guys know, I've been DJing for about almost 20 years. I didn't hear rap songs until 1983, so I came late in the game. I think I heard Blondie's Rapture in '81, but I didn't really recognise that as being part of the culture of hip hop.

It wasn't until I heard Run DMC's It's Like That and Sucker MC's that I started recognising that there was a culture going on; all these people spinning on their heads and painting on walls and scratching on records. I saw all this as something I wanted to get down with it.«

RBMA: »This scene that you discovered, we're still talking about the early days of hip hop here, quite localised around the New York area. How different do you think the hip hop culture emerging on the West Coast - in L.A., where you grew up - was compared to its beginnings on the other side of the States?«

Cut Chemist: »Well, L.A. is a lot different than New York, everything is all spread out, very suburban. In New York, everybody was really close together with a lot of problems socially. And, of course, out of those types of social conditions, something like hip hop emerges - a kind of a rebellious, youth revolution.

In L.A., I embraced the East Coast hip hop culture, even though I wasn't from there. I wished I was because it was so different. I wanted to buy records, New York records. I didn't really care about records from L.A. because I was from there and took it for granted. Of course, now I'm sorry I did that because there were a lot of great L.A. records that I never bought.«

RBMA: »This was about 1983?«

Cut Chemist: »Yes, I was 11 years old and the first record I heard was Rockit by Herbie Hancock. The DJ, who scratched on that track was Grandmixer D.ST, and that was the first time scratching ever appeared on any kind of a crossover record. Herbie Hancock was a major jazz artist and a progressive one at that. He incorporated this new kind of sound into his music and Rockit became a huge hit.



So when I heard that I was like: "Wow - what is that sound, man?" Because I recognised the keyboard, I saw the robotic mannequins on the video dancing, but what was that homey doing with the record? I asked my father, and he was like: "Ah, that's some kind of simulated electronic sound." I wasn't convinced though, it just sounded too manual to me.

Later, I saw the movie Breakin', about breakdancing in L.A. I got to see this guy called The Glove who was Ice-T's DJ and I actually saw him scratch and I was like: "Man, those are records!"

I was already into buying records so I was like: "Man, I got to get a turntable." Naturally, I bought Rockit and then I was home, doing my terrible scratches. I had my first and only battle around that time, on my 12th birthday. There was a competition at a clothing shop called For Breakers Only in Hollywood. I was the only white kid there and I was 12, so just on that basis alone I made it past the preliminaries because I wasn't really very good. I didn't know how to use the mixer. I just kind of doing my little 'wicky wicky' thing and managed to make it to the finals. The judges were way less sympathetic then and I lost completely so that was it. I never really battled again. I got more interested in just playing at parties than trying to take people out in battles.«

RBMA: »You brought up an interesting point, when you said you were the only white kid in the battle. We're talking about 1984, and back then hip hop was very polarised ethnically. How was it then compared to today?«

Cut Chemist: »Way different. I see a lot more white DJs nowadays. It's so much more culturally diverse now, which is what hip hop was aimed at anyway. A lot of people growing up in L.A. thought hip hop was just for blacks. It wasn't for latinos or whites. The 'godfather of hip hop' himself, Afrika Bambaataa, aimed it towards youth in general. It was a youth movement and it incorporated everybody. So if you're ever in a hip hop club and someone says: "Man, you don't even belong here", don't trip - you belong there. It's for everybody.«

RBMA: »Afrika Bambaataa would wear Sex Pistols t-shirts because he followed that stuff too, right? He was into everything.«

Cut Chemist: »Yeah, his goal was just to get everybody together, the punks and the soul guys, and just have a big party. He played records from every genre and that's kind of the whole philosophy I follow. Rock, jazz, country or soul - it doesn't matter what you play, it's how you present it.

Bambaataa was known as the master of records, he has supposedly the largest record collection known to man and he was one of the first to start extending the breakdowns on certain tracks. These breaks would usually only last about four bars, so the DJ would cut between two copies of the same record to extend the break and build up the party atmosphere.

I think Bambaataa explains the breakdown most eloquently in the movie, Scratch. He said: "The breakdown is that part that you look for in a record that lets your god-self just get wild." The breakdown is just something that overcomes you. It makes you want to spin on your head. It's usually the funkiest part of the record and it makes you go: "Oh man, I wanna get down to this."

Pretty soon 12" versions of disco songs began to get pressed up for the record pools, for DJs to play out. These 12"s were louder, more durable with extra long breakdowns for the clubs. So you can see the direction where this is going. Hip hop developed through these extended 12" versions of disco tunes, specifically the break.

This is a kind of biased view because I'm a DJ. I don't know, if you've heard people like Dilated [Peoples] say that the backbone of hip hop is the DJ. The MC was initially there to hype up the crowd. No one was rapping, they'd say stuff like: "Yes yes y'all. My man, my man."

The MC wasn't trying to steal the show, holding his bottle of champagne or anything like that. Nowadays the role of the DJ has faded somewhat. The MC is the frontman, sometimes just using DATs for his backing track, no DJing at all.«

RBMA: »This idea of rapping over disco breaks. It wasn't altogether a new phenomenon. People were already doing that kind of thing around the world, weren't they?«

Cut Chemist: »You could take it back to Jamaica in the '60s. Jamaican DJs toasting, imitating American radio DJs. .Kool Herc took this idea with him to New York. You've also got poets like the Watts Prophets, Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, old Funk like Pigmeat Markham and James Brown. All these people were doing their thing around the same time, so rap has always been around, really.

I even have a recording with me now, recently unearthed, by the Co-Real Artists - What About You. This was recorded for a play in the early '70s. There was a tradition in African/American theatre communities to have a drummer and an ensemble cast speaking over beats. There's a whole bunch of different influences for hip hop to draw upon.«

RBMA: »So you had these people rapping over disco breaks in '80s New York, the realisation of hip hop. What were the names of these people?«

Cut Chemist: »Well, you had DJs like Afrika Bambaataa, Breakout and Baron, Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash. The list goes on. The rappers at the time included the Cold Crush Brothers and the .Fantastic Five, which is where we kind of got our name from, Jurassic 5. Most notably was Run DMC, those guys broke hip hop, made it as big as rock. .Rick Rubin marketed those guys like a stadium rock band, and it worked. Run DMC's sound was all drummachine with their DJ, Jam Master Jay, making big heavy handed rubs. They had a huge sound.«

RBMA: »Being in L.A., 3.000 miles away from where all this is originating, was the impact equally felt?«

Cut Chemist: »Oh yeah, it hit everybody at the same time. Run DMC were as big as Guns'N'Roses. I saw them in 1984, 12 years old. It was like seeing god or something.

We were actually in New York the night Jam Master Jay was killed. We did a Jurassic 5 show. So that was really crazy, celebratory and mournful at the same time.«

RBMA: »Was there anybody on the West Coast that was doing anything like Run DMC around '84?«

Cut Chemist: »I was more involved in the electro scene in L.A. at that time. So I was into Egyptian Lover and Ice-T, stuff like that. I think the hip hop sound was a little bit different in L.A. geared more towards clubs, a little faster.«

RBMA: »When did all the gangsta rap start in L.A.?«

Cut Chemist: »I really started to notice it around '87. Gangsters always existed obviously in every city, but then they started making songs about it. I think that was Dr Dre's brainchild. He is an incredible businessman. He had a group called the Wrecking Crew, which wasn't gangster at all, they were a club act that wore lipstick and purple clothes, very Prince-influenced.

That wasn't working anymore, so Dre got some guys from South Central and Compton, put them in black baseball caps and jeans jackets and made some gangsta rap. That was N.W.A..

They started making songs about life in the hood. Dre was a smart man because N.W.A. sold a huge number of records. There were guys like Schoolly D from Philadelphia, doing stuff like PSK [Park Side Killer] in 1985, but N.W.A. and the L.A. scene a few years later is generally regarded as the birth of gangsta rap.«

RBMA: »When did you make your first pilgrimage to New York?«

Cut Chemist: »OK, ow we are getting into the digging culture, my favourite part. Digging is a very important part of hip hop, especially for DJs and for me. It's basically going out there and finding all the records.

My sister was looking to go to college on the East Coast, so my family took a vacation and checked out some schools in '86 and I used this as an excuse to go digging.

To prepare for the trip, I went to the library and I got all these phone books from every city I knew we were going to. I looked up all the record stores in each one and wrote them all down. I had it all properly advanced.

And so I went up to the people in all these stores and asked them stuff like: "Do you have the record that Jam Master Jay was using on Peter Piper?" And the guy hands me a Bob James record. You have to ask a lot of questions. Nine times out of ten you'll find somebody that is knowledgeable about that particular sound you're after.

So I came back from the family trip with all these rock records with drum breaks on them. I was trying to accumulate this big collection of other types of records, other genres of music like soul and jazz. That's really when I started to realise that hip hop was initially made from other records. Since then I've acquired this reputation as somebody who collects a lot of records and uses a lot of obscure samples when I'm making my music. So that was how it started.«

RBMA: »So was this the first time that you actually discovered the names and the actual songs from these early hip hop tunes you were into?«

Cut Chemist: »Yeah, because I never knew about it and that's also when I became aware of the Ultimate Breaks And Beats compilations. After I got those, I went looking for the originals.

Ultimate Breaks And Beats has influenced way more than hip hop. They've influenced everything from drum 'n' bass to house. They all use the beats found on those compilations: Impeach The President, Cramp Your Style, etc. All kinds of stuff on there for DJs to use.«

RBMA: »Digging really came into its own when the sampling drummachines became readily available. Hip hop gradually became more sample-based and people started looking for new beats.«

Cut Chemist: »Records are infinite. Before you were limited to the stock sounds that came with the early drummachines. Nowadays, in terms of sampling, I think the wider your library of sounds is, the more versatile and articulate you can be. Q-Bert once said that the more scratches you know, the more articulate you can speak when you scratch. I believe the same with samples and music.«

RBMA: »Who were the first people to start using these samples and breaks that changed the sound of hip hop?«

Cut Chemist: »Jungle Brothers was the group that got me into sampling. Double Dee & Steinski's Lessons 1, 2 & 3 were obviously a big influence to me, but when I heard Jungle Brothers, that was the first time I heard somebody make a record entirely out of records.

I'm not a technical guy, I'm not a computer guy and don't know any musical instruments. Records are my thing. So Jungle Brothers kind of opened the door for me, making me realise that I could make records out of records.«

RBMA: »You mentioned Double Dee & Steinski as an influence in your work. Can you tell us about that?«

Cut Chemist: »Well, Double Dee & Steinski were the guys that progressed the whole genre of cut 'n' paste records, which are like megamixes. They literally spliced beats together on analogue tape, recorded that onto a new tape and so on, building up a whole collage of music made from other music. When I heard Lesson 3 in '86, I was like: "Wow, that's kind of ill." Then I heard Lesson 2 and obviously Lesson 1. The first record I ever made was called Lesson 4, kind of in homage to Double Dee & Steinski and that's how my recording career started.

I started recording in '94, with Lesson 4, which was on the flipside of Jurassic 5's first release, Unified Rebelution [credited as Unity Committee and Rebels of Rhythm, who merged to form J5]. We recorded everything up to our first album on my broken old 8-track reel to reel, really low budget. We didn't have Pro Tools or anything. It really doesn't matter what you have as long as your heart is 100% in it.

I think the whole notion of hip hop comes from having limited resources and making something out of nothing and that's exactly what we did. The rewind button on the 8-track didn't work. I had to kick it. Our gear was primitive. We pressed up 500 copies of Unified Rebelution, selling them out of the trunk of my car before it got picked up by Blunt Records in New York.

The deal with Blunt was just for the one release. They didn't pick our option to make an album so we made our self-titled EP and put it out independently once again. That got picked up by Play It Again Sam and it went gold in Europe, so that was really special. After that we got picked up by Interscope to do our first album, Quality Control. We made another album Power In Numbers and things are doing all right.«

Participant: »Where you surprised when you got signed to a major label like Interscope, who were famous for Eminem?«

Cut Chemist: »Well, they weren't famous for Eminem at the time but they were famous for a lot of gangsta rap so I was surprised for that reason alone. We had pretty much exhausted all our resources releasing our stuff independently at that point. Like I said, it went gold in Europe and in the States we sold like close to 100.000 copies, but we couldn't do it anymore.

So obviously, when you are making a lot of money, the record companies come knocking on your door. We were like: "Well, what can you do for us?" Obviously they can get more records into more stores, get the music out to more people and have a bigger staff than we ever did, so we agreed to a deal. That was the next logical step for Jurassic 5.

We had concerns about signing with a major. They try to make things that will sell in certain markets, so they'll want you to conform to that. But fortunately for us, we'd already established an audience. We'd sold enough copies to prove that.

Too many cats out there are trying to sound like what's hot. Eminem or Wu-Tang blow up and there's a thousand copycats spawned.

That's just the way it is, that's the way the record companies try to do it because they don't have the foresight anymore to cultivate new sounds. In the '60s and '70s, there were labels like Motown. People like Berry Gordy were visionaries. They tried to make things that sounded like nothing that had existed before and they still made hits. But nowadays everybody is too lazy for that, especially in America. They just want to keep pumping out the same stuff. A lot of major labels don't really have an interest in the art of making music anymore.«

RBMA: »Your first track, Lesson 4 also spawned a collaborative relationship with DJ Shadow. How did that come about exactly?«

Cut Chemist: »Well, Shadow's first was also called Lesson 4, which was released on the flip of a remix of Real Deal by Lifers Group. He'd named it that for the exact same reasons as I did.

I read about Shadow's track in a hip hop newsletter and I think his friend DJ Zen told him about my track around the same name. It was weird, kind of like it was meant to be or something. Anyway, it brought us together and Shadow asked me to do a remix for something and that led to the Brainfreeze project, which we followed up with Product Placement and now we're entertaining the idea of a part three.«

RBMA: »For anyone who hasn't heard of Brainfreeze or Product Placement, they were basically live mixes of funk 7" singles by Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow. There are plenty of great funk and hip hop mixes out there, but these two had a profound effect on the whole digging culture.

Nowadays you can't go on eBay, looking for an old funk record without coming across a reference to these two mixes. Some of the prices for these 45s have rocketed as a result, some even going for hundreds of dollars.«

Cut Chemist: »Yeah, sometimes over a thousand.«

RBMA: »Could you explain how the Brainfreeze and Product Placement mixes came about?«

Cut Chemist: »Over the years, digging through records, you try to find the most obscure thing you could find that no one else has. That's the kind of etiquette, I guess you could say. And 45s to me, and to a lot of other people, are seen as the last frontier for obscurity because there are just millions of them. You're never going to be able to get them all. Both Shadow and myself became interested in digging for 45s independently. Shadow to me is probably one of the kings of digging in general, but in 45s for sure. He was on top of a lot of obscure stuff before a lot of people.

So this guy named Mark Herily does this thing called Future Primitive in San Francisco, which is like a collective of DJs. He asked me to do something with DJ Shadow and so I said: "You know what? Since we're both DJs and we both dig for 45s, let's do an all-45 set."

The challenge with 45s is they are hard to handle. They are these little records that aren't meant for scratching or manhandling in any way. So when you're talking about like cutting it up and trying to beatjuggle, flaring and blending, doing all this crazy stuff, it's a lot harder than using 12"s or LPs.

Blending in particular is hard. These records aren't quantized, they have human drummers that go off time. So when you are blending, you're talking about this human rhythm against another human rhythm.

So we did this at the Future Primitive show and it went over well. We'd recorded one of the practice sessions. We pressed that up onto CD to sell at the show.

The centre piece of Brainfreeze was a promotional 45, recorded in the '60s to advertise Slurpies - a slushy, flavoured crushed drink - on the radio. The record was made by 7/11, a convenience store chain. The cover design for the Brainfreeze mix used the Slurpee and 7/11 logos as a motif.

So we sold these CDs at the show. The next thing, you know, the demand for these CDs rocket, the whole thing turns into this cult phenomenon. Bootleg copies are pressed up, over 200.000 of them are sold around the world.

Then people started to hunt down the original 45s featured in the mix. Unfortunately, there are a lot of ego games that go along with digging - dealers begin to push their prices up for these records, that and the bidding frenzies on eBay. It's crazy but it's all for the art, I guess.«

RBMA: »You then followed the success of Brainfreeze with the Product Placement mix, showcasing it on a world tour.«

Cut Chemist: »Yeah, we did live shows of that mix everywhere: Japan, England, Scotland, New York, San Francisco, L.A.«

RBMA: »Made some good money doing this?«

Cut Chemist: »Lost a lot of money doing that.«

RBMA: »With Product Placement?«

Cut Chemist: »Well, flights, hotels, the tour bus. We booked this tour pretty much ourselves. We're just a couple of DJs, not booking agents and so we didn't really budget it correctly. We sold like 300 CDs a night, for $20 each. We made mad loot but then we had all the expenses - we brought out our projectionist, tour managers, etc.«

RBMA: »Your shows in L.A. and San Francisco featured hundreds of freshly baked cookies and cold milk, which was part of the theme for Product Placement.«

Cut Chemist: »Yeah, like the Slurpee in the first mix. So we thought it would be cool to give everyone milk and cookies. The dopest thing about it all was that we were playing hardcore deep funk 45s to sold out shows, which was just unbelievable.

All these people were just kind of chilling with their milk and cookies, smiling and having a good time and I'm willing to bet that that's never happened before on the planet. It was just crazy. It's just stuff like that that kind of makes me smile and that's what it's all about. So I took a hit financially, but I felt it was worth it.«

RBMA: »After these two mixes, everyone tends to regard you as the authority on deep funk 45s; these amazing pieces of plastic that often never made it out of some town in America in 1968. How do you feel about that?«

Cut Chemist: »It's kind of uncomfortable because that's not the fact. I look at other people as having more authority on certain records. So when people put me up on this pedestal, like you got every record known to man, it's just not true.

There are a lot of basics I need to cover and I can only do so much because I'm not out there digging every day. I'm touring, trying to make a living, trying to build a career. That stuff sidetracks you a lot from looking for records.«

RBMA: »One thing I can safely say though, is that you've become an authority on scratching and drumming and all that stuff.«

Cut Chemist: »That's just the nature of how I play music. I think that happened when Lesson 4 was included in the Return Of The DJ compilation. That kind of put me into this turntablist category, which is cool with me. I see other turntablists, like guys from out here in Brazil, like this DJ called Premo, they're just killing me. All their techniques are just so updated and I'm just like: "Man, I'm still in the '80s."

I find it hard to think of myself as a turntablist. I'm kind of in the middle. I'm not an authority in digging or collecting and I'm not an authority on scratching and beat juggling, so what the hell am I? What am I doing up here?

I can cut it up and hold my own but there are so many cats out there that are better. That's just the way it is. There will always a bigger fish out there. So to say I'm the authority on this just isn't my style.«

RBMA: »Very humble of you Cut.«

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Interview with Eothen "Egon" Alapatt
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