The setting is a venue in East Hollywood. Talk about hearts on the dance floor. Flashing lights fight with the hazy smoke in attempt to reach out to you. Psychedelic glimpses of heaven spin in your head as you absorb the energy pulsating from the colorful strobe lights overhead. Your feet are in a pretty sticky situation, and with every jump and grind your shoes become more and more engulfed in vat of beer, vodka, burnt bits and depending on the extremity of the party that you are at, vomit. Bones, everywhere. Especially the more pointed and dangerous ones. I dare you to get out of sync with the thumping crowd and expect an elbow or shoulder blade to not get slammed into your face. In the middle of this musical orgy, I spy with my drunken eyes a wasted youth clutching his beer bottle, celebrating the life that he has just began, the fears of failure a bachelors degree away. I spy with my drunken eyes a cocky persona, her jeans hug her curves tightly, she’s thirty, crow’s feet is a dead giveaway, but to anyone with the right amount of cash and with the right whip, she’s twenty one. Tonight she has been anonymously crowned queen of the dance floor. And why shouldn’t she be, she got the night off and saved up for the damn tickets. Not to mention the fact that it took two hours to straighten that mess of a hair and squeeze those size 14 hips into size 7 jeans. I spy with my drunken eyes a confident and happy persona,she’s alone. No need for an entourage of girls to blend in with and a steady supply of drinks to free her spirit! She is high off of life, an institution that she has forced herself to ignore the negative facet of and instead remain fixated on the good.
Sadness, happiness, love, hate, sin and lies all under one roof and don’t tell me you can’t feel the energy radiating in a room full of hip thumpers and rump shakers. I spy with my drunken eyes, the creator of it all, the man with the golden hands spinning and turning rhythms and anthems that combined potently and subliminally force you to let go of the worries of life and give in to the joys of the night. We hail him the Apollo of the turntables, his fans and beloved following refer to him as A-Trak. If you deem necessary we can cut the figurative bullshit and throw around the known as, Alan Macklovitch. When you’re a creator that has been at the forefront of such a massive and monumental movement, Shiva, Zeus, Allah it’s all the same just as long as you acknowledge the creation that has taken place, the work, hustle, grind.
Although music as an art form is abstract, I got a chance to talk about the more concrete aspect of it with A-Trak. We talked about everything from the late DJ AM and Keith Elam, brought the conversation to life with the pharaohs of hip hop and rhythmic harmonies: Africa Bambaataa, Kanye West, Jam Master Jay and took it right back to where it started with the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, Audio Research, and a bar mitzvah. From the commencement of the interview, there was a characteristic in A-Trak’s being that I instantly held in high regard. He knew his stuff. So many people will drone on for hours, giving you auditory tours of their celebrity lives, but with A-Trak, I was schooled on the art that he specializes in, DJing. A-Trak, Kanye West’s handpicked tour DJ, the man who has scratched Kanye West, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Common and Kid Cudi classics, 1997 winner of the DMC World Championships, taught me about sets, routines, and the techniques to masterfully mixing songs from different genres to create one sweltering night. After ensuring that I was sufficiently schooled on the art of mixing, we went on to talk about some of the people that have influenced A-Trak. We started off with the late Guru,Keith Elam, who A-Trak said inspired him by simply “making good records”. We began to talk about the Gang Starr duo that Guru had been the half of and A-Trak commended them on how they stayed “truthful and gritty” at a time when hip hop was evolving. On the subject of emcee’s and gritty hip hop, Run DMC and especially Jam Master Jay took home the award and were cited as being the “pioneers of hip hop” that exposed a whole generation to a new style of music that eventually took over the nation. Jam Master Jay, he dubbed the “anchor that kept [Run DMC’s] credibility as a group unquestionable”. So as you can clearly see, not only does the man have the keen ability to mix songs to get the most favorable ass shaking result, but he also knows the history and importance of all these hits. (more…)
