“Public Enemy No. 1” was a pause tape beat”
This is an amazing article via Ian Fondue of the Lloydbrary about early hiphop DJs using cassette tapes in their productions – yes a lot of us started creating ‘pause button edits’ and it’s amazing that some of the classics were created this way.
I knew that early house DJs like Ron Hardy used to edit and play out cassettes, and before that reel-to-reel for production ‘dubplates’ – even some DJs used live drum machines or tape loops. The idea that it was all turntablism isn’t true, especially outside of hip hop.
But I didn’t know that Public Enemy’s Hank Shocklee/Bomb Squad, Afrika Bambaata & Afrika Islam, Q-Tip, Pete Rock and Beastie Boys used pause button beats in their released productions! Even loaded those edits onto the early samplers…so I guess the vaunted ‘crunchy’ SP1200 hiphop sound could be actually tape compression?
I remember the section in the must-read ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’ about Grandmixer D.ST using a machine without even a pause button, but thought it an outlier…but it makes sense, given the horrendous prices of early samplers, or the fact that in early days of hip hop the sampler didn’t exist at all and not everyone could afford two decks and a mixer.
Certainly as a baby mashup/cutup ‘producer’ a single tape deck and a record player was all I had…later I had a double deck, but it was all about the tapes well before computers and technology became part of my setup. And I’m guessing I share that a lot with the early mashup and bootleg crowd – certainly the likes Cassetteboy wouldn’t exist without pause button edits as their first album ‘The Parker Tapes’ took seven years of editing!
And of course Negativland used anything they could get including cassettes, and I doubt early bootleg classics like Whipped Cream mix of Public Enemy by Evolution Control Committee were created on samplers, too wonky, which gives them their charm and ‘groove’, like the Doctor Who theme.
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