Hacker Cinema
Scratch
2001 · Film · documentary · 92 min
Directed by Doug Pray
A feature-length documentary film about hip-hop DJing, otherwise known as turntablism. From the South Bronx in the 1970s to San Francisco now, the world's best scratchers, beat-diggers, party-rockers, and producers wax poetic on beats, breaks, battles, and the infinite possibilities of vinyl.
5 positivefrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
I'm not going to comment on the technical side of things, which is way beyond my technical comprehensions skills, and I'm sure it required a considerable amount of brain, time and energy to reach similar results.
But music production and distribution is (actually, was) my home turf, so here's my two cents on the topic:
I've already heard music qualitatively on par with the tracks available on your demo page. I've heard it way more than I truly wanted or felt it was necessary, at least once a day while tracking on pro tools hundreds of albums you've never ever heard of, in studios in France and LA, for years.
It was made with people with the best intentions, coming from all sorts of walks of life, and yet it was obvious from the first note they played that they were condemned to the oblivion, their music destined to be basically never heard by anyone.
And this has been done every day, multiple times a day, in every studio around the world, since the '60s.
20% of Spotify music has never been played once. IIRC less than 40% has been played more than once.
There's a genuinely humbling scene in the 2002 documentary "Scratch" where DJ Shadow, a world-renowed DJ and producer, wades trough stacks of EPs out of a record store in NY that have never, ever been played once[1], which perfectly captures how little of the musical output being recorded we actually get to listen to.
Making music is very easy. Making music people want to listen to is hard, mind-bogglingly so. For every whitebread pop track you've heard on the radio, there's thousands of other similar tracks that have been discarded by an A&R, a radio DJ, some label, or simply by the audience.
I'm saying this with no ill feelings towards you or your work, but I can't concieve even the flimsiest of reasons why anyone would ever listen to (or license/sync/track/ ) any of those generated songs once the novelty of "music made by the AI" is gone.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gpKYnRdf0A&t=6s
For anyone that is a fan of hip-hop and interested in its origins I can recommend the Nas documentary Time is Illmatic (2014)[0]. I recently had the pleasure of catching the Nas & Wu-Tang tour and RZA said that Wu-Tang can claim nearly 30yrs of hip-hop's history. Noreaga said in an interview with Nas that he suggests people new to hip-hop start with Nas and then go _backwards_ in hip-hop's history to understand just how revolutionary Nas was as an artist to evolve and advance the form of rap.
I can also recommend numerous other documentaries such as Bombin (1988), Wild Style (1982), Style Wars (1983), Scratch (2001), Freestyle (2000), Martha a Picture Story (2019), 80 Blocks from Tiffany's (1979) and Beat Kings (2007) in no particular order.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdLDW6l7D8U
>The Century of the Self: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
I think all of Adam Curtis' documentaries are worth a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL617BE1DB723DB1D6
Some others favourites off the top of my head:
808 (about the drum machine): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2268622/
Scratch: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0143861/
Hoop Dreams: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110057/
Startup.com (a classic!) : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
The Fog of War: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
Or was it Grandmaster Flash? I wish I could find the TV documentary I remember this from.
Was this in the movie Scratch? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0143861/
Only other source I can think of is NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1080761/
(Both of these are well worth watching. NY77 describes the amazing cultural events in NYC, 1997.)
If anybody is interested in learning about the roots of hip hop (more specifically of DJ culture), this is an excellent documentary on it:
http://www.amazon.com/Scratch-Afrika-Bambaataa/dp/B00006AL1G/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1297121171&sr=8-7