Back before samples had to be wait eons to be cleared, back in a day when uptown hip hop crews and downtown punks were checking out each other’s shows trying to learn a thing or two, there lived Steven Stein and Doug DiFranco — two pioneers whose adventures would transform them into the hip-hop superheroes known as Steinski and Double Dee.

Rabid music fans and hip-hop enthusiasts with day jobs on the edges of the biz, they got their “big break” in 1983 by winning a Tommy Boy Records remix contest for Play That Beat, Mr. D.J. by G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid. The remix has come to be known in the annals of hip-hop as “Lesson 1 - The Payoff Mix” — an incomprehensible sampladelic jam of breaks from funk and disco records that reads (just as the name suggests) like a time capsulized history lesson. It was from works like these that, much like the graffiti kids tagging stray subway trains with spray paint cans, a cult of “illegal art” in music was born. More music and full review after the jump.

Steinski - Lesson 1 - The Payoff Mix

The story of their influence on hip-hop culture and popular music since the 1980’s is not something that a writer can simply explain in words. It can be heard in the craft of their songs, cobbling pieces from everywhere to generate complete and utter reconstructions of great records — a style duplicated by countless artists since. Steinski and Double Dee, though neither consider themselves to be great turntablists, are considered godfathers of modern DJ culture and serve as the main inspiration to people like DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist and Girl Talk (not to mention one of my favorites, the Memphis Feel-Harmonic DJ Symphony Orchestra). One listen to What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective and you sense the bare essences of what their contribution to hip-hop and DJ culture really means.

This 2-disc set (Disc 1 is all the original tracks while Disc 2 is a monstrous and involving megamix from Steinski’s radio show known as ‘A Rough Mix’) is an absolute essential addition to the collection of anyone who considers themselves a fan of hip-hop, of turntablism, of DJ-oriented music of any kind. Every track is a journey, every moment a new adventure, every slice that Steinski incorporates represents a piece of the cultural landscape in the television generation. From thousands and thousands of recordings, Steinski gave birth to masterpieces as intricate as any of the individual pieces.

These works also represent a by-gone era, an era during which these works could be created with little or no fanfare from the artists whose works were sampled to create the new songs. The amount of money it would cost to pay the sampling fees for these tracks, were they created today, would be so astronomical as to prevent them from ever seeing the light of day — because the revenue they would inevitably generate would never meet the amount of money invested in them.

And it is from the minds of Steinski and Double Dee that these works and ideas sprang forth. We can begin to understand what Keith Haring, the NYC artist whose works came to represent hip-hop culture in the 1980’s, meant about hip-hop culture when he said that “Nothing is ever an end because it can always be used as the beginning of something else.” This retrospective, long overdue, is fitting tribute to the roots of sampling and hip hop culture from one of its greatest curators and inventors.

Steinski - Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix)
Steinski - Lesson 3 (History of Hip Hop)

You can purchase Steinski’s What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective from Amazon [cd or mp3] by clicking here.