028-DJ Kool Herc, Deconstruction, and Synecdoche

In this episode, I am joined by Matt Carter and Eric Taxier to discuss DJ Kool Herc, his park parties, and his Merry-Go-Round technique--a method of extending the break of a song and linking it to other breaks. We discuss the issues of liveness (just what is "live" at a hip hop party using pre-recorded materials?), the art of DJing seen from the perspective of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction (that is, DJing as a series of reversals), and the break as a kind of synecdoche (a part that stands in for the whole and yet separates itself from that whole). For a quick example of the Merry-Go-Round Technique, see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw4H2FZjfpo The image art for this episode comes courtesy of  Mika Väisänen. mika-photography.com, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons; The file can be found at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dj_Kool_Herc.jpg