That’s Kool Herc up there, one of the pioneers of hip-hop DJing.  I was looking at some wanky academic papers with titles like “Beatboxing As Information Recall” and stuff like that, and I was suddenly struck very, very hard by the fact that vinyl is a non-linear medium.

I mean, it’s an obvious thing, but also a really subtle thing.  The next step from that is to realize that house music is linear music, whereas hip-hop is not.  As a case in point, ‘way back in the day, house and disco tunes were sometimes play on reel to reel tape players, about the most linear medium every created by man.  Hip-hop DJing, on the other hand, doesn’t exist, can’t exist without the ability to do “live re-editing, live re-mixing, and mash-ups!”, to paraphrase a promotional campaign for a certain DJ that we all know and love:

So which is better?  The mix or the cut?  I’m pretty sure the answer is “both.”  I was raised on John Digweed though, so you can guess which way I tend to jump.  That said, I should try jumping the other way soon.