|
Dj Godfather on the U.S scene RBMA lecturer.
Every Sunday, 2,000 of Detroit's party massive queue up outside DJ Godfather's weekly club night. They've been "kicking back and getting wild" for the last two years, where, on an average night, Godfather will spin battle tricks for three hours. Godfather started DJing at 15 and three years later started his Databass Databass and Twilight 76 labels. Here, he explains how Ghetto Tech is uniting the kids.
GODFATHER: »The press called it Ghetto Tech, a ghetto, street version of Techno. It's been the most mainstream music in Detroit for the last eight years. It's also been the most hidden music because every single club plays this music. You barely hear Techno or House or Jungle or Hip Hop, you hear all Ghetto Tech. It's played on commercial radio stations like urban radio stations. It crosses over to everyone because Detroit is real segregated, it's the only music that crosses between the urban and the more suburban crowd.
The records I play, I don't even call them songs, they're DJ tools. That's the style of this music, making this music and the DJing. It's not just me who DJs like that. I was brought up to play that way. I wasn't like: "Hey, I want to practise a bunch of tricks" or nothing like that. Starting at an early age, you just learn from other DJ's and make up your own tricks and make up something from what you just made. So that's how I evolved. I started out when I was 15. So there's a generation older than me, who influenced me.
When I go out of town my sets are one and a half hours long. You can only bring two pieces of luggage on an aeroplane. So if I bring a third one it costs like $180, so a lot of times the booking agent would tell promoters: "Look, he can only do one hour, if you want any more you have to pay for his records. You have to pay for another crate to come over because he goes through 100 records within one hour."
A lot of times when I DJ in a different city, it's the first time they have heard that music. They go wild because they've never seen a DJ play dance music, do battle tricks. They've never heard music as raw as this. In Detroit, I can do all those tricks for three hours straight and it doesn't impress anybody because they're used to it. People in Detroit don't understand that it's just a Detroit thing.
The way I DJ outside of Detroit is totally different to how I DJ in Detroit. In Detroit, I'm on the mic, I'm getting people rowdy, it's not really like people are saying: "Hey, I want to go out of my way to act crazy and get dirty tonight." That's just how it is there. We get g-string contests and all that kind of crazy stuff. It's just a real party crowd, they don't go to a club to take music seriously. They just go to relax and kick back and act wild.
A lot of people mistake the whole music for a bunch of filthy words. Half the records I play don't even have words. Like I said, that's just a style of DJing and a style of tracks that we play to make it all come together. A lot of the chants came from early Miami Bass records like Luke Skywalker and the 2 Live Crew, which in the late 80's were played over Electro stuff like Cybotron or Kraftwerk. So the music is a blend of the two, you put a vocal hook over an Electro-style beat.
In the mid-90's we started really playing a lot of Chicago stuff because it almost sounded like the Detroit stuff. Detroit had more Electro-based ghetto music and Chicago had the more House-oriented ghetto music, so we just mixed it all together.
In the early days the early 'Enforcers' records on Reinforced crossed over. So did a lot of the Aphrodite records. Stuff like 'Rock the Funky Beat', that was a big song in Detroit because it was just drums with a bass line. It was real simple at the beginning of the song so it mixed perfect if you threw a ghetto acappella over it.
Our club's been going on for close to two years. It's on a Sunday night, it's three separate floors, we get 2,000 people. We get a really faithful crowd, they don't care if it's Monday, they got to go to work or they got finals in the morning or if it's Christmas Eve - they still come to our club. On the main floor we're live on a radio station 93.1, and upstairs we got a little Techno/House floor and downstairs it's nothing but Ghetto Tech and Hip Hop. The crowd that listens to Hip Hop, they also listen to Ghetto Tech. It's all hand in hand.
What really pushed it is the urban stations playing it. They've been broadcasting live from clubs for years with this music and basically, in Detroit, if a club is being broadcast on the radio, there's guaranteed 2,000 people there.
In the States, everyone wants to be a DJ and a lot of people talk a big game, but they're not doing anything. People throw a lot of rave parties in the States. They used to be good before but now it's just a bunch of little kids that go for drugs, so then the police come in and bust them. It's got to the point where, in Detroit, there used to be, like, four or five rave parties a night. Now, there are four or five a year. It got so watered down and people come for the wrong reasons now. They just go for the drugs and the kids are getting younger and overdosing and the police come. So now the city really cracks down on parties. It's just getting really negative in Detroit, in the States. Parties are actually harder to throw and it's harder to get people there that love music. They just get the drug heads.
This is 18 hours a day of work. I'm in the office until five, I go home, go to the studio, and relax two hours after that, go to sleep do the same thing over again. It's hard but a label is not going to get done correctly unless you do it yourself. If I'm not in control, then I don't like it.
When I started the label, I was only 18 and I didn't know how to shop my stuff to a different label. I said: "Okay, I'm going to do a record a month." And the next thing you know it became a full-time job and distributors were calling me from Germany wanting our records. I was just used to filling up the trunk of my car and taking them to three different record shops. If you have a successful record in this kind of music, you can make a living selling in one city alone. That's how big the music is in Detroit. It works to our advantage because every DJ buys two copies so you're selling double the records.
Do I get artists releasing on my label who are outside of Detroit? Just Chicago really, on Databass at least. On our Twilight 76 label, we've got a few people from Germany like Mas 2008. Our Electro is a little bit different. I actually have two separate labels just for distribution purposes. Some distributors only pick up on our Electro, like down in Florida.
The most important thing to me right now is getting this music worldwide. It's been hidden in Detroit for the last 10, 15 years. People think when they go to Detroit it's Techno city, when it's not. If you have a good Ghetto Tech record, you sell 1,000 to 15,000 copies of that record in Detroit alone for the first six months. That's how big the demand is, and that's just three record shops.«
Every Sunday, 2,000 of Detroit's party massive queue up outside DJ Godfather's weekly club night. They've been "kicking back and getting wild" for the last two years, where, on an average night, Godfather will spin battle tricks for three hours. Godfather started DJing at 15 and three years later started his Databass Databass and Twilight 76 labels. Here, he explains how Ghetto Tech is uniting the kids.
___________________
"I think the scientific and the artistic spirit have something in common. The scientist wants not only to learn the facts, but to understand how they cohere, fit together and make a whole. He even uses criteria such as beauty and symmetry to help decide which theory he wants.
The scientist cannot capture the whole cosmos in thought. In his mind he makes a kind of microcosm, which we see as an analogue of the cosmos. In this way we try to get a feeling for the whole. The artist, I suppose, gets a feeling for the whole some other way.”
David Bohm in “Art, Dialogue and the Implicate Order”, published in On Creativity RC (Routledge Classics)
|
