Rap Stats and the demise of the DJ

Need an indication of how DJs are regarded in Hip Hop? Rap Stats gives an indication through emcee's lyrics.

Rap Stats technics midi

Rap Stats technics midi

If the urban street slang employed by Hip Hop luminaries make little or no sense to you, then head to Rap Genius is for you. And to compliment their vast library of rap lyrics, they’ve complied a frequency list of what words were used and when. I hadn’t really paid it any attention until this morning, when my old Cohort Mr Trick posted an all too poignant visual commentary via Rap Stats on the relationship between DJs and emcees.

From my own personal point of view, the stuff we see in the charts is Rap, a derivative of Hip Hop that essentially strips out 3 of the 4 elements of Hip Hop to leave the emceeing element i.e. the most commercial that has a face and a voice. DJs have become little more than a prop to all too many Rap megastars, and rolled out as nothing more than a prop to legitimise themselves to the culture. </end_soapbox_rant>.

Need evidence? I put a few choice DJ related words into Rap Stats and got back some disturbing graphs.

Keyword: DJ

Rap Stats (1)

Keyword: Turntable

Rap Stats (2)

Keyword: Technics

Rap Stats (3)

Keyword: CDJ

Rap Stats (4)

Keyword: MIDI

Rap Stats (5)

 

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Mark Settle
Mark Settle

The old Editor of DJWORX - you can now find Mark at WORXLAB

Articles: 1228

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32 Comments

  1. Chris ‘Kali’ Karns – cool vid with Mortal kombat style bizness but a mutli layered scratch routine seems an odd way to advertise this product he’s also done much better routines previously in my mind… ones where i feel i’d need four arms to even get close to.
    Wouldnt put me off buying one if i had the cash though

  2. you can run SDJ and SSL on the same system, so you can test SDJ at home and still use SSL for gigs…. getting the popcorn ready for the SYNC debate kicking off again…. :)

    • I understand the focus on new hardware, it makes business sense. But It’s a shame that a software limitation sees perfectly good hardware like SL1 and TTM57SL on its way to the dustbin.

      Folks moving to Serato DJ might consider sending unwanted gear the way of the xwax developers, where they could see out their retirement as open source on Linux (eg. with xwax/Mixxx)

      I believe there’s already basics in the Linux driver, but missing stuff like the phono input. People asked but just no developer had access to one to fix this up.

      So definitely don’t throw these out!

  6. At the risk of sounding unnecessarily offended, Windows 8 is pretty stable. I haven’t had any remarkable OS failures, or indeed any (although that might be my selective memory at work)

  9. hey dj worx crew… maybe you can help me with this

    i love the cdj 2000 support in serato dj but i have a question for the sync feature.. when i activate simple sync and move the pitch fader everything works perfect but how can i set the fader to another position without changing the bpms like i can do it on the serato dj controllers like Numark NS7 with Pressing Shift and moving the pitch fader…

    this is my only problem .. i hope you can help me with this :-)

    greetings olde

    • This won’t be quite the solution you want, but you can now disable the “maintain sync on track load” checkbox in the setup screen.

      Basically, sync is not enabled unless you push it, so when you loaded the track you could adjust the two sliders independently…

      Otherwise, if sync is on you need to disable it on the deck in order to adjust the tempos independently.

  14. SDJ seems to be lagging behind (the extremely stable and mature) SSL at the moment in functionality and stability. For my part, I’ll probably check it out again in 6 months or so.

    rs

  15. Is there any possibility a TTM57 would work with SDJ? I’m planning on getting either a 61 or 62 in the near future, but if I don’t want to completely get rid of my 57 either ya know?

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