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I need some help from the musicfrom
the maestro, check rt out/ Somebody
make some noise in this joint man...
D'Arcy: Club culture is much bigger down there than it is up
here. Here, there's a big struggle between educating your people
and... you gotta strike the right balance between educating your
crowd...
DJ 43: ...iyd
keeping them
happy...
D'Arcy: ...but
still you've got to
watch your commer
cial interests also. I
mecn you don't want
to lose...
DJ 43: ...iose /our ass...
D'Arcy: Yeah, you don't want to lose money. You wanna go and
make sure that people come out for it, and you wanna introduce
some new people and say "Yeah, listen to these DJs or producers..."
But still you've gotto make sure that you hove that balance. I don't
wanna knock the crowd around here but I just think that they're
happy with relatively... they're not really open to new things. They
want to hear the same things.
DJ 43: They'll bring the some DJs. The Atlanta production com
panies will usually bring the same DJs.
D'Arcy: Because the-) mow those do well. I don't really blame
anybody, really, because you've got to watch your commercial inter
est.
DJ 43: And that's the thing about Phungus. When we first found
ed Phungus we were all about education. There were no DJ names, it
was just "Phungus DJs" period. It wasn't like "43, Marie, D'Arcy,
whatever..." it was the "Phungus DJs." And we would go to bars that
are not dance clubs. The closest they would ever come is maybe play
a Chemical Brothers CD.
D'Arcy: Pubs.
DJ 43: Pubs. And we would set up our sound system and we'd
play dance music all night long. Our friends would come by and f hey
would dance.
D'Arcy: It's so funny, cause we're in Athens, right? We were
like, "We want to do something that's kinda dance oriented, and we
gotta start somewhere." So we were throwing parties at places like
Flannagan's.
DJ 43: Our first party was at City Bar. We did City Bar, we
played Georgia Bar, we played Flannagan's a couple of times, we
ployed Half Moon, then we did some at O'Malley's. The bigger we
got, once we started doing the rave type thing... When we first
started doing it, owe of the guys would play acid jazz to begin with,
then we'd work up to house and I'd play a little break-beat, and then
D’arcy would play a little Jungle at the end of the night. It was a
good coverage.
What's all this "original" con?AVe all live in th€ same
museum/We all rearrange the same old song...
—Gary Numan "My Breathing"
"I don't think you'll ever meet a rave kid who doesn't like hip- Although I do think it has a lot to do with your rhythm.
-DJ Kooi "Let Me Clear My throat
I don t mink you n ever meer a rave xia wno aoesn r nice nip-
hop" says Phungus' Brian Blessinger. It is the root of all DJ culture,
and Athens has had its ov/n hip-hop underground for years. In the
words of Athens DJ Mr. Big:
I don't think you con talk about DJincj
unless you talk about hip-hop, unless you talk
about where it comes from. Do you know
where it comes from? Do you know why we
started doing what we do with turntables?
Yeah, it was a money thing, but it was more
than that. It came from back when the clubs fig
ured out that you could make more money if
you hired one guy to play Top 40 instead of
paying a band to play it.
So you had all of these clubs with DJs, disc jockeys, playing oil
these songs that we didn't like. So what they did was they took the
rhythm, the
rhythms that
they wanted to
hear, and they
used their
turntables to
get them.
Thai's how you
ended up with
people like
Grandmaster
Flash and
A f r i k a a
Bambaat aa.
That's how you
got people ele
vating the art.
Don't get
wrong. This isn't just a New York thing. Hip-hop's every
where. There's always been an Athens hip-hop under
ground. You ever heard o f the Cobra Crew? HCA?
Technique? They were doing what they do years ago. It's
just now you've got people in the clubs, downtown, they
want to hear it too. Some of them are still around, but
some of them moved away. I think HCA is spinning
strip clubs in Florida. Back then, we all used to do block
parties because they didn't want us downtown. Or we'd
find some place way out in the woods.
I still get out and do my thing. I was spinning the
other night over at The Fifth Quarter. Used to spin at 02
when it was open too. We had to stop that though. They want our
music, but they don't want us. You know what I'm saying? They think
it's OK for us to come down there and spin records in their clubs.
And it's OK for people to come out and spend their money. But fhey
don't want to show us the respect we deserve.
I'm not saying that it's a racial thing. It doesn't matter if you're
white or black if you want to be successful with hip-hoD. That's not
where hip-hop comes from. It comes from the pureness of your heart.
When I got to the show.../! could tell that you had been
crying, crying/lts that same sing-song, and the DJ
sucks...
—R.G.M "Radio Song"
Shortly after the first Flagpole interview (above), Mark Bell
moved to Tampa. Four months later, he was back in Athens.
"Tampa was very drug-oriented," he says now. "All they like is
breakbeat. There's no personality vith the DJs — down there they all
play the same shit."
We're sitting on the floor in Mark Bell's front room — we ask
D'arcy to show us what he means when he says he plays "Techstep "
D'arcy throws a platter on the turntable, says, "We also call this 'Death
From Above/"
When the needle hits the wax, o huge, ugly, violent sound
descends on the frantic beet — like a snippet from The Ride of the
Valkyries played by a symphony of weed woclcers. As soon as the
sound hits, Bell rolls over in a ball on the floor, clutching his stomach
laughing.
"We're in the second or third coming of the Athens scene,' Bell
says, after regaining his composure. "[About a year ago] the scene
died out. Some of the kids were doing a lot of drugs... crystal
mefh...
"The new batch of kids, they're more mature. They've gotten out
of their party phase." Although drugs are sometimes a part of the
scene os
much as
they are of
the rock
scene, he
' says "you
don't see
'em all
crocked out
in the mid
dle of the
day" these
days.
When
D'arcy and
Brian clear
out and the
turntables
are still, Sell says,
"I sent R.E.M. a letter, basical
ly saying I'd really like the chance
— even if it ne^er gets put out — to go through their back catalogue
and do some remixes.... I don't know if it got lost in the snuffle, but I
need *o send them a record and keep it on their mind, 'cause I think
it'd be really cool for these two very different sides of the Athens
scene., that are also very much one."
mmvs head
DOWNTOWN
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