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.I N T R O D U C T I O Nto aƒord the country’s live bands, poor and working-class commu-nities gravitated toward DJs who built the powerful sound systems.These homemade sound systems amplified the already bottom-heavy bass rhythms that provided the essential architecture inJamaican music.The most popular DJs earned an even greater fol-lowing by featuring black American soul music, which U.S.militarypersonnel based in the Caribbean exposed them to.When he was oldenough, Herc wove elements of that world into his performance as aDJ in hip hop’s burgeoning scene.The cultural flows that connectedNorth America to the Caribbean suggest that hip hop was global longbefore being global was cool.But as much as Flash admired Herc he noticed a few flaws, too.According to Flash, “[Herc] might play something that was down-tempo and then right behind that would play something that was up-tempo, and it wasn’t on time.In between record A and record B, youcould see how oƒ time it was in the way the audience would go intodisarray.” Flash later termed what he observed as the disarray unison factor.At a time when most young boys his age would have dreamed ofsports stardom or girls, Flash developed a passion for mastering thefine art and science of DJing.With passion and persistence he pur-sued the ideas that were revolving in his head as fast as the discs he became famous for spinning.By his estimation he spent about threeyears of his life locked away in his bedroom mastering what, inessence, would become his craft and a new form of musicianship.“Isacrificed most of my kid years to—to try to just take this thing that was just running around in my head and make it a reality.”Flash and his DJ friends believed that in every great record there is an even greater part, what they called “the get down part.” That part of the song is more formally referred to as the break.Flash wanted to capture and extend the break beat because it was usually only a fewseconds long.What he really wanted was to take sections of songs from vinyl and reinvent them by producing newer, longer, and funkier ver-sions: essentially, making new musical soundscapes from previously27
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