Music Review: Steinski - What Does It All Mean?

It's odd to have a retrospective for a first album and it's several times more odd to have a retrospective for an artist that most people probably haven't heard of.T hey might have heard a track and didn't know who made it but ut more likely, and perhaps more importantly, they probably have heard of and listen to artists who have been influenced by the work of that unknown artist putting out a retrospective.

When Steinski and his partner Double Dee teamed up to create their first cut-and-paste hip hop masterpiece, "The Payoff Mix", they weren't aware that it would be circulated and bootlegged the world over, or that it would become one of the godfather tracks for much of the mashup culture around today. No, they just wanted an excuse to work on music, use their extensive record collection, and maybe win this Tommy Boy remix contest thing. Fortunately, they did win, or the face of hip hop might have been markedly different.

It's true that DJ culture was already alive and thriving by the early '80s but while most DJs at the time were using their talents to augment live performances, the collage artists were buried in the studios making brand new music. Matching up and collaging vast stores of vinyl, they ushered in the era of A.D.D. hyper mixtapes: new creations compiled from history. Double Dee and Steinski - and later just Steinski on his own - were a shade different in the fact that they weren't really DJs. They were just music lovers with vast record collections, encyclopedic knowledge of musical and non-musical source material, access to a studio and a desire to see what they could do with all of that.

What Does It All Mean: 1983-2006 Retrospective is the long overdue collection of those experiments. It starts with the collaborations between Double Dee and Steinski. The first three are the official Lesson mixes - "The Payoff Mix", "Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix)", and "Lesson 3 (History of Hip Hop)" - and should be required listening for anyone even remotely interested in hip hop culture. The tracks "Jazz" and "Voice Mail (Sugar Hill Suite)" are basically lesser heard mixes in the same Lesson style, the latter using the Sugar Hill Records archive as its source material.

From there, the retrospective shifts to Steinski's solo efforts and collaborations with other artists. Although in a similar vein to the tracks made with Double Dee, many of the solo tracks tend to have a more singular and less frantically sampled ethos to them. "The Motorcade Sped On" is about the Kennedy assassination. "Number Three On Flight Eleven" is about 9/11. And "I'm Wild About That Thing" is about... well, sex. The quote-heavy tracks which also tend to be politically bent, including "It's Up To You (Television Mix)", are the least successful, as they sacrifice style and music for a forced message. But most of the other tracks are exquisitely built, and frequently showcase some expert turntablism.

Article Author: David R Perry

Lost somewhere in the rolling hills of Tennessee, David R Perry can occasionally be found doing dark, unspeakable things to words. Printed words, spoken words, electronically mangled words... really any kind but twittered words.

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