Steinski Lecture (Cape Town 2003) | Red Bull Music Academy

It all began in the early ’80s, when Steinski, an incurable beat junkie, started schooling his friend Doug DeFranco in the joys of hip-hop. A short while later they entered a contest with a track made using tape and a razor blade, and received a standing ovation from judges including Arthur Baker, Afrika Bambaataa, Shep Pettibone and Jellybean Benitez. The track, “Lesson 1,” was the first of its kind to be created with samples – its closest contemporaries being tracks by Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, who made sonic collages using only turntables. They financed a pressing of its follow-up, “Lesson 2,” themselves and distributed it to DJs and radio stations. But it was “Lesson 3: The History Of Hip Hop” that perhaps pushed the copyright infringement a little far, and, as we found out at the 2003 Red Bull Music Academy, it was removed from shelves, making their bootlegs some of the most sought-after mixes in the history of hip-hop.

TOPICS:
00:30 - Tommy Boy remix contest
08:35 - Buchanan and Goodman
12:39 - Afrika Bambaataa
14:50 - Building "Lessons"
17:38 - Copyright
23:19 - Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow

MUSIC:
30:22 - Steinski – “Untitled Mix”

The Red Bull Music Academy is a global music institution committed to fostering creativity in music. We celebrate music, its culture, and the transformative minds behind it. Begun in 1998, the Academy has taken the core principles that underlie its annual workshop for selected participants and applied this curatorial approach to events, lectures, and city-wide festivals throughout the year.

[alianshampoprisioners]

The first samplist in Ny... A living legend!!!

[balle]

Lesson 1 was not the first track to be done with multiple samples. Grandmaster Flash already had Adventures on the Wheels of Steel and Afrika Islam was already doing collages on the Zulu Beats show way before Steinski entered for the Tommy Boy contest.

[KdaMFG]

The documentary SCRATCH brought me here.