Also this issue:

The Empire Strikes Back
With Attack of the Clones, the Star Wars series gets back on track.
-Sam Adams

Another Fine Meth
The Salton Sea charts amphetamine-fueled delusions and winds up grounded.
-Cindy Fuchs

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repertory film

Screen Picks

May 16-22, 2002

movies

What Goes Around

<i>SCRATCH</i> THIS: Two turntables, a microphone and a homage to the DJ.

SCRATCH THIS: Two turntables, a microphone and a homage to the DJ.

Scratch

Scratch puts the needle on the historical record.

by Sam Adams

ScratchDirected by Doug Pray A Palm Pictures release Opens Friday at the Roxy

Watching any number of heavy-rotation rap videos stuffed with big-name no-talents and moonlighting movie stars, it’s not hard to feel hip-hop’s taken a bit of a wrong turn. Scratch, Doug Pray’s history of turntable artistry, pinpoints the moment when star power started to overwhelm musical innovation -- it was when MCs started getting higher billing than the DJs. Like Pray’s Seattle-spawned Hype!, Scratch is wider than it is deep, ranging over so many subjects that many get shorter shrift than they deserve. But from Afrika Bambaata to DJ Qbert, Scratch covers the waterfront, taking in dozens of major figures in the development of one of the 20th century’s most important art forms.

If nothing else, Scratch firmly establishes Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," with its showcase on the scratch wizardry of GrandMixer DXT, as the "Like a Rolling Stone" of two turntables and a microphone -- practically every DJ, MC and hanger-on interviewed cites Hancock's watershed single as their first exposure to scratching, the song that kicked open the door for everyone who followed after.

Pray's American Masters approach doesn't convey much street flavor, but the lack of attention paid to gangsta credentials is refreshing, even if it's odd to hear from so many figures who look like they might have wandered out of a freshman English class at Stanford. Qbert, who's returned to so many times that he might as well be the film's narrator, is a positively beaming figure in a sideways baseball cap, one who then proceeds to lay his hands on the turntables and make some of the strangest and most wondrous sounds you've ever heard in your life. Even if you've heard Qbert (or his onetime crew, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz) before, it's hard to imagine a pair of hands and a few old records producing the insane palette of sounds that come out of the speakers -- at least, until you've heard him do it.

Scratch doesn't offer a lot of surprises, though a few interesting tangents are left unexplored (like one claiming that Qbert has become a role model for Filipinos worldwide, partly due to the lack of competition). Going "digging" for obscure records with DJ Shadow, though, or watching Mixmaster Mike's pets spinning on an unattended turntable puts a human face on an art form that almost rejects it by nature. (It's hard to picture Shadow asking Puffy to pass him the Courvoisier.) Even the film's most optimistic voices don't see the MC era coming to an end, but even a brief listen tells you they're better off without the obscene temptations of Mountain Dew commercials and second-fiddle roles in action thrillers. One look at the crowd packing San Francisco's Fillmore for the Piklz's final show and you know you don't have to fear for the art form's future.