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What Does It All Mean? - 1983-2006 Retrospective

by

Steinski

 
What Does It All Mean? - 1983-2006 Retrospective
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Girl Talk before there was Girl Talk: frantic mash-ups for breathless parties.

  • We Say...

    Review by Jeff Siegel

    In 1983, a 30-ish ad copywriter named Steve Stein and his sound engineer friend Doug DiFranco followed an ad from Tommy Boy Records to the glory of a $100 remix contest win. Not much of a creation myth, but “The Payoff Mix,” with its gleeful and increasingly frantic spray of tiny tape-slices of Culture Club, Little Richard and Bugs Bunny, became a keystone of mash-up culture. Now, after decades of overpriced bootlegs and whispers from the underground, the collected works of the man called Steinski have finally surfaced in one place, courtesy of the pirates at Illegal Art (home of clear Steinski disciple Girl Talk). What set the world alight here was the anything-goes authority with which Stein and DiFranco (and later Coldcut) would marshal anything within reach, so long as it squared to the omnipotent beat.

    The early party-rockers roll together the hits of James Brown, the Sugar Hill catalog and whatever was playing on KISS-FM at the time to create warped, elastic, floor-filling mixes. As utterly classic as those are, the real excitement comes when these elements were grafted to Big Statements, chopping up the words of anyone from Bush I to Gloria Steinem until they flow — like accidental MCs, scattering their words from their meanings and putting the “head” back in head-nod. Included is a mix Stein created for Coldcut's “Solid Steel” radio show in 2002, which riffs on Stein's practically Paleozoic age — he's pushing 60. But who else would begin a hip-hop mix with a snatch of '50s big-band rumble before tumbling into bed with Li'l Kim? Too much fun for a history lesson.

  • They Say...

    Review by John Bush, All Music Guide

    One of the most unlikely heroes of hip-hop has to be former ad man Steinski, who catapulted himself to street-level fame by entering a Tommy Boy remix contest in 1983 and delivering (with recording studio vet Double Dee) one of the best mastermixes of all time. No matter that this was hardly an "on the fly" turntablist piece worthy of Grandmaster Flash; basically, it came about from boxes of records, turntables, tape machines, and a dozen hours of studio time. The original "Lesson" (aka "The Payoff Mix") was a dizzying trip that took in dozens of track snippets interspersed with all manner of movie dialogue and cartoon samples. It also managed to keep the flame for truly hilarious hip-hop alive until Prince Paul and colleagues arrived on the scene in the mid- to late '80s with their own twist on the perfect beat. "The Payoff Mix" was followed in 1984 by "The Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix)," a series of the Godfather's greatest grunts, with just as many detours through funk and hip-hop as the first mix. From there, Double Dee & Steinski or Steinski solo took on everything from the history of hip-hop, jazz, and Sugar Hill to two of the most deadly serious moments in American history, JFK's assassination ("The Motorcade Sped On") and the events of 9/11 ("Number Three on Flight Eleven"). The Illegal Art compilation titled What Does It All Mean?: 1983-2006 Retrospective has most of Steinski's greatest work, including virtually all of his productions on the first disc and, on the second, one of the best mix albums of all time, his Nothing to Fear: A Rough Mix for the Coldcut-associated show Solid Steel on the BBC. Rap music has rarely gotten more virtuosic and creative than it does here.

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