DJ Craze

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Pick up the needle. Drop it on the record. DJ Craze, a.k.a. Aristh Delgado, is onstage at the 2000 DMC/Technics World DJ Championships in the Millennium Dome in London, and he's playing the crowd like a video game. Craze, 23, won the world championships in 1998 in Paris; he won again in 1999 in New York City. Most DJs just spin and scratch, maybe toss in a few behind-the-back tricks. When Craze spins, it's art--he twists notes in the air the way Jackson Pollock used to drip paint on a canvas. Now, at the London contest, he's adding something else that's fresh: he's playing the needle on one of his turntables like a percussive instrument, picking it up softly and dropping it--hard--on the record. An announcer delivers the judges' decision...

Hold on. Stop the music. How can a guy who just spins records--and mostly records other people recorded--stand beside the likes of Philip Roth and Cassandra Wilson on a list of America's best artists? Well, 75 years ago, many critics thought jazz wasn't an art; 50 years ago, they derided rock; 25 years ago, they went after rap. In the '70s and '80s, DJs such as Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore helped established DJing as an integral part of hip-hop culture. Craze is taking the genre further. People dance to DJs, but "turntablists" like Craze they stand and listen to, they study, they admire as they might a jazz soloist. Craze's sets are meticulously planned and carefully executed. Employing a keen ear, he locates the best grooves on a record; sliding his fingers across the vinyl, he nimbly slows down or speeds up the beat; twiddling a cross-fader (which adjusts the volume), he changes the structure of songs by blending the sounds of two records on two different turntables...

Pick up the needle. Drop it on the record. Craze's life is a spinning disc, always changing speeds. Track No. 1: Nicaragua. This is a fast number. "I don't remember much," says Craze, who was born in Managua. "There was a war going on and s___." Track No. 2: Change. When he was three, Craze's parents moved to San Francisco and then to Miami. Track No. 3: Discovery. Craze didn't have much as a kid--not much money, not much direction. But then, when he was 13, his brother brought home a set of turntables. "He was like, 'Don't touch my stuff,'" says Craze. But he was all over the stuff anyway. Pretty soon he was playing small parties, spinning merengue records, salsa, hip-hop. Then Craze saw a videotape of Mix Master Mike, a pioneering West Coast DJ, battling another DJ. "I didn't know DJing was an art until then," says Craze. He began to refine his skills. "That's all my life was back then," he says, "coming home and practicing."

Pick up the needle. Drop it on the record. DJ Craze is onstage at the 2000 DMC/Technics World DJ Championships. An announcer delivers the judges' decision: "DJ Craze--the first DJ in history to win one, two, three years consecutively!" Just as writers like Thomas Pynchon spin out novels that are a blend of literary references (it's no coincidence one of the main characters in The Crying of Lot 49 is a radio DJ), just as visual artists like Lee Krasner have created collages of bits of older paintings (she even used pieces of her husband Jackson Pollock's canvases), Craze's work is simultaneously an assault on tradition and a tribute to what's gone before. His listeners get the future and the past in stereo: the nostalgia of old songs and the excitement of hearing that music torn down and rebuilt for new generations. How many times can you hear the same song before you get sick of it? Craze offers music everlasting life--repetition without monotony, ecstasy without end. Pick up...Pick up...Pick up the needle...