With the rise in popularity and hence, commercialism of the hip-hop subculture nowadays, the urban lifestyles various facets have naturally been pushed into the mainstream. Not without the help of MTV and its various offshoots, a lifestyle that just a few years ago was still underground is now common fodder for soft-drink commercials, billboard ads and even NBA games. It’s not uncommon nowadays to ask a 50 year old Caucasian farmer from the Midwest who The Fresh Prince is and get a correct answer.

It’s only natural then that the street arts that make-up the backbone of hip-hop has also gained international pop attention. Graffiti writing, break-dancing, rapping and beat-boxing used to be confined to the urban ghettos of the main cities of America like New York and Los Angeles. Now spray-painted (aerosol) art can be seen on the walls of Berlin, national break-dancing competitions in Seoul are televised globally, and rappers are a dime a dozen in the cities of the Philippines. One can truly say hip-hop has gone pop when Iraqi kids scramble to get their hands on posters of 50cent. The saying “music knows no boundaries” becomes a colossal understatement indeed in light of this.

‘Deejaying’ or the more accurate term- turntablism, is one of the last nuances of hip-hop to come out of the urban jungles of America. DJ Babu of the world-famous Beat Junkies (an award-winning turntablist crew) defines a turntablist as “one who uses the turntable in the spirit of a musical instrument”. Still, a more detailed definition- “a musician: a hip-hop disc jockey who in a live/spontaneous situation can manipulate or restructure an existing phonograph recording to produce or express a new composition that is unrecognizable from its original ingredients.” The word hip-hop was said to have been coined from the way early turntablists ‘hopped’ from one turntable to another in a ‘hip’ fashion during live shows with rappers. Indeed, the DJ has come a long way from being a rapper’s sidekick during hip-hop’s infancy. Now they can be seen playing in rock bands like Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Incubus- packing stadiums throughout the globe with their fusion of rock and hip-hop music.