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Review [published February 1999]
Ulf Poschardt: DJ Culture
Chris Mitchell
In the last 30 years, the role of the DJ has transformed
from being a mere purveyor of pop music to being the
creator of pop music. This transformation is due almost
solely to the humble analogue technology of the record
turntable, which still thrives in the midst of this supposedly
digital decade. In DJ Culture, Ulf Poschardt, editor
in chief of Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin,
has attempted to trace the evolution of the DJ and his
impact on musical culture.
However, Poschardt is not interested in simply
discussing fashionable modern DJs who create their
own records. He spends the first third of DJ Culture
discussing the prehistory of today’s DJs, the record
spinners who arrived with the advent of radio. There
are not many histories which can pinpoint an exact date
and time for their origin, but Poschardt maintains the
DJ came into being in 1906, when electrical engineer
Reginald A. Fessenden played a record of Handel’s
Largo in the world’s first radio broadcast.
DJ Culture details the social influence of this powerful
new mixture of recorded and transmittable sound,
along with the DJs’ subtly subversive light entertain-
BUY Ulf Poschardt books online from and
ment programming. While 1940s disc jockey legend
Alan Freed never scratch his own tunes together, he
introduced a whole post-war white generation to the
black music of jazz and rhythm and blues, flying in the
face of McCarthy-era conservatism.
Just as the DJ was created by technology, so DJs
began to exploit that technology to take control of the
sound of the records they played. With the beginning
of house and disco clubs in the early 70s, DJs sought
ways to extend their audiences’ favourite sections of
particular tracks, which led to using two turntables and
repeating the same segment.
From the sonic DIY experiments of Grandmaster
Flash, Kool J Herc and Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Culture
meticulously traces the roots of the modern DJ and the
birth of the record as technological collage, concluding
with the emergence of drum’n’bass and the seemingly
infinite possibilities of computerised music.
Poschardt manages to write about DJ culture in a
scholarly but informal style, interweaving quotes from
DJs with citations of numerous critical theorists. In
the hands of a less thoughtful writer, this could have
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