DJ Craze interview
Posted:
22 Jun 2009
Craze laughs from his belly. “It’s the answer that everybody used to give,” he says, putting on a supercilious voice, “‘Well, turntablism is the art of using turntables as a musical instrument’.” He breaks back into his own voice, a lyrical, Latin-tinged argot, and says, “That’s what it is though: it’s the art of being a badass on the decks.”
And wouldn’t he know. Born Aristh Delgado in Nicaragua, the 32-year-old Miami-based DJ is still the only solo turntablist ever to win three consecutive DMC World Championships, gaining the third title in 2000 at the bright young age of 23. “I wasn’t trying to be greedy or nothin’,”Craze explains with the sort of self-awareness that makes cockiness charming, “I wanted to stop after my second one. But my crew was like, 'no one’s ever won it three years in a row, you’ll be the first one to do it.’ I did it just to see if I could.”
You win a DMC World title with a six minute routine on the turntables, scratching, beat juggling, and breaking out the odd bit of gratuitous showmanship. But into those six minutes of brazen skill go months and months of living, breathing, and sleeping your music; searching for the right beats, cuts, breaks and drops, the intros and the outros, the crowd-movers and the crowd-dazzlers. “It’s very intense,” Craze assures, “It’s geeked out. Every moment of every day you’re thinking about what you could do. It takes a long time alone in your bedroom grinding up practice hours. But it was fun.”
Craze quit battling at the turn of the millennium, but his natural competitive streak survives. “The competition factor is what makes people like me, and Klever, and A-Trak keep going,” he insists. “'Cause we want to be better than everybody else, with the skills, with what we do and what we play.” He laments the fall of scratch since the early 2000s and muses that the “age of the party rocker” has taken over: “The best DJs in the world nowadays are about something else. Back then it was about skill, now it’s more about who can do the Jesus pose, and who can wave their hands in the air harder.” He predicts, however, a second coming for turntablism. “It was really big in the 90s,” he says, recalling the glory days of the art. “It will come back. In hard times people get creative. The blood’ll start flowing again and it will come back. [The revival of] turntablism is long overdue.”
Before he sets off on a tour that yanks him from continent to continent (“I try to stay on the road as much as possible – you gotta keep in people’s faces”), Craze is appreciating some downtime with his family. As we speak on the phone, he is at his mother-in-law’s home in New Jersey. His nine-year-old daughter chatters in the background as the DJ outlines the surprisingly prosaic details of his day: wake up, eat, go to the movies, bowl... “Yeah, I’m bored out of my mind,” he admits, laughing. The following day is when the madness starts, as he flies to London to play alongside some of the industry’s finest at the Scratch Perverts’ Beat Down album launch party.
Though Craze normally tours solo, this summer he’s “going everywhere” with Klever, another 90s-bred scratch wunderkind. The two have different styles of music: “I play anything bassline, from fidget house to dubstep to a liiiiiiitle bit – maybe ten minutes – of drum’n’bass, and then scratching,” explains Craze, stretching his vowels and raising the pitch of his voice for emphasis (it’s a habit), “Klever plays hard electro, electro house, that kinda thing. But we’ve been friends forever so we know exactly what we’re doing.”
The two met in 1997, when Klever “still had glasses and dreads, [and] dressed all normal, with no tattoos.” It was around then that Craze was forming a crew with turntable prodigy A-Trak, and they were taking on talent. He remembers, “One of my boys in Atlanta was like, ‘yo, you gotta come check out this white boy, he’s craaaaaazy’, so I went to [Klever’s] crib and jammed out.”
And here they are – the third and fourth DMC champions to hit Hong Kong since April. “You got Kentaro, A-Trak, you got me and Klev. Well, those are, like, the four show-offs,” Craze offers with a flash of camaraderie.
In another impressive alliance, Craze is busy setting up a label with fellow DJ Kill the Noise. He mentions that they’ve got a “great situation going”. They’re going to be associated with one of the biggest labels in the world, he says, but he can’t talk about it yet. “I’m really excited about it, so that’s what I’m putting all my energy into right now: studio time and getting my label off the ground.”
Craze talks about his vision with a calm confidence that suggests he’ll achieve it, “What I want from my music is to make something that has a rugged, raw appeal, something dirty, that everybody likes.” To the dismay of fans who hope for a signature Craze sound, the DJ experiments with different music almost every year, bouncing from hip-hop through all kinds of bass. “The most important thing in my career is my happiness,” the thrice DMC World Champion says, “I’m doing all this for me. I’ve hopped a lot of genres and lost money and lost fans, but, God damn, I wake up happy.”
Samantha Leese
Tags:
Add your comment