Favorite Song No. 351: Strafe – Set It Off

A name that is not often mentioned when discussing the birth of breakbeat DJ’ing, and extending a beat using two copies of the same record, or, as I like to call it, a little two-copy action, is Walter Gibbons. In 1972, he was performing at disco clubs, extending drum break portions of songs using two copies of the same record, and keeping flawless timing while doing so. Other DJs have said that until they watched him do it, they assumed he was playing a record featuring a professionally made extended mix.

The accepted story of the birth of hip hop is that it began on August 11, 1973, when Kool DJ Herc performed at his sister’s back to school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Bronx, but the history is all very hazy. We know that a DJ known as Grandmaster Flowers had been playing records at parks and other outdoor venues in the 1960s, and had established enough of a name for himself that James Brown chose Flowers as his opening act for a show at Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, in 1969. That was perhaps the first time a DJ played the role of opening act for a band, and if not the first time, it was certainly a rarity in 1969.

It’s very likely that Flowers’ performance influenced the style of the Bronx DJs, but that is mere speculation. We do know that Herc was 18 years old at the time of his 1973 party, and it was one of his earliest public performances. It’s said that he debuted his “Merry-Go-Round” style of mixing that night, in which he mixed from the break portion of a James Brown record, “Give it Up or Turnit a Loose” into “Bongo Rock” (or maybe “Apache”), and from there into “The Mexican.” At some future point, he started going back and forth between two copies of the same record to extend the break, though reportedly he did so without keeping the rhythm. It was more of a haphazard needle drop than a smooth segue. Grandmaster Flash is credited with perfecting the on-beat segue that extended a break using two copies of the same record, and staying on-beat as he did so, but we have no record of him doing that until 1977. Some claim he was doing it in 1976, but no one but Gibbons was doing it between 1972-75.

Did Kool Herc, or any other Bronx DJs hear Gibbons mixing? Maybe, maybe not. Disco was huge, and many of the Bronx DJs went downtown to party. Some, like DJ Hollywood, performed in the downtown disco clubs, so certainly some of the future Bronx hip hop superstars were exposed to Gibbons. As in science, multiple discovery is common in music. Sometimes, the time is right for something to happen, and more than one person makes it happen at the same time. Percussion-rich records were suddenly common, turntables capable of slip cueing and quick mixing were new to the market. Professional mixers geared towards DJs, with cross-faders and headphone cueing were also new. Everything was ripe for DJs to take things to a new level, which they did, so it would not be surprising if Gibbons and Herc discovered the same thing independently of one another. We’ll probably never know.

What Kool DJ Herc did undeniably revolutionized music, and he deserves every bit of fame, credit, and praise he is given and then some. His parties spawned Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, and the three worked together to birth the hip hop nation. That said, when it comes to two-copy action and breakbeat extension, Walter Gibbons got there first. His efforts are less celebrated, which I think is a shame. What he started doing in the early ’70s gave birth to the remixing techniques that propelled disco to the stratospheric heights it reached, and are still the de facto standards today. His re-edit of Double Exposure’s disco hit “Ten Percent” was the first 12″ single released commercially, and he paved the way for me, and every other DJ, who followed in his footsteps. He built the blueprint for the soon-to-be ubiquitous disco remix.

One record he mixed is “Set It Off,” by electronic musician Steve Standard, who recorded under the stage name Strafe. I first heard this record in 1989, when my classmate David played it for me. David and I were freshmen at Berkeley, and he’d come from New York, where he’d haunted the dance clubs, and knew all sorts of terrific underground music of which I was sadly unaware. I’d never heard of “house” or “trance” music until Dave played some for me. His family was from Belgium, so he spent a lot of time in Europe, and had some great early electronic songs he’d found overseas, and he was constantly exposing me to wonderful newness.

Even in 1989, “Set It Off” sounded ahead of its time, and I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a brand new song. It sounded like a fully-formed, modern house track, but was released at a time when disco and electro music sounded nothing like Strafe. Dave had Kenny Carpenter’s 1986 remix, but make no mistake– Carpenter is building on a sound laid down by Gibbons two years prior. As he had done years earlier for disco, with the original “Set It Off,” Gibbons created the blueprint for modern house music, a blueprint that nearly every subsequent producer and remixer has followed, which is why when we hear this song we think “house music.”

Every disco, hip hop, and electronic DJ owes an eternal debt of gratitude to the late Walter Gibbons. Bonarma!