Grandmaster Caz Reflects On Early Deejay Culture, Kool Herc Influence

by PAUL MEARA

Grandmaster Caz says today's deejays have it much easier and that it was very expensive to be an early deejay in Hip Hop.

Hip Hop music lore is always something easy to wax with the all time greats and Grandmaster Caz is one of the earliest when it came to emceeing and deejaying.

Recently sitting down with Vlad TV, The Bronx native reflected on the difficulty of being a deejay in the 1970s and the expense of buying both vinyls and the right equipment to stand out as a street deejay.

"The vinyl, that was the easy part," Caz said when asked about having to buy vinyls as opposed to today's easier serato system. "It was the sound system. How many people had that kind of equipment? The equipment that [deejay] Kool Herc played on was way before its time. No streetdeejays had that kind of equipment. I just did a project recently that I kind of had to refer to the equipment that Kool Herc had at one point and I said, "Really?!" When Herc was playing on those turntables, we was playing on these."

Grandmaster Caz also explained how early on your deejaying worth was measured by records you owned and those with the best collections were preferred.

"Your value as a deejay was the records that you had," he said. "What do you have that he don't have? What makes you different from that nextdeejay? And that's what it was about. First it's the sound system and once you establish that you have to be the deejay with the top music. You have to have the best records."