A couple days ago, I got an email from a completely anonymous person, basically just letting me know that he liked what I did in the "Scratch" documentary. Anytime anyone hits me up like that, I immediately feel 2 things: appreciative and undeserving.
Being a part of "Scratch" really is one of the crowning achievements of my life. For those of you who aren't aware of it, "Scratch" is THE quintessential documentary of Turntablist culture. I'm very much a purist when it comes to how Turntablist and Hip-hop culture are represented, and in my opinion, "Scratch" really captures the lifestyle, essence, and mindset of these cultures really well. And if you can't take my self-proclaimed flim expertise as an acceptable voice of authority, it also got a lot of critical acclaim at the Sundance film fest in 2001, and gained nation-wide and international theatrical distribution. Turntablism has since peaked and declined. This means the likelihood of someone doing another turntablist documentary, let alone a half-decent one, are very slim. What does all this ultimately mean? It means that for anyone who has any curiosity about DJ's, there's a decent chance that this movie will make it into their DVD player, and as a byproduct of that, my music will continue to reach new people. This is why 10 years later, I'm privelaged to still get appreciation for my work. I'm fully aware of how rarely this happens in the Turntablist work, and there aren't really words to express how blessed I feel with this.
While I take a lot of pride in my music, I'm also fully aware that sometimes it just comes down to pure luck and circumstance that can yield success. My exposure in "Scratch" is the perfect example of that. There are so many other DJ's that have put on ridiculously amazing performances that I'd want to watch 100 times more than mine, but way more people have and will be exposed to my stuff simply because the film crew happened to want to film at that place, at that time, at that year of competition. I've always been terrible about accepting compliments on my music because of stuff like this. I just got lucky. There are so many other DJ's out there that more deserving of that short 30 second clip than I was.
At the end of the day, I just feel very blessed for the situation. As undeserving as it might be, it's a great feeling to know that your music has been and will be heard by so many people, and that possibly you might inspire someone to do something of their own. And there's absolutely nothing that isn't beautiful about that.
...Except for the fact that I've learnd that I now have an IMDB profile that tells me quantitatively how much more or less popular I am from week to week. As of this writing, my popularity is down 74%. DAMN IT!
