The use of turntables in hip hop is intimately connected to practices of borrowing and intertextual reference, practices that have made it a target for criticism by musicians struggling to see beyond simple conceptions of authorship and authenticity. The extraordinary innovations of hip hop, however, alongside the importance of race and place in its inception and development, have rendered this music a fertile site for academic research and debate. There has been some outstanding scholarly work in this field (see, for example, Potter Reference Potter1995; Krims Reference Krims2001; Schloss 2003), but little has been published on the details of turntablism and Sophy Smith's book is, therefore, both timely and welcome.

Although a DJ at turntables is still commonplace in hip hop performance, Schloss argues that the role of the turntable in hip hop production has been displaced, in certain respects, by digital sampling technologies. DJing, however, remains central to the hip hop world primarily because the processes and thinking deployed by producers are self-consciously carried over from the turntable to the sampler (Schloss Reference Schloss2004, pp. 51–55). Furthermore, as Schloss notes, DJing remains important to hip hop on a practical level. This is first because it means exposure and access to large amounts of music, secondly because earning money as a DJ is a common means for funding other production equipment, and thirdly because scratching remains ‘an essential part of the producers ‘arsenal’ (Schloss Reference Schloss2004, p. 55).

Hip hop turntablism, it seems to me, invests in the ideology of DJing as the ‘roots’ of hip hop practice but resists the trend towards using samplers by placing special emphasis upon the possibility of manipulating sound through the creative engagement of DJ equipment. This results in the fascinating set of musics and practices (fuelled, in part, by DJ contests) that concern Sophy Smith.

Her book falls broadly into three sections. The first concerns some background on turntablism including a historical perspective on the use of turntables in musical performance and details of the technologies and techniques used by turntablists. The second section focuses upon two very broad, and very different, areas of methodology: approaches to theorising the process of collaboration in creative group work and ways of analysing and notating popular musics, particularly turntablism. Aspects of these diverse methods are then brought to bear on three specific hip hop team turntable routines in the third section.

I found the first section (Chapters 2–5) in certain respects the most interesting. While I was aware of the basic processes involved in hip hop DJing before I read the book, much of the terminology that is carefully and clearly described by Smith was new to me. This is one of the strengths of the book generally; Smith's work is very accessible and takes steps to cover the basics systematically and clearly. Turntablist techniques such as punchphasing, backspinning, beat juggling and the crab scratch are succinctly described and given some historical context, usually with reference to the early history of hip hop.

I was not altogether at ease with Smith's broader approach to the history of hip hop turntablism. During the first section of the book there is a remarkable emphasis upon the use of turntables in the European ‘high’ art tradition with the work of figures such as Pierre Schaeffer (a key figure in the development of musique concrète) and Lázsló Moholy-Nagy (an artist associated with the Bauhaus) receiving extensive consideration. It strikes me that there will be teachers of music technology who will welcome such an approach. There is, I think, a perceptible tendency for students of music technology with an interest in black cultural forms to be enticed into the world of high art composition by drawing a connection between DJing and sampling practices and the work of avant-garde composers in the 1940s and 1950s. I would not want to dismiss such strategies out of hand, but there is a real danger here, it seems to me, of misrepresenting historical processes when drawing such connections. Smith's claim, for example, that Frankie Knuckles’ use of a train sound effect can be understood as ‘an unconscious nod to Pierre Schaeffer's Etude aux Chemin de Fer’ (p. 24) could be misleading. More generally, it strikes me as odd that a book on hip hop turntablism should have six references in the index for Pierre Schaeffer, when DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash only have one and two, respectively (on this issue, see Taylor Reference Taylor2001, p. 67).

The drawing of connections between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms is, of course, a worthwhile concern and there is merit in Smith's work, but there are times when her handling of complex issues falters. The comparison between nightclub DJs and avant-garde composers, for instance, leads to the claim that ‘the studio-based remix compositions of Walter Gibbons and Frankie Knuckles … were created from a desire to make music that worked more successfully in the club environment, rather than the development of music itself’ (p. 37). The question as to why the performance venues of the avant-garde – the concert hall and the art gallery – should be considered transparent when the club is not is left unaddressed.

The second section of the book (Chapters 6–9) is more concerned with methodology. At this point Smith's interest in collaboration comes into sharper focus. In Chapter 6 the work of Michael Farrell on collaborative circles is summarised and examined in direct relation to the creative work of hip hop DJ teams. There is extensive use of interview material here, a small portion of which derives from interviews carried out by the author, and there appears to be some correspondence between Farrell's stages of creative collaboration and that encountered in the work of DJ teams (although there is, again, the possible tension that Farrell's material is drawn from European middle-class activities). These stages are then developed further with reference to ‘devising frameworks’ theorised by a number of writers concerned with contemporary dance and theatre (pp. 66–70). This allows Smith to offer a more detailed model for the collaboration of DJ teams.

Before applying her model to specific routines, Smith engages with the thorny issue of notating popular music. After noting Schloss's arguments against the use of notation in approaching hip hop and Mark Katz's success in this area in Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music, there is a useful summary of the music-analytical taxonomies proposed by leading popular musicologists: Tagg, Hawkins, Moore and Wall (pp. 74–7). Smith's point that such taxonomies need considerable revision if they are to engage the particularities of turntable routines is well made and the framework for analysis she proposes is plausible and clear.

Another strength of the book is the detailed account of the current state of turntablist transcription which, it seems, has focused upon attempts to document scratch patterns. Smith goes on to propose a transcription method that is well justified but perhaps a little lacking in detail as the intricacies of any scratching are left unarticulated. (The scores, incidentally, are not published in the book and the URL provided does not work at the time of my writing; however, the author kindly provided me with one that does: http://turntablecollaboration.wordpress.com.)

The final section of the book (Chapter 9) looks in some detail at the work of three DJ teams: the Scratch Perverts, the Mixologists and the DMU Crew (the latter, I assume, was formed from a group of Smith's students at De Montfort University). Each of the three routines is then considered in turn, and a systematic account of collaborative processes and musical parameters is provided for each in accordance with the models developed earlier in the book. Accessibility is again a strength in this section but, for me, critical and analytical insights are too thin on the ground; the writing is almost exclusively descriptive and comments on texture, for example, tend to be along the lines of x is thicker/thinner than y. The approach is clear, however, and some conclusions are drawn.

There are parts of the book that suggest a lack of experience with academic conventions. The passages concerning Nattiez's semiotic analysis of the ‘poietic level’ are particularly problematic in this regard. Smith appears to have slipped a little when wishing to cite one source quoted within another, and makes the mistake, unwittingly no doubt, of suggesting that Abbate's translation of Molino in Nattiez (Reference Nattiez and Abbate1990) is her own. She goes on to present Nattiez's summary of Gilson as her own words, and makes the general mistake of suggesting that Nattiez's drawing together of Gilson and Molino is his her work instead of Nattiez's (pp. 72–3). I should also mention a misreading of an important text: McClary and Walser's ‘Start making sense! Musicology wrestles with rock’ does not claim that ‘the neglect of musical components in favour of sociological aspects is “the greatest single failure of musicology”’ (McClary and Walser 2000, p. 286, cited by p. 72); indeed, the opposite view would be closer to theirs.

Despite these oversights, much of the book will be useful to undergraduates and sections will serve as a useful summary of key topics for scholars. Perhaps more importantly, the book may serve to enliven important debates in popular music scholarship – debates, that is, concerning the extent to which musical and sociocultural analysis can or should be kept separate; the relative merits of deploying notation to aid analysis and, more specifically, the extent to which studies in hip hop, an African-American tradition with global impact, need to retain black history as a primary point of reference.