Swinging at Giants
Today, I was time-wasting as usual on my Facebook news feed, when I saw a DJ friend of mine “liked” a video. It was a video of Grandmaster Jay, hip-hop pioneer, endorsing and even putting his name on “Grandmaster Beamz.” In the ridiculous video, Jay effectively plagiarizes a famous routine by DJ legend Jazzy Jeff. He had removed the video, but we all know things on the internet don’t go away… See for yourself:
When my DJ friend posted this, and I watched it and replied to it, “Except that’s Jazzy Jeff’s routine.”, and posted a link to him doing the routine at a private NBA player’s party via youtube.
I wasn’t even really that upset about it, until I saw his responses to my comments, which THEN made me mad. The following conversation followed.
So, following this and some other comments I made about the bogus nature of his performance, he blocked me… me and a ton of other DJ’s that felt disrespected by this farce and that Jay would commit to endorsing such a silly and gimmicky product. If I wanted midi triggers, I’d stroll on over to DJ Tech Tools and grab myself a Midi Fighter Pro. It’s way cooler, and I wouldn’t look like a complete tool using it.
More to come on this, I’m sure…
Even Jazzy Jeff, on his Instagram account, says he never heard of “Grandmaster Jay”. He said he looked him up online and only found a Wikipedia page. Which, by the way, has since been deleted.
As someone who follows the DJ culture closely and does read up and research the history of DJ’ing b/c I love it, I for one have never heard of him. Which just made me extremely angry reading the comments you shared above from Facebook.
“Grandmaster Jay” is an ass-clown and how dare he take the “Grandmaster” title in his name??
So I checked that dude’s facebook page and besides the sketchy photos, he put up a status calling out the haters.. In the comments section a young lady named “Candy Jason” co-signs for him and talks about how she remembers him rocking parties back in the day.
I looked up her acct and she’s only been on Facebook for 13 hours.. LMAO!!
Dude is creating fake accounts to bolster his credibility.. GTFOH!!!
https://www.facebook.com/candy.jason.58
His response to me was… block Trenton, declare victory
Thank you for standing up to that bullsh*t!! I’ve been DJing for 24 years and I can’t stand the state of the artform right now. This dude totally misrepresented himself to make it seem like you could cut and scratch on that POS controller. That was bad enough, but then he defended it with some lame “hater” type response. So cheating wanna be DJs out of their hard earned money is something to be proud of now??
By the way.. I’ve been a hip hop fanatic for over 30 years now and I ain’t NEVER heard this dude’s name before. Can you really call yourself a “legend” if 10 out of 10 people have never heard of you?? More like a “footnote”.