Turntables might wobble...

Although hip hop was around--we'd seen Breakin' and Krush Groove--it didn't really enter my world in a serious way until 1986. I was in high school at the time, and I could separate my friends into two camps: those who listened to Raising Hell and Licensed to Ill, and those who did not.

I'm not really a fan of hip hop anymore, so news of Jam Master Jay's death makes me more nostalgic than anything else. I remember listening to "Raising Hell" on the way to school one morning and thinking about how huge the beats were, how it was sort of like the hard rock we used to like but somehow bigger and better. And I suppose that's the remarkable thing--even though we had no connection to hip hop culture, and had Whitney Houston and Billy Ocean and Level 42 and Kenny Fucking Loggins blaring at us on the radio--Jay's DJing was powerful enough to change how we experienced music.

(And, as an aside, if there's a tragedy here, it's not that hip hop lost a pioneer--as sad as that is--it's that a young man (37) with three children was apparently murdered.)