Listening to most turntablism albums is like putting porn on the TV, turning up the volume really loud and leaving the room to masturbate. The interdependence of sound and vision are such that the spectacle of some character flipping his leg behind his neck while he juggles two records is perfectly reasonable as long as those two records are an old funk 45 and a Godzilla sound effects platter. Not only that, to become the creme de la creme, that same character is not allowed to repeat the feat two shows in a row, lest he dare wedging the panties of a thousand air-scratching credibility auditors. Mix Master Mike is one of the rare breed to dominate every corner of the turntable culture. He's the fanboys' favorite world champion, the old-timers' anointed torchbearer, and the ambassador to the mainstream, as appointed by The Beastie Boys. Yet, despite his credentials, his records are boring.
Take the title track, "Bangzilla". It's basically a Prodigy demo without that screaming idiot trouncing all over it, supplanted by Cold War samples and Parkinsonian scratching. Now, if you were in a small venue watching the video close-ups of Mix Master's hands twitching like a Thriller zombie all over the place, you could probably cup your hand over your mouth and declare, "Oh, snap!" or something. But on record, as far as you know, he put a vibrator on the turntable and went for a sandwich. The rest of the album follows suit. The beats are slabs of gray concrete to be scribbled and tagged over with inexorable displays of wikky-wikked film noir snippets in lieu of any coherent mood or theme. The more impressive bits will raise some eyebrows on first listen, but that's exactly where Mix Master loses out to a fellow cratedigger like DJ Shadow, whose albums are less about technical prowess than impressionist sample layers. While Shadow might not stand up to Mix Master in a battle, he understands that the production album is not a proving ground. Mix Master has little to prove.
In Doug Pray's 2001 film, Scratch, Mix Master has a scene where he runs through the basics of scratching in what looks like his mom's basement. It's like watching Lebron James show a fat white dude how to dunk. When Mike's done with the lesson, he rips the proverbial rim off your garage with an improvised assault on his poor little turntables. And then, of course, there are his live shows with the B-Boys where he interpolates whatever the fuck he feels like in the middle of the group's classics, enlivening the Boys' dog and pony show.
Inevitably, connoisseurs of the genre will snap up this album like it's a mint copy of "Skull Snaps" because it will serve as a mnemonic device for the times they've witnessed Mix Master Mike move a crowd. But for the casual listener, Bangzilla is nothing more than a mechanical curiosity.
