ABSTRACT
What is a OJ? Someone who plays other people's records - for a living, for love, ideally for both. The majority of OJs - at weddings, parties, bars, rock clubs, and discotheques - "play" records in the most rudimentary sense of the word: slap them on the turntable one after the other. But in hip-hop and house, and in all the rave and club-based hybrids of those two black American musics, the OJ plays records in a different sense - one that's closer to improvising on a musical instrument, or playing with a plastic, mutable substance. As this element of "play" has gotten even more re-creative, the OJ has come to be considered an artist.
