Although Herc was known for letting records play before and beyond their breaks (sometimes, to the consternation of some observers, including the “wack” or undesirable parts, or all the way to the end of a track), perhaps his most lasting legacy is the practice of isolating and extending these breakbeats, transforming the fleeting, funky moments into loops that could last for many minutes. Eventually, by employing two turntables and two copies of a record, Herc developed what he called the “Merry-Go-Round” technique. Dropping the needle back to the beginning of the break on one record just as the other was about to end, and repeating the process ad infinitum, Herc could keep a break — and a crowd of b-boys — breaking for as long as that particular section would work. Though the hip-hop story has enshrined Herc as the first to isolate and repeat breakbeats in this way, it should be noted that Herc’s technical proficiency was never exactly heralded, and so his focus on and liberation of the break should perhaps be understood more as an aesthetic than a technical achievement. Later DJs, such as Grandmaster Flash, influenced by Herc’s model but more virtuosic in their control over the turntables and mixer, would improve on the formula, moving beyond drop-the-needle imprecision by backspinning, scratching, and cutting the records while cueing them via monitoring headphones, thus allowing one to mix breaks more seamlessly into one another and to isolate shorter and shorter sections for repetition.
As an element of style, Herc’s less-than-seamless, stop-and-start approach to selection draws yet another connection to reggae performance practice. Whereas hip-hop DJing — partly related to its roots in disco and the club scene — has since developed in a manner that privileges smooth, beat-matched transitions between tracks, reggae selecting has remained a style more defined by stark cuts and mixes. This is often the case even when a selector is “juggling,” or mixing sequentially, several songs on the same underlying riddim: when a popular song receives requests for a “pull up,” the selector rewinds it, usually suddenly and audibly, and lets it play again. Reggae-style selecting arises partly out of the constraints of using a single turntable
