Entry · catalog no. 1245
scratching
/ /ˈskrætʃɪŋ/ /SKRACH-ing
noun · The Bronx, New York · 1970s
✓ Verified
1.
The DJ technique of moving a vinyl record forward and back beneath the stylus by hand, using the mixers fader to shape the resulting sound into rhythm and pitch.
“He held the break down and started scratching over the bassline until the whole room turned around.”
2.
By extension, any short rhythmic stutter of a sound that imitates that gesture, whether made on vinyl, on a controller, or in software.
“There is a scratch on the hook that they programmed. Nobody touched a record.”
Origin & Attribution
Theodore Livingston, a twelve-year-old in the Bronx who performed as Grand Wizzard Theodore, found the technique at home in 1975 while his mother stood in the doorway telling him to turn the music down. He kept his hand on the record while she talked, heard what the stalled groove did under the needle, and went back to it deliberately. Within two years he was doing it in public, and it moved through the boroughs DJ crews from there. Mainstream accounts routinely hand the invention to Grandmaster Flash, his mentor and neighbor, who refined and popularized it, or to GrandMixer DXT on Herbie Hancocks Rockit in 1983, which is when white rock audiences first heard it. Both credits are downstream of a Black twelve-year-old in a Bronx bedroom.
1975
Theodore Livingston, aged twelve, discovers the technique in his Bronx bedroom
1981
Grandmaster Flashs Wheels of Steel puts scratching on commercial vinyl, cut live on three turntables
2001
Doug Prays documentary Scratch opens with Theodore recounting the invention
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
The Bronx, New York · 1970s
Spoken by
DJs, hip-hop practitioners and audiences; now general
$SCRATCThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady51 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
74/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1975
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Scratch, directed by Doug Pray, Palm Pictures, 2001
film
■
Mark Katz, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012
book
■
+ Cite a source1977: Grand Wizzard Theodore and the Invention of Scratching, 50 Years of Hip-Hop, KEXP, 15 February 2023
podcast
See also