Masters at Work's club-mixes of pop artists elevated the DJ from record player to studio producer

Masters at Work (Louie Vega and Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez) began by making b-side ‘dubs’ of existing pop and R&B tracks: ‘we took a couple of vocal samples from the song and put it on the b-side and call them Masters at Work dubs.’ Frankie Knuckles started playing their Debbie Gibson dub even though he’d never play a Debbie Gibson record — the remix was more powerful than the original. This established a new professional role: the DJ-as-studio-producer who could take commercial pop material and re-engineer it for the dance floor, extracting and amplifying its rhythmic potential. The role became standard: major labels began commissioning DJs specifically to transform pop artists’ singles into club-usable versions.

Examples

Armand Van Helden’s ‘Pumped Up’ remix of Tori Amos was ‘a massive crossover hit big in both the clubs and charts in the US and UK’ — the rock original transformed into a house record.

Assessment

Explain the Masters at Work business model for DJ-as-producer and describe what structural change it represented in the relationship between DJs and the major record industry.