Forget what anyone else has told you. The act of scratching a record and using the resulting sound within music was invented by Grandwizard Theodore. He in turn taught the skill to the pioneers of hip-hop, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambataa, and DJ Kool Herc.

The story goes like this: Theodore was mixing records in his room when his mother burst in to talk to him. He didn't want to lose the place on the record he was currently playing, so he kept pulling the record back while talking to his mother. As he continued to talk to her and repeatedly move the record back and forth he found he liked the sound it made. He worked with the sound some more and finally presented it to his friends, and it gained their approval.

What had started as Grandwizard Theodore's attempt to keep a record in place would become one of the primal elements of hip-hop.

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