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When Mixmaster Mike of Beastie Boys fame describes in the new documentary film “Scratch” the first time he heard a DJ scratch a record – on Malcom’s McLaren’s 1983 single “Buffalo Gals” – he said he didn’t know what he was hearing. “All that scratching was making me itch. Zigga zigga. Where’s that sound coming from?” 

The answer quickly arrived on TV when a performance of Herbie Hanckock’s breakdancing classic “Rockit” broadcast a sonic revelation. Mike could see that Mixmaster DXT was rubbing a record back and forth under a needle, sending him and legion of other budding young hip hop DJs on the path to turntablism. 

Fifteen years after “Rockit,” filmmaker Doug Pray was approached, on the strength of his 1996 documentary about the Seattle grunge scene “Hype,” to direct a documentary about scratching, and Pray admits he didn’t know anything about it at the time. “I know it sounds corny, but the journey of discovery is exactly what keeps you going,” said Pray from his Los Angles home. “There’s something to be said for being an outsider in a culture, because you do go in with an open mind.  

I’m able to go in and ask really simple, kind of stupid questions. And sometimes the answers are the most interesting things. The answers always end up in the movie.” 

Easy to do, hard to do well, scratching is the cosmic noise for the soundtrack of the hip hop world. It’s the flash behind the gold-ringed glimmer of Grandmaster Flash and the bounce in Run DMC’s beats. Deeply grooved in the roots of funk, the DJ searches for his scratches in the breaks of his record collection. 

One of the really simple questions Pray asked about scratching is “What is a break?” says Zulu Nation founder Afrika Bambaataa in the film, “... the break beat is the part you look for in a record that lets your God-self just get wild.” 

“Scratch” can’t resist getting a little wild itself with sampling and slipping of its own while it presents a history, a definition, and a portrait of scratching and its practitioners. Pray found that to adequately tell the story of scratching he would have to include all the hip hop arts: breakdancing, graffiti, the MC and the D. It’s an urban arts movement that has been saddled by its association with rap as a street fad but has grown to legitimately stake a claim in music, language, painting and fashion. 

The DJs in the film take stabs at explaining their frenetic techniques, but the art of scratching cannot be adequately explained apart from the other hip-hop arts; it’s a style working in symbiosis with rhyming and dancing and the heat of a house party. Filmmaker Pray said he had trouble making the 90-minute film informative to people who don’t know much about the hip hop scene while appealing to the people who are already steeped in it. “Some things are left out,” he said. “I can’t cover everything. I’m not Ken Burns.” 

"Scratch" digs into the old-school founders of scratching with DXT and Grandmaster Flash (seen in a clip from the legendary 1982 feature film "Wild Style" scratching in his kitchen), asks scratching poster boy DJ Qbert how he talks through his turntables, and follows downbeat DJ Shadow digging the vinyl treasure trove in the low-ceiling basement of his favorite record store in a hush-hush Sacramento location. 

"The whole old school section is 15 minutes long. At one point it was 45 minutes long," said Pray about trying to present the whole story in 90 minutes. "There’s always a point in the editing when it suddenly becomes more about the movie and less about who are you trying to please, and the movie takes on a logic of its own." 

By letting the story come out of the material, Pray’s film shows scratching as trying to overcome its own obscurity. DJs spinning records at parties gave MCs and rappers the platform for rhyming over syncopated beats, who then eventually overshadowing the DJ with their front-man stage personalities. Record companies began to do away with DJs altogether, paying just an MC with a drum machine to make records. 

Scratching, the film suggests, existed as a closeted skill in the fingertips of bedroom prodigies at garage parties, working under the noise complaints of their parents and, like celestial jazzman Sun Ra, by communing with alien forces to create a world of cosmic righteousness through grooves and beats. 

A breakthrough release was "Return of the DJ," a 1996 compilation record featuring just scratching by masters of the craft, stepping them up to front stage. Now, sales of turntables as musical instruments are rivaling those of guitars as kids spend endless hours practicing for Scratchcon, an annual scratching competition that trophies the winning scratcher of the world.  

Doug Pray found DJs who were eager to talk about their influences and techniques in spite of the competitive spirit of Scratchcon.  

"It seems like there’s a new energy, and honoring old hip hop," said Pray. "Hip hop has become mainstream corporate rap, and become a narrow closed-minded thing. Because of that these DJs are asking ‘why aren’t people having fun at hip-hop parties anymore? Why aren’t people dancing? Let’s take this back to what it used to be.’"