I saved my birthday money to buy a "DJ Starter Kit" I saw in the back of The Source, next to the phone-sex ads. The kit consisted of two rickety belt-drive turntables and a mixer that was likely gummed up with baby rat skeletons. I had to wait another birthday to save up for a single non-garbage turntable, the Technics SL-1200MK2.
Wikimedia Commons/32bitmaschine
The Technics was the mastodon of turntables: heavy, fearsome, and now extinct.
Nowadays, most everybody DJs on laptops. But in the post-impeachment years of the Clinton administration, you needed vinyl. (You could've bought CD turntables if you were a billionaire from the future or something.) This meant cobbling together a sizable record collection. Mine mostly consisted of thrift-store garbage gems, like Jesse Ventura's heavy-metal single and that one record that's at every Salvation Army that everybody's grandfather wanked to.
A&M Records
You know, this one.
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