Get out your old record player. It's probably somewhere down there in the basement behind your broken-down Betamax, a Rubik's Cube or two, and a vinyl copy of Synchronicity. Cue up a record, and let it play. Congratulations--you're a musician. There may even be a spot for you on the rap-rock Family Values Tour.
Disc jockeys, of course, have been around for decades. In the 1970s hip-hop founding fathers Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash helped turn record spinning into an art. And rock acts--Aerosmith, R.E.M. and others--have long sought to bottle the lightning of hip-hop by collaborating with rappers. Today, though,...