DJ Qbert

DJ Qbert — Richard Quitevis, born October 7, 1969, in San Francisco — is the most influential turntablist who ever lived. A DMC World Champion and founding member of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, Qbert did not just master the turntable; he reinvented what it could do, inventing scratches and techniques that became the vocabulary of the entire art form. His peers call him the greatest DJ in the world. The media calls him the Jimi Hendrix of the turntables. Both are understatements of a career that turned the DJ into a musician.

The origin story is pure Bay Area hip-hop. Quitevis grew up in San Francisco’s Excelsior District, the son of Filipino immigrants, and got his first turntable — a Fisher-Price — as a toddler. He started seriously playing with records at fifteen, schooled by the street performers and graffiti artists of the mid-eighties local scene. The fateful meeting happened in the Balboa High School cafeteria, where he battled a young Mix Master Mike; the two have been friends and collaborators ever since. By 1990, Qbert, Mike, and DJ Apollo had founded the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, the crew that would turn DJ battles into avant-garde performance.

The championships tell part of the story. Qbert took the DMC USA title solo in 1991, then won the DMC World DJ Championships in 1992 (with Mike and Apollo as the Rock Steady DJs) and again in 1993 — a run that gave global exposure to skills nobody had seen before. Watching prime Qbert is watching someone play an instrument nobody else knew existed: the crab scratch — his signature invention, a flutter of fingers across the fader that changed what was physically possible — plus a catalog of techniques so foundational that every turntablist under forty learned them from Qbert directly or indirectly. He even invented the first musical annotation system for scratching, composing on vinyl like a classical score.

The records tell the rest. As a member of the Piklz, Qbert appeared on the landmark Dr. Octagon (1996) alongside Kool Keith and Dan the Automator — one of underground hip-hop’s defining albums. His 1998 solo debut Wave Twisters: Episode 7 Million – Sonic Wars Within the Protons was then reverse-engineered from sound into visuals, becoming an animated feature film selected for the Sundance Film Festival — a turntablist album turned into cinema, which tells you everything about how Qbert hears music. Later independent releases Extraterrestria and Galaxxxian, funded by one of hip-hop’s most successful Kickstarter campaigns, kept the catalog growing on his own terms.

The teaching tells more than the trophies. Through Thud Rumble, his skratch school and equipment company, Qbert systematized turntablism — creating the tutorials, the tools, and the curriculum that trained the next generations, including the online QBert Skratch University. His collaborations with the industry’s biggest DJ companies carry his stamp of approval; his designs shaped the hardware the culture uses. And the honors kept coming: America’s Best DJ in 2010, and a knighting as “Grandmixer” by the legendary GrandMixer DXT — hip-hop’s hallowed knighting tradition, shared with only Roc Raida of the X-Ecutioners among DJs.

The screen career is its own chapter. Qbert was the focus of two major documentaries — Scratch and Hang the DJ, both selected at Cannes and Sundance — appeared as a playable character in DJ Hero 2, and did post-production work on the animated feature Turbo. Each appearance carried the same message to the mainstream: the turntable is a respected musical instrument, and its world ambassador is Qbert.

His Twitch sets bring the legend into the streaming era: live skratch sessions where one of the art form’s inventors still practices in public. There is something profound about watching Qbert stream — the master, still a student, still pushing. In a medium built for gamers and talk shows, a turntablist of his stature choosing to broadcast practice sessions is a statement about what the craft is: not a performance you polish and retire, but a discipline you live inside.

The influence is incalculable. From A-Trak to Craze to C2C to Z-Trip, a generation of DJs regarded as musicians rather than record-players traces its lineage to Qbert’s innovations. Hip-hop’s fifth element — the DJ — has no greater ambassador, and no more convincing proof that the turntable belongs on stage next to any instrument ever built. From DMC stages to Sundance screens to Twitch streams, DJ Qbert’s career is the history of turntablism itself, still being written.