Early beat pioneers such as Prince Paul, DJ Premier and Easy MoBee recall the urge to create that drove them to use whatever tools were available: Betamax tapes, reel-to-reel decks, even cassette boomboxes, which were used to manually loop samples recorded off the radio. So it's understandable when some of these old-school sonic alchemists hate on current digital technologies such as ProTools—powerful, inexpensive PC software that changed the music industry, put some studios out of business and turned casual home recordists into overnight producers.
But in the segment titled "Hip-Hop Today: Under Construction," the titans are philosophical as well, allowing that new technologies (such as the widely available '80s gear by Japanese companies such as Roland and Akai) gave them their entry into the business. For a new generation of beat stylists, it's still about the spirit of invention, the thrill of transcending material limitations: not so much what you're working with, but what you do with it.