Double Dee and Steinski is a duo of hip hop producers, composed of Doug "Double Dee" DiFranco and Steven "Steinski" Stein. They achieved notoriety in the early 1980s for a series of underground hip-hop sample-based collages known as the "Lessons". Although they never had a hit record, they proved highly influential for subsequent artists such as Coldcut, DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, the Avalanches, and Girl Talk. Their music was not widely available on CD until 2008 due to their use of copyrighted material. There have been occasional illegal re-issues, and several internet sites have mp3s of their music available for download. History In 1983, Tommy Boy Records held a promotional contest, in which entrants were asked to remix the single "Play That Beat, Mr. D.J." by G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid. By day, DiFranco worked in a professional music studio, while Stein was a copy supervisor for Doyle Dane Bernbach. Although the two were older (27 and 31, respectively) than most of their peers in the hip-hop community, they were both enthusiasts of the genre; Stein, in particular, had been attending downtown rap clubs for years and had an extensive knowledge of hip-hop's history (although early hip-hop records did not appear until 1979, DJing was a phenomenon that had been around since 1973. Stein claimed to draw inspiration from the Dickie Goodman records of the 1950s, which edited together pop songs and comedic commentary. Their contest entry, "Lesson 1 – The Payoff Mix", was packed with sampled appropriations from other records—not only from early hip-hop records and from Funk and Disco records that were popular with hip-hop DJs, but with short snippets of older songs by Little Richard and The Supremes, along with vocal samples from sources as diverse as instructional tap-dancing records and Humphrey Bogart films. The record was pieced together in DiFranco's studio in 12–14 hours over two days and was critically praised. The jury, which included Afrika Bambaataa, Shep Pettibone, and "Jellybean" Benitez awarded "Lesson 1" the first prize. DiFranco and Stein followed up this success with the track "Lesson 2 — The James Brown Mix" in 1984, which began with a sample from The War of the Worlds before quickly running through a montage of memorable breaks from classic James Brown records, as well as various other samples. Also that year, DiFranco teamed up with David Witz, a CBS Records producer who recorded as Arthur Ether, to