A Quote by Chuck D
DJ culture always made us aware that the best records were going to come from the small shops
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I've always strived to find those records that people don't know, but they actually go "Wow, what is this?" - and they go crazy to it. To me, that's more rewarding as a DJ, and that's what I always thought a DJ was supposed to do: it's about educating people. Now there seems to be a commercial edge to stuff and people are reacting to stuff they've heard on the radio all day long: to me, that's not what youth culture should be reacting to.
I've been a DJ since I was about 13, and I started out as a hip-hop DJ. So I was always playing records that would just get people going. I was just doing parties and high school dances and whatever, and then, progressively, I started making my own music, writing little songs here and there, but it was never anything crazy.
Hip-hop is a part of rock & roll because it comes from DJ culture. DJ culture is the embodiment of all genres and all recorded music, if you actually pay attention to it.
The game is always going to be bigger than the man and it doesn't matter what you are doing; records or whatever, somebody is just going to come along and break your records. But to achieve something that people would always look up to is something you will always appreciate.
There is no point mucking around and saying we are just going to have one or two shops and that's it... we are going to reach, you know, 40 shops around the world. I want 150 shops in China.
It's just that when you heard hip-hop, no matter where you were, it was a culture that kind of made you want to try to be part of it. Whether you thought you were an artist, whether you thought you could be a DJ, whether you thought you could breakdance, or whether you thought you could rap. It was the kind of culture that had a lot of open doors.
The Grizzlies organization did a very good job of always pushing us in directions and making us aware of things we might not have been aware of when we were young.
I represent a rural state and live in a small town. Small merchants make up the majority of Vermont's small businesses and thread our state together. It is the mom-and-pop grocers, farm-supply stores, coffee shops, bookstores and barber shops where Vermonters connect, conduct business and check in on one another.
My two main trainers were John Dahmer and DJ Hyde. DJ Hyde mainly taught me how to be tough: I mean, the beatings that he used to give the students as far as wrestling initiations go were as tough as they come, and I'm thankful for it.
Traditionally, with a DJ set, you just go hear DJ that has a good reputation and let the DJ take you somewhere. It was up to the DJ what he wanted to play. Typically in dance music, people didn't know most of the songs a DJ played.
All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us-by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.
I've never had anybody produce my records. I've always produced my own records. I've worked with a guy for a while who was an engineer who helped me produce records, but I've always made my own records. I'm a control fanatic. I've got to control everything.
I would have never dreamed that my career would be this successful. I grew up in an average home in Barbados, and we didn't live in the best neighborhood. But I was never aware that we were poor; my mom never made us feel that way. She loved me unconditionally. She made us feel anything was possible and instilled in me such confidence.
I think that some of the best runs that I've been on as a coach have come as the result of a tough loss or a string of tough losses that galvanized us and made us figure out who we were. Then we were able to take off. You have to use them as learning experiences and move forward.
It's tough when you're an artist because you get to go around the world and make a lot of friends, but guess what? One day, all these people that you love are going to die, from DJ Mehdi to DJ Dusk to J Dilla to Austin Peralta to DJ Rashad.
We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be.
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