DJ JS-1 – The Unkut Interview

Rocksteady member DJ JS-1 has been putting it down in the DJ, mixtape and production game for years, as well as getting busy with the paint as JERMS since his school days. We caught up last November to discuss the sorry state of modern rap, the trials of making compilation albums and tips copping vinyl on the sly.

Robbie: How did it start for you?

DJ JS-1: Growing up in Queens, New York – I was born in the mid 70’s – so by the time I was old enough to look around and know what’s going on, you’re six, seven, eight years old. It’s early 80’s and hip-hop culture was everywhere. My grandmother lived near Lefrak and I first remember them doing a mural on the side of pizzaria there when I was really young. I always loved to draw, and I got into graff from watching these guys do that. By third or fourth grade I was trying to draw my name and do stuff, and in sixth grade we stole some spray paint and went to the schoolyard to try and write our names. That was 1986. I was always listening to hip-hop and started buying vinyl as soon as I was old enough to get on the bus or the train by myself to get to the record stores. Then I saved up to get turntables.

What were some of your favorite record stores growing up?

Locally in Flushing, where I lived, there was a little flea market and there was a small record store in there. That was the closest one to my house that I could get to off one bus, and we used to see Large Professor, cos he lived near there. Large Professor was always walking around up in there. He was someone I always looked up to, so that was kinda cool. Later on it was Beat Street Records in Brooklyn, Rock & Soul Records and Downstairs Records in Manhattan, then eventually A-1 Records and Sound Library in downtown Manhattan. Slowly but surely most of them got phased out, there’s a handful left now. We used to make whole weekends for that! Make the rounds to all the stores and run into people we knew. I met DJ Rectangle in 1993 when he was in New York or the first time I met Roc Raida and all these different favorite DJ’s were all at record stores. It’s sad that we don’t really have that anymore, I really miss that.

Even the memory of where you found a particular record can be great.

Of course. There’s times when we would go to the record store and I would have $15 on me and I would find so many records that I couldn’t buy. I would take the records and hide them and hope that when I came back nobody’s checked in this section cos there’s horrible records here. Those records meant to so much to me, cos when you went back and they were still there it was like, ‘Yes!’

Did you rack much stuff?

We used to do the 99 cent sticker trick. We went into Beat Street one time and they took the roll of 99 cent stickers when the girl turned around and they were just taking $20 albums and putting the 99 cents sticker on it! The girl at the counter had no idea. They’d just drop a stack of records and she just rang them up. That was a nice trick.

When did you decide to start making beats?

Around the mid 90’s I did something on the second Return of The DJ record on Bomb Records, and when I started seeing people around the world saying, ‘This thing that this guy and Spinbad did is really good!’ Then me and Spinbad did a couple of mixtapes and they sold a lot. We started meeting people like Jazzy Jeff and DJ Scratch and they were saying, ‘We appreciate what you’re doing, this is really good.’ Once you start getting feedback from the people that you look up to it’s like, ‘OK, maybe there’s something to this!’ I still didn’t look at it as a career but I was plotting away to keep putting out more mixes and getting my stuff out there. Eventually in the late 90’s when had I met up with Rahzel and he said, ‘I need someone to tour around the world.’ Touring is pretty direct way to put money in your pocket, so I was like, ‘OK, I can walk away from what I went to college for.’

Aren’t their two DJ Spinbad’s?

The other Spinbad is a guy from Philly who’s really old school, before Cash Money. Some people argue that he was the guy who was doing the transform scratch before Jeff and Cash Money. The Rock The Casbah Spinbad is the one I know. In the 90’s we were doing the 4-track mixes and really trying to go crazy producing mixtapes. We scratched hooks from songs, added songs from movies and all stuff like that. On the cover with him on the original Rock The Casbah mixtape, it’s me, him and A.Vee. I’m wearing my Jungle Brothers camouflage hat. [laughs] We took The Breakfast Club cover. Me and Spinbad had made a tape called Cold Cuts Remixes and we sold a lot of that. Then he put the 80’s tape together, I did a few scratches on that I think, I was at his house. We were always cutting up 80’s stuff but nobody was making a mixtape with it, and he was like, ‘I’m just gonna go for it and put all the movie stuff on it like we do for hip-hop mixes.’ I don’t even know what the numbers would be on that, sales-wise, but that tape did excellent. It really got around.

Is it intimidating to work with a rapper on the level of Kool G Rap or KRS-One?

It is, because I’m thinking how can I say anything to these guys about, ‘You should make a song about this’ or ‘Say it like this, this is the direction I want to go in with this song.’ It was awkward for me at first but KRS was kinda the guy that helped me out a lot because he told me to give him direction. He would ask me, ‘Is this how you want it? How does this sound?’ Once I saw that he was receptive to my criticism or me taking control of the session because it’s my song, I kinda let that roll over to the other guys. Most people were pretty cool. I was just happy that they agreed to work with me in the first place, but if you want it to come out the way you want it you do at a certain point have to speak up. Now I’m comfortable with everybody and I have no problem.

You also managed to get Ced-Gee and Kool Keith on the same track.

I got Ced and Keith to turn up to the studio at the same time, at 9am on a Sunday morning! [laughs] That alone is a feat! I didn’t expect it to happen. They told me they were gonna be there and they showed up! To this day it’s one of my greatest moments. Not an easy thing to pull off.

What’s the longest you’ve ever tried to get somebody on a track?

There’s been times I ‘ve waited ten months for a verse. I don’t have a timeline when I do these projects, cos I know what it’s gonna be like with all these different MC’s on it. I know it’s gonna be a long time so I’m always constantly working – some songs were meant to be on an album that came out last time, some songs don’t get finished until the next project – I just do it as I go. It’s definitely not easy, but I love it though, so I can’t complain.

How do you feel about the way New York has changed since when you were growing up?

It’s totally different to how it was back then. In Brooklyn now, all the weed spots that you used to go to and the crack areas and the gun areas, now Madonna’s trying to open restaurants there, the rent is so expensive, you see people riding around on expensive bicycles. Vegan shakes and coffee shops that used to be weed spots. You can’t knock that the neighborhoods are getting better. but at the same time a lot of the stuff that we grew up with music-wise, where the feeling came from of that music? That stuff is taken away so the stuff that’s made now is just not gonna have that same vibe because it’s not coming from the same place. When we were coming up it was a lot more rugged, everyone had their camouflage and their Timberland boots and it was ‘rough, rugged and hardcore.’ Now if I go to the park and I look at the style of these kids and what they’re wearing and what they’re talking about in the songs, it makes sense. The kids are all wearing these super-expensive outfits, their sneakers are $300 and they don’t wanna play basketball because they don’t want to get their sneakers dirty. They’re wearing these pretty jeans and everybody looks like a little R&B celebrity and the music reflects that. It’s much softer.

Everyone wants to talk about their feelings.

[laughs] Right! Everyone’s all emotional. It reflects that also in the neighborhoods – where people were getting beat up in Bushwick is now all art galleries and you get a kale shake. People got priced out, unfortunately. The stuff we felt made New York cool and the reason that everyone wanted to come here, it’s like the people that did eventually come here took that away. They talked about, ‘There’s graffiti in Brooklyn, it’s really cool.’ But now they took away graff and they put in street artists. Guys stenciling Marilyn Monroe and an owl. It’s like, ‘What’s up with the real graff?’ ‘Oh, we don’t want that!’ It’s strange. Also, we don’t really have any hip-hop clubs. When we were growing up there were tonnes of hip-hop clubs – there was Homebase and The Tunnel and Marrs and The Arena and The Roxy and The Palladium and Latin Quarter. There places were huge, and people would be in there, dressed hip-hop and they would be playing raw hip-hop all night long. The promoters weren’t like, ‘You have to play something for the girls!’ People forget, they would put stuff off the Criminal Minded album in the club and the whole club would go crazy, girls would be dancing.

It was all these massive hip-hop clubs and they did away with all of ’em! A lot of times the neighborhood would complain and say it was drawing people they didn’t want there, and in certain parts of Manhattan they would say, ‘There’s people smoking weed outside! We can’t have this!’ They would find ways to shut the clubs down. It was a lotta political nonsense and the vibe of the music started changing. Puffy and these guys were promoting the fanciness aspect of it and in their videos they’d be in these plush clubs with the champagne dance and the suits, and the promoters would be like, ‘We want our place to look like this!’ Now if you want to hear some hip-hop you might like it’s a lounge or a very small club where it’s like a hallway, it’s like 150 people all in.

Aspirational lifestyles.

Right. It’s like, ‘No, that’s just him in a video, he’s rich. We don’t do that.’ It just got out of control. Now the bigger radio DJ’s basically DJ in strip clubs and hip-hop DJ’s who play breakbeats are playing for a couple of hundred bucks in these small lounges. There’s just no other hip-hop clubs, so that kills the vibe. A lot of these kids might feel that for them to get their stuff played by the big radio guys they’ve gotta make a strip club kinda record.

You’re involved in the annual Rocksteady Anniversaries, right?

Yes. That’s the one thing I look forward to every year because everybody there is all on the same page. For a while we were doing in in New Jersey but for the last few years it’s back in Central Park. We had about 6,000 people out there for it, it was great. This year I got to DJ for Special Ed and we did all his hits, that was awesome.

Were you there when Lord Finesse decimated Lords of the Underground accapella?

Yes, I’ve been there for a lotta great moments at the Zulu Anniversaries as well. I’ve been at one where George Clinton from Parliament/Funkadelic was there and Organized Konfusion performed. That was ’93/’94. You’re not gonna see that at pretty much anything else ever. When Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy performed together in ’94/’95 in the middle of a ballroom with Bambaataa and KRS and all these people in there together. It’s just incredible to be at. I’ve been blessed to see a few things like that. I was at the New Music Seminar when Supernat and Craig G battled, it had began at this club called Wetlands and I happened to be at that, there were probably 200 people at that one. I was also with Supernat and Rahzel when he battled JUICE at the Wake-Up Show anniversary in California. It’s about being at the right place at the right time, I used to try to go to everything that I thought something would happen at.

You’ve been putting out albums for almost fifteen years now. How have things changed?

When I first started, vinyl sales were tremendous. I would sell a KRS single – over 15,000 copies of a vinyl single. That’s not gonna happen now. The money aspect on the vinyl part was pretty nice, and then CD’s gradually went down. That kinda stinks cos I was always more of a physical product guy, the artwork and the liner notes. Everyone can just make a song a put it out on the internet, because people are using Serato now. Back then, the fact that you’d either have to get a distribution deal or front the money to press vinyl eliminated a lot of people from the game from the simple fact that if you didn’t think it was well worth it or would do well for you? You wouldn’t bother doing it. But now you can make nine albums a year, just throw ’em out there and it if it works it works. If it doesn’t, you don’t really lose much cos you just sent the email out there. It’s very saturated, you’ve gotta fight through the noise to get to the good stuff.

The process of paying dues before putting music out isn’t as harsh.

We used to complain about what we’ve gotta go through to put music out and wish that it was as easy as it is now, but now that it’s so easy everyone puts music out and it devalues the good music that’s coming out. Even for myself, who loves this stuff, I just get so many songs sent to me that sometimes it’s hard to even go through them. You just get discouraged. ‘Really? In this past month there’s 300 songs?’

It’s a pretty low ratio of those 300 that are any good, right?

I went through 272 songs and I pulled aside 18 of them to play, so there ya go.

DJ JS-1 & DJ Spinbad – ‘Itchy Vinyl Session Part II‘

DJ JS-1 feat. Kool G Rap – ‘Take A Loss‘

DJ JS-1 feat. Kurious, Craig G & Smooth B – ‘Love Me Not‘

DJ JS-1 Feat. Canibus, Ced-Gee, Kool Keith, Prince Po and Rahzel – ‘Brainbender‘