DJ Pizzo [HipHopSite.com] – The Unkut Interview

I did some work with DJ Pizzo this year over at Cuepoint, but previous to that I’d been a loyal customer of the main mail-order hip-hop stores, one of which was HipHopSite, which was founded by Pizzo and Warren Peace in 1996. He explained how the wild west that was the early internet allowed their new business to thrive and help introduce the world to a range of underground groups, as well as their involvement with classic remix projects such as The Grey Album and God’s Stepson. Ironically, the very same lawlessness that had helped the independent rap scene flourish during this period would ultimately become it’s very undoing.

Robbie: How did you get started as a rap fan?

DJ Pizzo: I got into hip-hop watching Yo! MTV Raps when I was a sixth grader. Then I found this college show, when I was in eighth grade, called Word Up. It was on KUNV at UNLV and this guy Warren Peace was the host. He was a freshman in college at the time and I was a kid in junior high, and he would be playing the b-side of the remix of the new Big Daddy Kane single that wasn’t out yet. It opened up a whole new [world] – because of the show, I was hearing all this music that was promo-only. Warren was judging some local talent show, so I went down there and met him. He told me I could come hang out at the show. I was the youngest person there, everybody else was in college, and I was always digging through his records and recording stuff to tape.

Around ’94/’95 I was posting on rec.music.hip-hop. I started trading tapes with kids over the internet, which was sending cassettes of unreleased music to each other through the mail before there was file sharing. There was a kid who had an advance of De La Soul‘s Stakes Is High album, and another kid who had the Wu-Tang Clan demo tape, and another kid who had the Gravediggaz demo tape. All of a sudden I had all this unreleased music that Warren didn’t have, so I started playing those tracks on his show. Then he had the idea, ‘What if we started a website where we can post this unreleased music?’

There were no [proper] hip-hop websites. There was Support Online Hip-Hop and 88HipHop and platform.net but none of it was really updated. We were like, ‘Let’s do daily updates.’ We were doing the Real Audio streams – because that was the only way to do it. Getting industry news through Warren’s connections as a radio DJ, and he was also getting advance music, so we were debuting Biggie‘s ‘Hypnotize’ to the entire internet. People who had access to this stuff weren’t connected to the internet. We were the only people connected in the industry and savvy enough to have an internet website, so we built an audience really quickly.

The indie hip-hop movement of the late-90s, early 2000’s was basically spearheaded by us and a couple of other people. We were introducing the world to all these unknown artists who were outside of the Bay Area, LA or New York, who couldn’t find an audience elsewhere. We were breaking all these new artists like Little Brother, RJD2, Eminem – a ton of people were making their online debuts through HipHopSite and building their audience that way. If you ask Jedi Mind Tricks or 7L & Esoteric or Anticon, those guys will be like, ‘The first people who supported us were HipHopSite.’ That’s why a lot of it was considered ‘Nerd Rap,’ because it was being birthed on the internet. Prior to that, it was being birthed on the street or in the club.

At what point did you begin to do retail?

In the early days we were able to get a few ads out of record labels. Interscope gave us like five grand to promote their artists at the time. They didn’t even know what they were doing, they were just like, ‘Promote our stuff.’ We were like, ‘Cool, we were gonna do that anyway!’ At that point, the budgets in the record industry were insane – the parties, the video budgets – the industry was a completely different animal, because the piracy wasn’t like it was today.

Within the first year we were like, ‘We want to do this as a business, but we’re not making any money.’ At the same time, the indie hip-hop scene was springing up, so we were like, ‘We should sell merchandise for these new groups.’ Some of the first twelve-inches we carried were Jedi Mind Tricks, 7L & Esoteric [and] J-Live. It really took us until the third iteration of the site to figure out how to do the mail-order side correctly. It was like, ‘Send a check or money order to this address and we’ll send it to you.’ This was such new territory at the time. The we discovered that we need to make a shopping cart and take credit card payments. All this stuff seems fairly obvious for an online retailer at this point, but in ’96/’97 it was blazing a new trail.

What kind of quantities were you selling once you got up and running on that side?

We were delivering a huge amount of sales for some of these individual records, especially during the later years when we got into the CDs and the pre-order packages. In the pre-digital music era, you’d move a couple of thousand of something.

Did you introduce the pre-order packages as a response to competition from Sandbox Automatic?

Competition with Sandbox was super-tight. It got ugly at times – on both sides. [laughs] They started it with the autographed posters and we were like, ‘We can do something cooler than that.’ I had a guy who worked for me named S-Boogie, and he was close with Egon at Stones Throw. They had a relationship that was built on trading records, like 45s and that sort of thing, so he went to LA and somehow came the idea to do a Yesterday’s New Quintet 7″ for ‘Rocket Love.’ We knew we were stomping on sacred ground a little bit, because Sandbox was hosting Stones Throw’s website and we had gotten this exclusive deal with Stones Throw. [laughs] Looking back, it was definitely a conflict of interest. That was when we upped the ante of what a free promo item could be, and that changed everything. We realised it was really cheap to press 45s, so we could factor the cost into the price of the promo package. The 7″s were really the premium promo items. We did CDs, mixtapes, t-shirts, but the 7″ was really the cutting edge one, because those things are still valuable today. A lot of them had runs of only five hundred copies.

It must have been crazy to have the opportunity to put stuff like the Pete Rock ‘Meccalicious’ 7″ out.

There’s a crazy story to the Pete Rock one, which I’ll tell for the first time ever. We did the 45 for Soul Survivor II and BBE gave us the tracks and we pressed five hundred copies and did the giveaway. Somehow the label gave us clearance to do it but Pete didn’t sign off on it, so we had to end up destroying these 45s! About a hundred of them got shipped before Pete shut it down, so there’s a hundred lucky people of earth that have the ‘War’ 45. Pete was cool about it, so he was like, ‘I’ll give you this other track.’ So we pressed another 45 and everybody got that one.

What was the story with God’s Stepson and Nastradoomus?

That began with The Grey Album, that also started at HipHopSite. Prior to The Grey Album, Danger Mouse was producing these mixtapes, they were basically mash-ups, and we were carrying them on the site. Danger Mouse called us up one day and Warren was like, ‘We got the Jay-Z acapellas.’ He was like, ‘Can you send those?’ Later he told us, ‘I’ve got this thing called The Grey Album where I’m taking music from The Beatles’ White Album and the Jay-Z Black Album acapellas and I want you guys to carry it.’ We hear it and we’re like, ‘This is dope’ – but we’re not thinking it’s gonna be what it was.

Was it just another remix album to you guys at the time?

Remix albums weren’t even common back then, this really started that trend. We had it up for twenty-four hours and we went through five hundred or a thousand copies. We were like, ‘Damn!’ Then we find out MTV is talking about The Grey Album – that’s what was driving all these sales. He got a cease and desist, so he called us up and said, ‘You can’t ship anymore out.’ Prior to the cease and desist he had pressed a thousand copies of the vinyl, before he even knew it was going to blow up. So what he ended up doing was giving them to his friends and he numbered them. He kept track of who had what number, so if it ended up on Ebay he would know who sold their copy. [laughs] A year or two later he did the Gorillaz album and Gnarls Barkley and I’ve never talked to him again. He’s just become untouchable. [laughs]

God’s Stepson came out of that. ABB was trying to get us to carry the Little Brother album, so they gave us a 45 of this track ‘Atari 2600’ and that took off. Then they were like, ‘We’ve got this Justus League mixtape thing, we’ve got this God’s Stepson thing.’ And then those things went crazy. We were running Doom‘s website at the time and he had an album that was about to drop. I was like, ‘I did a remix album blending Nas accapellas and your beats. I’ll pay you ‘x’ amount of dollars if we can just give this away on CD with the purchase of the album.’ I didn’t even credit myself on it, we just called it Nastradoomus. We just pressed up the CD-R and then that it blew-up. We were selling all this product because of this one little free CD-R that was coming with it. We did a part two a few months later and it took on a life of its own. It blew up and it got bootlegged to death – vinyl, professional CDs – that thing was everywhere. That was not our intention.

How about the CD giveaway of Large Professor’s The LP that you bundled with 1st Class?

We reached out to Matador and somehow we got on the phone [with him] and we were like, ‘We want to put out the shelved album you never put out on Geffen.’ He was like, ‘Cool.’ We had to commit to ordering a thousand copies of his [new] album.

What about the infamous World Domination CD by The UN?

Someone – it might have one of the guys from the group, their DJ or at their label – said, ‘Let’s throw this out there.’ And they wanted to charge for it, I don’t think it was supposed to be a freebie. So we pressed-up the CDs, we did the artwork and then two days after posting it they were like, ‘Yo! Take it down!’ I don’t know what happened but the tune changed really fast.

You also designed and hosted Eminem’s first website, right?

There’s a closing expo that happens every year called Magic, this is ’97, and he was opening up for Gang Starr – but this was a half-assed Gang Starr show because only Guru showed up and Tony Touch was spinning for him. I met up with him [Eminem] at a Motel 6 to buy the Slim Shady EP in bulk. There was a crazy buzz off The Wake-Up Show freestyles and we sold out of it straight away. A few months later, I got on the phone with Sheck [Jon Shecter]. I’d given him a call with the idea of doing a website for Game Recordings. He was like, ‘I’m recording some stuff with Eminem, maybe I can help you do eminem.com? I can introduce you to his manager, Paul Rosenberg.’

I somehow got Paul to give me unreleased Em stuff that was unfinished and songs that never came out to preview on the site [eminem.com]. Paul would always give me little bits of information, like ‘We just did a song with Limp Bizkit.’ I’m like, ‘Dude! Send it to me! Please!’ I’m begging him, begging him and he’s like, ‘No, I’m not gonna send it.’ Then one day I get an envelope in the mail and there’s a letter in there that says: ‘If you give this to anyone, I will kill you.’ I took that super seriously. It was on cassette, I probably listened to it once. It wasn’t that good. Through eminem.com we’re selling ‘Hi, my name is Slim Shady’ t-shirts, during the first year of his Interscope career. That is a big part of what helped HipHopSite really go crazy in sales. Once we started carrying Eminem stuff it blew the doors open, we were doing hundreds of orders a day.

Are there any rare songs that you’re still chasing after all these years?

Do you remember the Fat Tape section in The Source around ’92, ’93? In one of those issues they listed Cypress Hill featuring Brand Nubian ‘Spark Another Owl.’ For years I was just going crazy like, ‘Where is this song?’

How long did it take you to get a proper store?

When I started this thing I was doing it in my parents’ house, and it was going so well that I just bought my own house. I might have been twenty. Half my mortgage was going to be paid by the company because I was going to use the garage as the office. But I was getting weird looks from the neighbors, because they were like, ‘What kind of operation is running there?’ [laughs] All these dudes in my garage, clearly working on something – it probably looked like a drug lab. My neighbour was giving me a real cocked eyebrow, so I invited him over. ‘I want to show you what we’re doing.’ He was like, ‘Ohhh! I work at the post office! I see HipHopSite packages all the time!’

Then I was getting kids from Japan that came to Vegas and were wanting to come to HipHopSite, or local people, and I was like, ‘This is my house, you can’t come here.’ I actually have this kid from Japan come over once, when I was still at my parents house, and I bring him into the garage and there’s two shelves of CDs and vinyl. He says, in very broken English, ‘This HipHopSite?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘This?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘This HipHopSite?’ ‘These two shelves of records are HipHopSite!’ He was bewildered. We had a warehouse for three months, and then we opened up a physical store next to UNLV. That became the base of operations, and we needed eight to ten employees. I had to have someone out front, working the register; I had to have five guys filling orders; another guy doing customer service – that was a complete nightmare; and Warren and I running operations.

Did you start doing in-stores at that point?

Yeah. As we started moving a lot of product, it got to the point where people would do whatever we asked, industry-wise – not where we were abusing our powers or anything. The biggest in-store we had was Pharrell, that was crazy. There was people wrapped around the shop and he was signing autographs. The best story was when we did Talib [Kweli] and DOOM. I’ve got a store filled with kids, there are four hundred kids waiting. One of my employees is like, ‘I’ll go get Talib.’ Nothing from DOOM, so now I’m sweating. We promoted the heck out of this, Madvillain just came out. So I’m talking to his tour manager on the phone and he’s like, ‘We’re at Imperial Palace, just come and get us.’ I’m like, ‘Where?’ He’s like, ‘We’re just walking around the casino. Come and find us.’ So I’m looking around Imperial Palace – which is a run-down Vegas casino that only old people gamble at – looking at customers, trying to find Zev Love X‘s face on a portly MF Doom’s body, because I haven’t seen what he looks like without his mask. My only frame of reference is the ‘Peachfuzz’ video.

Suddenly I saw him and I’m like, ‘Doom!’ He’s like, ‘Huh?’ ‘Yo, Pizzo from HipHopSite.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, what’s up man?’ ‘Yeah, cool. So, anyway – we got that in-store!’ He’s like, ‘In-store? Aww man, I don’t wanna do an in-store.’ I was like, ‘Please! There’s all these kids that are waiting for you. Everybody will be so disappointed if you don’t show up.’ He’s like, ‘Alright…’ So I have this little two-door Ford Mustang filled with very large rappers and entourage. I pull up to the store and we’re in the back room and he’s like, ‘I don’t really wanna do it, man.’ I’m thinking, ‘We’re here! You can’t do this to me!’ So then he’s like, ‘Gimme a beer.’ He takes this Heineken, pounds it – one beer, just like the song – and he’s like, ‘Alright, let’s go,’ and he signs autographs for an hour. It was a very proud moment, because I did the impossible and everybody was happy.

Did you upset anyone with your ‘Best and Worst’ lists at the end of the year?

The year-end thing was kind of like a roast. HipHopSite made its money because of the retail store, so we never had to worry about pissing off advertisers. That was the big problem with The Source after Shecky left – you weren’t getting unbiased album reviews anymore because they didn’t want to piss off their advertisers. That was a big part of what inspired HipHopSite, because we were so upset at seeing our favorite records get panned in The Source. We had a review of The Cenobites album and I think I gave it four out of five, and that same year I rated the Player’s Club soundtrack a two and a half. We were in the office [of A&M’s Kevin Black] and this guy was like, ‘You can’t give the Centipedes [sic] a four out of five and then give Player’s Club two!’ I’m like, ‘If you don’t want your record to get panned then don’t put out a wack record.’ [laughs]

So this was your peak period?

2004 to 2005 was the peak period for HipHopSite, and I’m sure Sandbox and UndergroundHipHop.com too. Then there was the end of the indie hip-hop era, which found all these things stopping within a year – you had Def Jux folding, you had Fat Beats ending their vinyl distribution, Caroline Distribution folded and you had HipHopSite closing. All these things happened at once, and it was very obvious to see why – it was because of the piracy. The flaw in the business model was you might pre-order something, but because we are like a Mom and Pop operation, you might not get it until a week after the street date. On top of that, if there are complications where we get short-changed because the distributor doesn’t have enough copies or we sold-out because we under-ordered, you might end up waiting two weeks to get an album that’s leaked on the internet a week previous to it’s release. This was the beginning of the end, when we started seeing [stuff like] Mobb Deep‘s Murda Muzik leak. Eventually this started happening left and right and we could see the writing on the wall that the music’s going digital. And Serato…

People didn’t need records anymore.

Yeah. The cornerstone of the business, even before the CDs came into play, was the DJs. Vegas has a huge club scene, so we were serving the DJs locally too. We were selling tons of Biggie and Ja Rule and DMX and all that, that was a big part of the business. Then Serato comes out, albums started leaking, the iPod comes out, all these things changed the landscape incredibly. Plus we were at the end of our five year lease at the store. We had been in business for ten years at that point and it was clear that the physical goods era – and more directly, the independent hip-hop era – had come to an end. The underground scene had run its course, all these true blue Brooklyn/L.A., Dilated People type artists, and I didn’t see a lot of new talent coming out of that side of things. That’s also part of why the scene folded.

We attempted to launch a digital music store but it was impossible to compete with iTunes. Then I relaunched HipHopSite as a blog, and that was fun but there’s so many blogs out there that unless you’re delivering original content it’s hard to compete in that space. I loved delivering the album reviews every week, and I feel like we had some of the best, unbiased reviews in the industry, but I actually didn’t like a lot of the music that was coming out. It’s almost like when indie hip-hop died, the blog era started, like a generational thing. The blog scene was different than the mail-order hip-hop scene. The Stones Throw, Def Jux, Eastern Conference stuff marks the end of one era and then a new era begins.