DJ Mighty Mi – The Unkut Interview

After cutting his teeth reviewing records for The Source magazine while still in high school, DJ Mighty Mi went onto release some classic white label remixes and formed The High and Mighty with Mr. Eon, eventually starting the Easter Conference record label. A couple of months ago I got the chance to pick his brain about the good old days of Philly rap radio, clubbers refusing to dance and how Top of the Pops cost him a fortune.

Robbie: Are you still living in Las Vegas?

DJ Mighty Mi: Yep, fifteen years later. [laughs] It’s actually a hard place to leave, believe it or not. It’s a very convenient city to live in. There’s no traffic and there’s good food, and I’m a big tennis player so it’s easy for me to just go play tennis and not sit in traffic. So there are some good things about it, even though it’s the obvious – gambling, tourism – you can’t picture yourself living in a place like this, but you can make a pretty normal life out of it.

Are you from Philly originally? What was it like growing up there?

Yeah, I’m from Philadelphia. My father was a sociology professor at Temple University, one of the colleges in Philly. I lived right in the city – in downtown, they call it. It’d be like two blocks of middle-class people and then there would be three blocks of ghetto, and then it’d be a really nice area, so it was a very juxtaposition of social classes. I think that’s where I got my initial hip-hop influences. It’s just that the neighborhoods were so meshed together, so we would see everything.

What was the period you grew-up in?

I was born in ’72, so this is all mostly eighties, some late seventies.

Was Lady B’s radio show your first exposure?

Yup, it was called Street Beat, and we had this DJ named Jeff Mills. It was kind of like our own little Red Alert show, they were specializing in playing kind of offbeat, not literally off beat, but not the most popular of the 12 inches – even though that was being played, too. So you were hearing all the big Public Enemy records, but you were also hearing artists like Freak L and MC Breeze and stuff like that. We were lucky that Jeff Mills and Lady B had really good taste in hip-hop, which is what I always say about Red Alert too. It shaped all of our hip-hop tastes. They just happened to have impeccable taste in hip-hop, they weren’t playing any duds.

My mom had moved to New York when I was in fourth grade, so I was splitting my time between Philly and New York and really absorbing what both had to offer, hip-hop wise. I would tape Red Alert and Marly Marl and Mr. Magic and then I would go back to Philly and kind of turn my friends on to New York radio, and vice versa – going up to New York on that Amtrak train with the Philly tapes and playing those for my New York friends. I was really getting the best of both worlds. And at that time, Philly was the best there was in hip-hop. I always say it would run a close second to New York.

I think the deejays were probably ahead. The Philly like scratch deejays were really leading the pack. Even for us out in Australia, I remember a Red Alert tape some kid brought back from New York and just rewinding the first eight bars of Latee’s ‘This Cut’s Got Flavor’ over and over again. I was like, ‘What is this? This is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard!’

Once the 45 King/Red Alert alliance happened, it was like no stopping them! [laughs] Nothing takes me back more to that time than when you hear the Red Alert promos. I know you’ve written about them a lot, but the Chill Rob G one and the JVC Force one – when those come on it’s like you’re getting in a time machine and I’m back in my mom’s apartment, taping it on her boom box.

And the ones where MC Search was ragging on the Beastie Boys, that was always funny. So you saying that on the Lady B and Jeff Mills show, they were playing local Philly stuff that maybe Red Alert wouldn’t have?

There was a little bit of overlapping happening, but for the most part Jeff Mills was finding the odd 12-inches on the odd labels that he liked, too. Those were always the fun ones to go out and find – The Dismasters and stuff like that.

Do you remember that Dismasters song where they were going at Red Alert and The Jungle Brothers? That song is hilarious.

[laughs]Yeah. The one that blew my mind – I heard maybe in the last couple of years, was the Cash Money and Marvelous ‘The Ugly People Be Quiet’, how they just jack that from another record. Have you heard that?

Wow, what’s that?

‘On the wheels of steel he is…the turntable – the turntable’ They just bit that from another Philly group. [‘The Boy Is Fierce‘ by The Sinisters of Sound]

[laughs] That’s wild. At what point did you start buying records?

Jon Shecter had gone to the same school as me and Mr. Eon did – he was in twelfth grade when we were in eighth grade – so there was that five year difference where we were never in high school together. We saw him and the guy who he was in B.M.O.C. with performing at the talent show, and that one episode of seeing two other Jewish guys actually performing hip-hop – we had only seen it up to that point on TV or at the concerts with the Beastie Boys – but to actually like see it up close with people who were going to school with, I’d say that probably influenced us to say, ‘Oh, maybe we can do this, the art form of it.’ He was older than me, but I could see it in myself, something to pursue. And then that kind of friendship or mentorship stayed when he went up to Harvard. He had started The Source and was sending me records to review while I was still in high school. That was so influential to me in my beginning stages.

So you were getting free records? Even better!

Yeah. He would send me the X-Clan record and I would be blown away! [laughs]

I remember seeing your name on the reviews. Were you writing for them when it was still a newsletter or was it when they got to the magazine stage?

I probably started contributing when they were on issue 10, ’89-ish.

Did B.M.O.C. have many other songs apart from what was on the single?

They had a couple of other songs. Their DJ was a guy named Kid Swift and he’s the one who really taught me. He was another West Philly deejay that was in the same crew with Jeff and Cash Money and Miz and all those guys. So that was my favorite part of the group [laughs] – the deejay. He was just such a nice guy and I’m still friends with him today. He did some scratches on the High and Mighty records.

When did you start deejaying? Was this around the same time as you were writing the reviews?

I tried initially to be an emcee.It became became evident very quickly that that was not going to be in my cards [laughs]

What were you calling yourself?

At that time Eon was MC Magnum. I might have been Jase or something – my middle name’s Jason – some play on my name at the time. But I was Mighty Mi very early, like as early as 1987 I’d say. We would go to the big arena shows at the Spectrum in Philly and you would see the two turntables and the little wooden Gemini mixer being supported by the two anvil cases in the middle. That set-up either captivated you or it didn’t, and I’m very lucky that it did, or else I probably would have just quit after not being a good emcee.

I remember I would go to those Spectrum shows and Jam Master Jay would be doing the bass rub which sounds so crazy in the speakers and you would say, ‘Wow! He’s just doing that from his hand on that turntable.’ It totally captivated me. I worked at Footlocker in the summer of 1988 and just saved up all my money to buy two Technics [turntables]. Even back then they were around $400, which was more like $1,000, so it really took some saving up. You remember the days you got them. I think I got one, and then a couple of months later I could afford the second. I didn’t get them both at the same time.

And a little Gemini mixer?

Initially the Radio Shack [laughs]. And then I think I have that Nu-Mark where the fader was on the left side of the mixer, and they had the phono buttons on the top – the one DJ Aladdin used, and I was a huge DJ Aladdin fan. I idolized him. That one DMC tape where it was Aladdin versus DJ Miz is like was one of my major influences when I was a teenager. They were VHS tapes.

Did you go to any of those battles?

For a couple of years I would DJ [at] the US finals, and it was my chance to show Red Alert that he had influenced me so much. I wasn’t competing but I would play records in between the DJs and Red Alert was the host. And then that’s when I could play my crazy, obscure stuff that he had played. It meant so much – he came up to me on stage and said, ‘I can’t believe what this man is playing!’ I have it on audio tape of him saying it. [laughs]

That’s incredible.

Yeah, there’s this one song, ‘Ladies Can I Have Your Attention?‘ [C$ Money and DJ Chase] and they use the ‘Can I have your attention’ with the Slick Rick [sample]. It was a record I had heard him play. I remember playing that specific line and he came up to me and he goes, ‘Man, I can’t believe the shit you’re playing!’ I said, ‘Yeah, this is all from years of listening to you, Red’.

So you’re getting to play at these kind of events, you’re making a name for yourself. What was the next step for you?

So those DMC things happened after I had graduated from college, mid-nineties. When it was time to pick a college to go to it was between the University of Wisconsin and Boston University. I chose Boston University because when I went up to visit, I was so impressed with the record stores. [laughs] that reason. Yes, I was going to go to college, but my main priority in life was to continue my DJ career. So naturally I was going to pick a place to go to school that had good record stores.

Boston had Skippy Whites, right?

Oh yeah, really good record shop. There was a bunch in Cambridge and then there was ones in this place called Kenmore Square. I remember the Black Sheep album came out – as far as I can remember, it was the first album that had the samples listed on the record jacket. I remember getting it and then just going right out to those Boston record stores and being able to find like 80% of the samples!

I remember being so impressed by how deep they dug for some of those samples. So many of those loops had never been used before.

Oh yeah. The Black Sheep album had a lot of rock samples, so a lot of these Boston stores were kind of rock-centric record stores. Even though you could find tons of other stuff you could tell that they started as rock stores. So they had a lot of those samples.

Going back to when you were reviewing records for The Source, were you in a record pool and was it mainly stuff you were getting from Sheck?

He would send me albums. It was the best and worst, because you would have the Brand Nubian album eight months early. By the time the Brand Nubian album came out, you were so sick of it while the rest of the world were enjoying it for the first time.That was the advantages and disadvantages of the advance cassette. But I had so many classics early – Breaking Atoms, The Chronic, One For All – just tons of incredible albums. But he definitely made me pay my dues. Like in the first record he had me review for The Source was this Three Times Dope offshoot named Larry Larr and The Wizard of Odds.

[laughs] I bought that record, like a dummy. I’m like, ‘Can’t go wrong with Chuck Nice!’

Also known as Ruffhouse’s first miss.

Were there times when you would get those advances and then the album would be totally different by the time it actually hit the stores? Or was that more in the late nineties?

Usually the advance cassette you would get would would be the album already done that they were sending to the press. But there would be instances where things were changed and the most memorable one was getting the BDP Edutainment early and the skits were Harry Allen interviewing Scott La Rock. For whatever reason when the commercial copy came out they had to take those off. Maybe they didn’t get permission from Scott’s estate or something. They were incredible, I still have the cassette somewhere.

That’s just flipped my wig, I had no idea that existed. At what stage did you start making music with Mr. Eon?

Into my junior year of college I again saved up for my next piece of equipment – the MPC 60 and started making beats. There was a guy in Boston, a record dealer named Bob Gibson, like the baseball player, and he was this very eclectic guy. He would make these sample tapes with original songs on them, and they became very big amongst the producers in Boston. He would sell records at that famous place, the Roosevelt in New York. There were definitely people who knew their records in Boston and it gave me a nice little head start on production. Joe Mansfield, the guy who produced ED OG, was an early Boston beat head who just knew every record.

I started making beats in Boston, progressing very slowly and just kind of learning the MPC. Eon continued rhyming and we would work on demos, but we weren’t taking it that seriously, we were still going to school and kind of doing that on the side. Then Bobbito comes up to Boston University in our senior year to host a party and somebody brings him to my place at my apartment in Boston. And Eon rhymes for him and he really likes Eon and invites us to go on the Stretch and Bob show. I think that’s the one thing that gave us the confidence to keep going with it and maybe start taking it even more seriously. We’re like, ‘Wow, Stretch and Bob like us!’

Then we start doing promos for Stretch and Bob, much in the Red Alert vein of Eon rhyming around samples that I’m scratching in. We sample ‘Now watch him run for the stretch’ from ‘Friendly Game of Baseball’, Main Source. So they started playing them, then we start working on our demo. We moved to New York right after college. Then we say, ‘Hey, maybe we should press-up our first single’. They were so influential, Stretch and Bob. Just hearing your stuff on there, it was the biggest deal because we would all tape it every night. Even the promos, when I would hear that next to a D.I.T.C. song, I was just like, ‘Wow, maybe I can do this.’

That would have been a real shot in the arm for them to say, ‘Hey, you guys are good. Make some stuff for us.’

Totally, and I think we got a little bit lucky that Stretch liked me, because I was also a club DJ and I was starting to DJ in the same scene that he was. And he could have very easily just hated on me, because he did do that, too. That was just the way back then, you know? Not everyone was a friendly deejay. There was a lot of competition and most DJs would actually be assholes. He could be like that but for some reason he took to me and I think that really helped get High and Mighty stuff played on the air. While we were in the same venues in the night, the downtown nightclub scene in New York I was also pursuing the group. So it was intersecting in his world on two levels. I’m just so fortunate that he didn’t look at me as some type of threat or anything. We struck up a friendship and actually did a lot of those white labels together.

I think one of the one of the first ones I remember hearing was the one with the D&D All-Stars and the Red and Meth ‘How High’. Was that like one of the first ones you put out?

I think the Crooklyn Dodgers one was actually first, in the same format of playing their famous beats when they go. I can’t remember when I started getting that idea to do that. I think it had come from something else, but I’ve really kind of stuck to it throughout the years. [laughs]

Were those acapellas from records or did you get them from the labels?

I’m pretty sure they were on their records because we would actually put them in live – that’s how we would get the vocals on. That’s why I loved recording them at Stretch’s house because he was actually amazing at it. First you would loop-up the instrumental bed in the MPC and you would lay that down first. So it would be eight bars of ‘I Got it Made’ by Special Ed into eight bars of the Black Moon song into eight bars of ‘The Symphony’. That was the formula. So you would lay down the instrumentals first, then the hard part was flying in the vocals live. But Stretch was incredible at it – he was a musician first before he was a DJ, so he had perfect timing. So I would love to do it at his crib because he would do it in one take. And I knew that the vocals would just be so tight. [laughs]

So you weren’t sampling the vocals? He was blending it live?

Yeah. We’d lay down the instrumental first onto ADAT and then you’d have to put the vocals in live. If you messed up you could still start over because you were actually recording onto an eight track. But he was just so good at it that I knew it would be the quickest and most precise way to do it.

Do you remember what the first white label hip-hop remix was?

It’s so crazy now in the Serato digital age to think back of that era. It seems like a lifetime ago, right? Like in the digital age, we all have remixes and we all have the craziest edits. But to think about a time of actually seeing like a mash-up on vinyl, it just seems like a different generation ago – because it was! But one of the first ones I remember is that New Edition one. It was ‘A Little Bit of Love Is All It Takes’ over ‘Sucker MC’s’ drums, and that was on vinyl.

And there was that Hot Day ‘Master Mix’ as well [New Edition’s ‘Once In A Lifetime Groove’ vocals over Public Enemy drums and ‘Ike’s Mood’].

Yeah, so maybe that was one of the first. Then there was a couple more, but it was like this huge deal, right. To have a non-regular version on vinyl. I think that’s what kind of attracted me to it in the beginning. I was DJing in nightclubs four or five times a week. I was playing the same version over and over again. I just thought it would be exciting in my own DJ set.

[laughs] You were getting bored of hearing the same mix!

Right. So initially I probably did it just to make my own set more exciting. Then we would put them out on vinyl – we would probably press up 5,000. I had a partner in it who was part of the Fat Beats Crew. This guy named Rich King, who ended up putting out the Big L album on Fat Beats. So he was my partner in the beginning and Japan would take a lot off the top. Like if you pressed up 5,000 they would take 3,000. So you were playing with house money from then ‘cos you now broke even right off the Japanese order. A place called Manhattan Records.

How were you doing the distro?

Rich was using his Fat Beats distribution network to get them out. They were kind of like no-brainers because people were into these DJ records at the time and there weren’t that many around. Now in the digital age, there’s tens of thousands of them coming out every year. But back then it was special to go into the record store and see the little white label section because it was still pretty tiny. You would see things like the Buckwild remix ‘Life’s a Bitch’ where he used ‘Mister Magic’. Stretch would play it, but he was playing it off the DAT on his radio show, so to see it on vinyl in the stores, you’re like, ‘Give me two – right now!’ [laughs]

Even before that era, there was that period where the record companies were pushing CDs, so there were white labels of songs that DJs wanted to be able to play out.

This was a different kind of bootleg – this was a bootleg that actually had creativity behind it, whereas those Rock and Soul [Records] bootlegs were just things that you couldn’t find on vinyl that you needed to play in nightclubs. People are still playing that ‘Before I Let Go’ bootleg and ‘All Night Long’ and ‘Funky Sensation’ – they were probably only out on album before that so to get a 12-inch pressing of it meant something.

There’s also the bootleg edits which just extend the song.

If you think about it, even those early Simon Harris records, even though they were usually just instrumentals, those were definitely edits, if you think about it. ‘Funky Drummer’ looped-up for three minutes.

Did you used to play many edits in your sets back then?

At the time I was in clubs, I was probably just playing normal versions. It’s funny, I’ve heard some people critique me in the digital age, saying I play too many edits. And then I think to myself, ‘Well, there was an era where I was just playing vinyl, which you criticizing me never did, and in that era I had to play original versions, ‘cos that’s all there was out. So me playing edits is obviously like a digital era thing, and obviously I can play original versions if I want to because that’s all I did when we only had vinyl. But this is what I choose to do! [laughs]

After I did the initial ‘Crooklyn’ and the ‘1, 2 Pass It’, then I started partnering up with a guy named Sean C, who was part of the Vinyl Reanimators. They were out of Boston. It was Joe Mansfield, Sean C and DJ Shame – who had amazing mixtapes out like ‘Traveling Through Sample Land‘. Now I partner with him [Sean C] and he’s got this Japanese connect and the money is outrageous. They were giving us like $8,000 to do three remixes, which at the time was unheard of. And it even started bringing out animosity with other deejays. They were saying, ‘Why can’t I do this? Why are you and Mighty Mi the only ones doing this Japanese hook up thing?’ [laughs] At that time, the Japanese vinyl money was better than anything else. So if you could somehow get that connection going you could make some quick dough.

So we did three or four volumes of those. Yeah, there was an ‘East Coast, West Coast Killa’ one where I put the BDP and Dre stuff over the same Mantronik beat I used on ‘B-Boy Document’, there was an Artifacts one, there was three or four that me and Sean did together. So that was kind of like the next step in the white labels. But that was meant just for Japan, you didn’t see those as much in the States as you saw the stuff that was coming from Fat Beats distribution.

That era of remixes was more sophisticated as well. You’re actually constructing a whole new instrumental and adding cuts rather than looping up the classic beats.

I would say the ‘1,2 Pass It’ and the ‘Crooklyn’ were kind of attempts to make songs that were not quite popular enough sounding to play in the club? Like an excuse to now play it in the club – I’m putting Special Ed’s biggest records under his verses, which makes it more appealing in a nightclub situation than just hearing the original Crooklyn Dodgers Premier beat. Even though it’s brilliant – maybe not for the clubs. That was my initial thinking where I put their own famous beats behind them – to make it appealing to more people.

What kind of music were you playing at these downtown clubs?

It was called ‘open format’ back then, but ‘open format’ meant hip-hop, reggae and dance classics – just those three genres. It was way before the DJ AM era where people started introducing rock records back into the nightclub. You would never hear Joan Jett during this era. [laughs] They were nice, downtown clubs – people thinking they were cooler than they were – but it was pre bottle service. That element hadn’t ruined the nightclubs yet – the Wall Street guys weren’t being let in because they were going to buy the whole bottle. It was unheard of – if I sat down and said, ‘I want the whole bottle of vodka!’ they would look at me like I was crazy! [laughs] The music was still great, Biggie was out, it was like the tail end of great New York nightlife.

Has that stopped people dancing in clubs?

Absolutely. It happened when I moved out here and the whole EDM explosion happened. I went from being tucked away in the corner of the club, nobody caring who was DJing or what they looked like to being onstage and everybody coming into the nightclub, running for the best view of the DJ they had and then just standing there and staring at the DJ for the whole night. It totally ruined the nightclubs. I almost wanted to get on the mic and say, ‘Please – dance among yourselves, socialize. Meet a girl!’

[laughs] That must impact what you’re playing as well, because if you’re not trying to get people dancing then hope do you plan your set list?

The first three years I was out here, I was just like the main guy playing, everything and anything. Then when the EDM explosion happened, now I’m opening up for people like David Guetta and Calvin Harris. So I’m supposed to kind of suck – all the energy is supposed to happen when they get on the stage. So it was actually quite fun. Although House music was new to me at this point, I could play stuff that I could relate to, Disco House or what they call a G House, where it’s a guy rhyming over house beats, because Calvin Harris gets to play the biggest songs. So now I’m playing like the songs that are less popular, but it’s actually fun because I rather hear these songs than the songs he’s gonna play.

What was the story behind your Ghostface remix that got picked up for a proper release?

I guess that’s the greatest ‘bootleg into an official remix’ story there is. I put that out on a white label and my father, who’s obviously not a hip hopper and was out of touch at that point said, ‘Why don’t you put your beeper number on the record so if somebody wants to get in contact with you they’ll know how to find you?’ I said, ‘Dad, come on, what are you saying? Why would I put my beeper number on the record? That’s so cheesy.’ He said, ‘No, you might as well. What if the label wants to find you? And I said, ‘If they do it it’ll probably be to shut me down’. But I did anyway, I put my beeper number on the record.

So we put it out and two weeks later, I get a weird number to call [on the beeper]. I call, he says, ‘This is Greg Boyd from Epic Street Team! We’ve heard that Ghostface Killah bootleg you put out.’ I’m expecting the next line to say, ‘If that’s not off the record shelves in the next 24 hours I’m sending Wu-Tang personally to fuck you up!’ And he says, ‘Hey man, we love it! We want to give you $5,000 for it and put your name on it and put it out as an official remix.’ I said, ‘Dad, you did good by me!’

[laughs] ‘Let me buy you a steak dinner!’ Is that similar to what happened with the Mobb Deep remix?

The ‘G.O.D. Pt. III’? That was just me and my boy Reef, who was A&R at Atlantic at the time and he produced ‘What Up Gangster’ for 50 Cent, but also produced songs on the first High and Mighty album and other stuff on Eastern Conference Records. He and I were doing production together at the time, messing around. It was my idea to use the Doug E. Fresh sample ‘Play This Only At Night’, and we just started hooking up more and more. Matty C and Schott Free were also our friends and they were A&R at Loud – it all went back to the original Source crew. So we played the remix for them in the Loud listening room, which is a very famous listening room where huge records were getting played and they ended up loving it. And I was, ‘Oh my god, this is gonna happen, baby!’Then we went to mix it at Unique and Prodigy was there and he was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna do a new verse on it. For P to be in there and be inspired by the beat and just write a new rhyme on the spot – what could be better for little Milo Berger?

That’s beautiful. Were you also releasing High and Mighty record by this point?

Probably The High and Mighty album hadn’t come out yet, but the singles were starting to come out. The next big thing I did was put out that Aaliyah ‘Are You That Somebody’ remix that Mad Skillz and the Supafriendz, where they’re rhyming over it? Skillz brought me that. Reef was kinda funneling his ex-Big Beat artists to me, so I was putting out Mad Skillz and now Tame 1 from the Artifacts. That was directly from him saying, ‘Hey, my boy Mighty Mi has got an indie label and they got distribution’. Skillz and Artifacts had probably lost their deals by then. Skillz, the first thing we did together was he had redone Slick Rick ‘Lick The Balls’. We put that out and that did really well on vinyl. Then he said, ‘There’s this huge new Aaliyah record, and me and the Supafriendz did a remix version.’ I remember bringing the DAT tape directly to Funkmaster Flex and it was just this huge white label. I think we sold 70,000 of those.

You also did some mixes for HipHopSite around that time.

Yeah, HipHopSite and Sandbox Automatic, with Ed and his mom. They were in such direct competition with each other that you had to have something special to sell the album. So we kept on like upping the promo game. So Ed would say, ‘OK, we’ll give away an unreleased Cage song with the Movies For The Blind album!’. And then Pizzo would say, ‘Oh yeah? Well we’ll press up a 45!’ [laughs] And that was the best they got, when Pizzo pressed-up a 45 of the ‘Crooklyn’ remix with the original version of the Eminem/High and Mighty song on the other side. I said, ‘You won, Pizzo’.

What was that album you were going to do with golden era rappers over fast beats?

I was calling it O.G. House where I was having all these guys rhyme over uptempo beats. And then I realised very quickly that there wasn’t a retail market for it. [laughs] Nobody cared about Ice Dog from the Tuff Crew rhyming over a 120 BPM house beat.

Did you release any of that stuff?

I put out a Ghostface song, a Large Professor song, a NORE song. I put out that one with Puba and Chubb Rock rhyming together, but there just wasn’t really a niche for it. But it’s beautiful because I ended up not putting out tons of it and I’ve used those verses on the new High and Mighty album, so I ended up getting good use out of it. [laughs]

Wait, there’s a new High and Mighty album?

It’s coming out. We got about eight songs done – there’s one with the Artifacts, one with O.C., one with Chubb Rock, one with Breeze [Brewin’], one with 7L and Esoteric, Kool Keith. So it’s fun. It just kind of kind of happened out of nowhere. I had to convince Eon that he was still a good writer, he was unsure if he could still write. I went to Philly, we recorded four or five songs. He was doing the lines in front of his son, which was definitely a new angle to our recording. It’s like it’s dad rap. Hey, if Alchemist and El-P can be two of the biggest stars in the world, why can’t The High and Mighty have a fifth album?

Exactly, I’m here for it. I loved that DJ song you did on that first album.

‘Mighty Mi For Your Stereo System’? That was just on the vinyl cos Rawkus was so nervous that we were gonna get sued cos there were so many samples on it. The DJ song was always very close to my heart. I’ve done mixtapes with all the DJ songs – stuff like ‘Cool V’s Tribute To Scratching’, ‘Mr. Cee’s Got A Master Plan’ and ‘Aladdin’s On A Rampage’. I just always live for those songs. A lot of the High and Mighty songs are just us as fans first – just the influence of being hip-hop fans and that comes out in our music so much. So we had to do a DJ song [laughs].

What was the experience of running an independent label? Rawkus did the early distribution, but did you reach a point where you were like, ‘We don’t need these guys any more’?

We initially got a label deal with them, and I think we’re still the only ones who ever got a label deal with them. So it was going to be three albums – High and Mighty, Smut Peddlers and maybe a Cage solo album – and we could funnel 12-inches through them. So we did a bunch of those. High and Mighty and Smut Peddlers weren’t these huge commercial successes, so it was just a natural progres back then, just to split ways. But I remember you kind of had to do it aggressively back then, that was just the way two entities separated. It had to be some animosity. It was almost like we were just going through the motions of being mad [laughs], when we were both saying, ‘I think we should go our separate ways.’ We had distribution in place to continue Eastern Conference records. It made sense for us to do it on our own at that point. But I remember in the actual meeting we both pretended we were angry, but we really weren’t. [laughs]

Did the Rawkus connection help you get G Rap on the Smut Peddlers song? [‘Talk Like Sex Pt. 2’]

I think that came through Rawkus back then. Like everyone would just hang out at the Rawkus offices. So we had become pretty good friends with G Rap’s manager at the time. This guy named Small Change and it was because he was this tiny little guy. He was hilarious. It made sense to do ‘Talk Like Sex’ on the Smut Peddlers album. To me, the G Rap song is the greatest sex rap ever written.

The whole story behind the making of the G Rap album at Rawkus was wild.

Being there at the time, you could see in real time that this was going to be the album that kind of ended Rawkus’ run, because they were doing things like hiring Timberland to do a beat for G Rap for $150,000. Getting Pharrell beats. To me, you make a G Rap album for $50,000, because that’s how a G Rap album is supposed to sound. You get Large Professor beats and shit like that. But they were very influenced by Hot 97 at the time. Cipha Sounds started being an A&R for Rawkus and was at Hot at the same time. So he’s Flex’s right-hand man, and ‘Simon Says’ had blowing up on Hot 97 so Rawkus is now like caught-up in that whole world of thinking they need to be making Hot 97 records, where they had made their mark from making Mos Def records. When they were spending a million dollars making the G Rap album, that’s when I knew they’d lost their identity – ironically enough on a G Rap album.

What was the story with the Princess Superstar’s ‘Bad Babysitter’?

I think we had the same publisher, so he linked us up and we make the song – 45 King’s in the video – the song starts doing really well, and then it gets played on Top of the Pops. And the guy who I sampled hears it, this guy named Sid Dale. He was big in the record library world – the sound libraries. And he said, ‘That’s my tune!’ Now all of a sudden, in the middle of signing publishing deals in Germany and Switzerland and the record’s everywhere – now I have to give all the money back. Sid Dale was not cool about it, he said, ‘I want all the publishing, I want all the money.’ So it made me look terrible in my publishing deal. I remember the owner called me and I thought he was going to just chew me out so hard. He ended up not being that mean to me. But it was my fault for suggesting that they not clear it, or just not saying what the sample was, but getting caught after the fact is never fun.

DJ Mighty Mi posts some of the highlights from his regular Twitch live mixes at his Soundcloud page.

The 25th anniversary of The High and The Mighty’s Home Field Advantage LP is now available to order, complete with six bonus tracks/demos. Meanwhile, the first single from their new album, ‘Highest Degree‘ featuring O.C., is out on streaming platforms.