Q & A’s
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…
It’s been a tough week, with Mr. Cee, Patti Astor and Paul Nice all leaving us. I’ve revisited and re-transcribed the interview I did with Paul in January 2015 for my Ultimate Breaks and Beats feature for Cuepoint so that I can share his personal reflections on the series that changed everything, and the inspiration…
Keith LeBlanc died this week, leaving behind an extensive catalogue of music as a member of the Sugar Hill house band, Tackhead and Litle Axe. I interviewed Keith in 2015 for the Past The Margin book, so I thought I’d share this excerpt where he discused the making of his ‘No Sell Out’ single on…
It took me exactly twenty years to get Godfather Don on the phone, which makes sense now that I know that by the time I started this site he had already changed his focus to playing jazz. This being my first phone interview since the ill-fated Just-Ice session in 2016, I had no idea how…
This interview was originally conducted ten years ago, while Mr. Barrier was promoting a new rapper he was working with who none of us can remember. Since I was compiling some material for a Queens book idea that never panned out, I held back the best parts – namely, the stuff about the park jams…
Last year I had the opportunity to interview The Original Gangster of Hip-Hop himself, Just-Ice. While it didn’t exactly go as planned, it was reassuring to speak to a rapper who was exactly how I imagined him to be from listening to his records. It proved to be a baffling, frustrating and sometimes hilarious journey…
Little is known about the legendary drummer/producer behind classic rap jams from Enjoy, Profile and Tuff City, so when his nephew Koolie Kookoo hit me up this past December I jumped at the chance to find out more about the great man. Here are some of Koolie’s favourite memories and anecdotes of his uncle. Robbie:…
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…
Queens-born producer Ayatollah has laced tracks for everyone from Tragedy to Screwball to Mos Def to Cormega. We caught-up last week to discuss his early days on the come-up, auditioning beat tapes at Rawkus Records and a random Happy Days connection. His latest project, Box Cutter Brothers 3, is out now with Drasar Monumental. Robbie:…
Rising up through the ranks from the ‘Son of Bambattaa’ to the DJ at The Roxy and launching the Zulu Beat radio show on WHBI, Afrika Islam went on to release the very first cut and paste record, help found the Rhyme Syndicate and produce the majority of Ice-T’s first four albums after moving to…
Microphone King Donald D has had a long and varied career, spanning back to the park jam era, onto the downtown club scene, radio and then records, both as a member of The B-Boys and as a soloist with the Rhyme Syndicate. Now residing in Italy, Donald took some time out to detail some of…
Afrika Islam: I was a member of the Zulu King b-boys, under Afrika Bambaataa. That’s how I came into the culture, from the floor up. I went out to battle other b-boy crews across the city, representing the Zulu Nation. From there, my second step was becoming a Zulu Nation DJ – the first line…