What got you interested in the mixtape?
If you ask me what a mixtape is, the answer would be very different from some of my mixtape and hip-hop purist friends. My first entry point to mixtapes were the first ones that I made in my bedroom, recording off the radio. But in high school I started buying the mixtapes that I cover in The Mixtape Museum. Those were the mixtapes that were curated and dubbed by these DJs. The DJ culture, in general, intrigues me.
Where did you buy them at the time?
I grew up on 14th Street in New York City. At the end of 14th Street, on the West Side between 6th and 8th Avenues, there were these little shops. They were just a hole in the wall, like a closet. Many were operated by Chinese and African vendors. You would walk into this little room, and there would be walls of tapes; like DJ Ron G or DJ Juice. DJ Ron G was the first mixtape I ever bought with my own money. There was Canal Street – a huge venue for "bootleg" recordings, 125th Street in Harlem, and Third Avenue in the Bronx. There were also other music stores around the tri-state area. The tapes were small, so you could pass them around, copy them, mail them, and stick them in your back pocket. My interest with the cassette is – because of my story and the things I've been exposed to living in New York – I found that there are so many things on these cassette tapes that are probably being missed. We don't know where the tapes are now. They're in attics and in Nike shoeboxes in basements. Some of these tapes are more than 40 years old. Cassette tape seems to be a very stable medium, more stable than some recent technology, but they are in danger of deteriorating. It is terrifying for me. That's why I spent the time locating them, finding the collectors who have them, and trying to get them to dump as much info as they can into spreadsheets so I can filter the information. It's a search and rescue mission. I have accepted that it is my life's work. There are so many people – DJs, hip-hop artists, historians, ethnomusicologists, and technologists – who are interested in helping.
What was on these tapes?
They were hip-hop compilations. Said DJ would have about 30 tracks, depending on the length of the tape, and it would just be different artists. The better DJs were blending from song to song.
Like beatmatching?
Right. Ron G was really great at that. He was one of the most notable DJs who mastered blending. He was responsible for breaking one of Mary J. Blige's early songs, because he mixed it with hip-hop. DJs naturally want to go and find new music from different artists, but, at some point, the record labels got hip to it and started really pushing music into the DJ's hands.
Weren't the tapes sometimes a record of a DJ set from a club night?
Sure, that's how they started. You had DJs like Brucie B, Kid Capri, and others who were recording their sets at clubs live, and then making copies of them and distributing them on the street. At some point there was a pivot, where it was like, "I'm not recording just my live sets, but I'm actually going to go home and create a tape." DJ Grandmaster Flash said he would sell tapes for a dollar per minute. If you had a 120-minute tape, it was $120.
There were a limited amount of these being made?
Sure, and a limited amount of people who could afford to actually pay that. It became a status thing. If someone was playing a tape from last night that was clearly a set from the club that you may not have been able to get into, you were like, "Oh, he was able to buy the tape." If you had a shout-out on the tape, it was even more special. You'd pay extra money to get a shout-out on the tape.
There are a lot of levels going on here!
There's a lot. The thing about it that's even crazier is that none of these tapes that were released were documented. That's part of the work I want to do with The Mixtape Museum; to get as much information and metadata as possible. Not necessarily sales, because "selling" mixtapes is illegal.
Because the material on there has been copyrighted by other artists.
But the impact! How many tapes did Jay-Z appear on before he hit? Those are the things I want to look at, because I feel like the mixtape and DJs have not gotten their due.
People drop a mixtape as a "release" now.
Mixtapes are very digital now. There was also a certain point – 50 Cent was one of the people responsible for this – where mixtapes actually became like an album; a street album. You'd have DJ Whoo Kid – who was 50 Cent's DJ, as well as the DJ for everyone under G-Unit [Records] – he would put out a tape, but it would be all G-Unit artists, or all 50 Cent. It was a targeted promotion. So, now you start to see a hip-hop artist say, "I'm going to drop this mixtape." First of all, there's probably not going to be a DJ on it. And it's probably just them – they're probably using tracks that are theirs. Using an older beat or something popular – a lot of times a freestyle over an older, well-known beat is a good way to promote. People are familiar with the sound, and now they're getting your voice and your style.
Have you been able to figure out some of the gear people were using, as well as how they duplicated the cassettes and distributed them?
Jazzy Joyce, who is still a very active and successful female DJ, on the Justo documentary, [Justo Presents: Mixtape All Stars, a.k.a The Mixtape Documentary], she talked about using a boombox with the double tape [decks]. She talked about how laborious that was, because she was doing it by hand. Later you had these machines that could record from one tape to multiple tapes.
Right, tape duplicator machines.
Then mixtapes were on CD. I have friends, like DJ Chuck T in South Carolina. Not only was he promoting his own mixtape series, but he would copy mixtapes for other DJs. He had this whole operation where he could copy thousands of mixtapes on CD. The whole process of making a mixtape has gotten easier, in general. Now we're just dragging and dropping music onto a Spotify playlist, so it's different.
Have you found evidence of people having low-budget, small home studios for making tapes?
Some of the DJs were doing that. The hip-hop mixtape had different genres underneath. The Ron Gs and the Juices, who were really great and recognized for their remixes, were considered hot shit. Then you had other DJs, like someone like DJ Clue, whose primary interest and specialty was exclusive tracks directly from the artist. People were flocking to his tapes because he had tracks that no other DJs had. He created a whole new mixtape genre.
There's an art to both.
