6497643561401052010434957 – Jay Electronica

don’t get excited, this isn’t technically new Jay. It’s the verse he dropped for Ringo’s blog a while back that someone put to music. It’s very odd and off kilter but I likes.

Elysian Fields – Pablo Ygal

Pablo Ygal is a new face with an old soul. The music is hypnotic, meditative and layered. Using an MPC as well as live instrumentation, the end result is something unique.

Clare & The Reasons – Murder, They Want Murder

put on these lovely tunes from Muhsinah via FWMJ. the kind of tunes I’d want to be magically playing  while I’d be on a plane landing in NYC at nightime.

Busta Rhymes – Get You Some (eLan’s remix)

eLan’s a great homie of mine, I’ve known him for years and it’s amazing to see his musical progression since then. I heard Mike Soops say he’s the cut off for new beat cats, anyone after him needs to go back to the lab.

*images by MicSpecial

First off, who are you and where are you from?

DJ Sake 1, that’s who I am. Born and raised in San Francisco, California. Which is where I am right now. From the Fillmore District, I claim the Mission district now; this area has been my home for the last 10 years. I was raised in Mid-City, Fillmore west.

How did you interest in DJing begin?

I started compiling and collecting music before I became an actual DJ. I was into Hip Hop, into graffiti, stuff like that. I was starting to get cassette tapes and CD’s and I’d hear songs on the radio that weren’t on the albums and I was dying to find out where to get those songs. My older brother who’s a DJ as well was like, you gotta buy the 12-inch single.” So I started buying 12-inch singles. I worked hella hard two summers, saved up enough money to buy a turntable. Didn’t have enough money to buy two so what I did was I learned how to mix by listening to the radio. When the mix shows would come on the radio, I practiced mixing because with the mix shows the tempo would stay steady for 4 or 5 songs. So I learned how to match beats with a boom box on my right ear and a turntable on my left. The time I put in the game is dwarfed by the amount of history of DJing and people that come before me.

So you see yourself as carrying on the lineage, the ongoing musical conversation a DJ is a part of?

Yes, it makes me insignificant but more significant. Insignificant because I’m part of this massive legacy but significant because I claim that as my own legacy so I see myself carrying that shit on. You catch some DJ’s and they act like they’re doing something that hasn’t been done before to make themselves look bigger, but it actually makes it look smaller. It disconnects them from a massive lineage that includes an amazing amount of people, it goes back to the 60’s if you include disco DJ’s.

How have you seen the musical landscape of the bay area change?

I think like all other places, DJing has become something that’s more common. The technology, the pricing, the popular significance in pop culture has become more accessible to everybody. It used to be pretty much a hip hop and house music thing but now the DJ is a common feature of any pop music form or any pop music reference. In that sense it’s accessible to people not just as something they can afford to do or can learn how to do, but as something they would even know about. This is where Q Bert and the Skratch Piklez, DJ Apollo, DJ Shadow, Peanut Butter Wolf is from the Bay. The Bay has always been bigger internationally than in terms of the number of people who live here. I think there was a sense that when the turntablism movement died that the music scene in the bay area died but that’s not true. I’ve traveled all over the world and San Francisco does have a world-class level of nightlife here. In terms of venues, the kind of talent that’s consistently coming through here and performing or coming out of the city, it really is a world class level of talent for a city that’s only 700,000 people. I do think its been watered down to some degree since DJ’s are the new kind of rock stars of pop culture but there’s enough of a really solid anchor here in terms of the DJ tradition which started with mobile DJ crews like Spintronix; where a lot of cats like Shortkut and Apollo got their start. The concept of the DJ crew kinda formed after that, kind of 2^nd generation, Local 1200 which is my crew, the Pirate DJ’s, the Allmighty DJ’s, every DJ in the bay repped a crew and had a crew they were down with, at least coming from the Hip Hop side of things. As we branched out and did different things we’ve kept that mentality of working together, keeping things tight. Also quite frankly, San Fransico has a small market mentality when it comes to some things in comparison with LA and New York, which makes it unique, but in some ways it’s good and in some ways its bad. We tend to be protective of our own scene; we pay a lot of respect and give a lot of credence to the people that come before us. When DJ’s move into San Fransisco or when people overlook the Bay area scene when they talk about DJ’s, we tend to speak up. We—I say we, I’m not speaking for everybody but I’m definitely speaking for myself on this and a lot of folks I mentioned already in this interview, we tend to be protective of it and make sure that the very rich history and vibrant and multi-faceted aspect of what being a DJ in the bay area means, we wanna make sure that story doesn’t get lost.

Do you have any thoughts on why Hyphy never had the national pop success that other similar party music had?

I feel that hyphy did have a little mainstream success. It was a musical phase that really was a production sound coming out of certain parts of the bay. It didn’t reflect all bay music so I think a lot of people in the bay felt mixed about getting behind it.

That’s why I mention it, obviously it wasn’t DJ focused but it seemed like the last time that the Bay had wet its feet in the mainstream pop music landscape.

We’ve had our moment throughout history, in the 90’s with the En Vogue, MC Hammer, Digital Underground, The Coup being on Wild Pitch Records. There’s always been a notoriety and respect for the bay as a place where good music comes from. At the same time, there is no major record industry here. Translating Bay area music to people predominately in New York and LA that take it and market it to something that the whole country can appreciate—there has always been a translation issue there. Bay area rap traditionally is very slow and funk heavy. Hyphy was much more up-tempo, metallic-sounding music that I give Rick Rock most of the credit for developing. Like any culture, especially youth culture, it changes and transforms over time so the aspect of living that life hasn’t changed it’s just that there is no longer any marketing gimmick attached to it. Also, the hyphy lifestyle and the rappers that speak on it are really involved with street culture in a way that a lot of other rappers aren’t. Bay area rappers have always been really involved in the stuff they talk about. Because they don’t go out on international tours they’re hood check is when they come back to their neighborhood that they’re from and if they’re saying stuff on a record that they’re not living, the people that live next door to them are going to check them on it. In any small market that’s what happens, that’s why this small market hip-hop is popular now. It’s been good in getting some of our artists national exposure with hood money but at the same time it’s gotten a lot of artists caught up in beefs that aren’t necessarily related to them but instead with sources of funding or turf issues. Bay area artists are about what we say we’re about. Look at what happened to 2pac, that fight that happened before he was shot in Vegas, that wasn’t a shock to Bay area audiences to see a Bay area rapper go after someone who was talking shit about them.

Shifting a little to more of your personal experiences, it seems like you have a particular sense of awareness in regards to DJing. Where did that come from?

I know what you’re talking about in several ways. Playing records isn’t DJing. I was telling someone the other day, a good DJ is not defined by the party they’re DJing at but a good DJ defines the party that they’re spinning. A great DJ, and there’s few of those, transforms a space. Not just defines their presence of the sonic landscape but actually transforms people’s mind states either for a period of time or permanently. It’s happened to me where I’m at a club and a DJ changes my thinking of the world through the music they were playing. Being aware of that possibility, you could never allow yourself, unless you wanna be a suck-ass, mediocre DJ, to look at it as just playing records. You have to push yourself. I’ve always identified with the Larry Lavans, the DJ Red Alerts, and the Q Bert’s, people that have pushed the boundaries. For us in Local 1200 when we founded it, it was more than just playing records in the social sense. Not just how we construct our sets but how we construct events that bring people together, which is essentiality the nerve center of DJing—an event where you’re DJing publically with a bunch of people. The live act of Djing. The actual moment when you’re selecting music to play for people to either listen or dance to, that touches the closest on defining what a DJ is and the greatness of what being a DJ is. I think we’ve lost that because people feel that unless youre DJing in Vegas at a bottle service club for this amount of money, you’re not DJing. That’s actually less what DJing is then spinning at a house party in the hood where there’s an organic connection between the DJ and the crowd. DJing for people that you know that know you and who you are as a person and what you stand for and where you’re from, that’s the nerve center of DJing. That’s what pure DJing is, in my estimation. To me it involves some level of transforming the world, transforming the community around you. That’s the two different sides of it; it’s transformative—more than just playing records in terms of the technical act of it and more than just playing records in terms of the social role that a DJ plays. We should be more humble because we’re not rock stars but we should be less humble because what we can be is something much greater than a rock star, someone who has much more of an impact on the world. The DJ’s that get gassed heads because they think theyre rock stars should be more humble and fall back, and a lot of other DJ’s who are humble should be less humble. It’s looked at like the MC speaks and teaches and the DJ is in the background providing the sonic soundtrack but that’s actually a discredit to what the DJ can be. We can be the nerve centre by being involved in promoting, what kind of records we choose to play, what people we invite to our parties, how we interact with people on a personal level, what we do outside of the nightclub, which people think is separate from what we do in nightclub but its not. It should be consistent, your life should be consistent. Someone shoud be able to look at  you at any given point in the day and find consistency. If you got a DJ that’s playing pop bottle records in the club and goes back to a little shit hole apartment, has no money  and is mad at the world, I’m not criticizing that person but maybe your records should reflect your life more and maybe you will then be able to have more of a connection with the people you’re playing them for.

Obviously you have pretty well set ideas and opinions on how you view your community and your role in it, all that social awarness stuff that people like to talk about.

Conscious shit,

Yeah, conscious shit, where did that start for you?

I was raised that way, I was raised by progressive parents and in San Francisco, which, especially in the 70’s and 80’s it was the center of the new left. People know about the Black Panthers but they don’t know about SDS, The Weather Underground, The Brown Berets, The New Chicano Movements. There were all these different variations of the civil rights movement in the 60’s and 70’s that transformed into revolutionary nationalist and internationalist organizations. I remember seeing anti-Apartheid protests, pro-FMLN protests and having no idea what that meant as a Jewish kid growing up in San Francisco. I was fortunate to have parents and mentors and people around me that instead of saying “that shit doesn’t have anything to do with you,” instead encouraged me to reflect on what it does have to do with me. Then being connected with hip hop at a phase where Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, Lakim Shabazz, X Clan, again as a young Jewish kid, hearing artists talk about revolutionary Black politics, it didn’t immediately impact me. Those artists weren’t directly talking to me so I had to stretch my mind to see where I fit and that process made me connect in a different way. By connecting in a different way I was reading books, studying and what I come to realize now, I was earning my right to be a part of the culture. At that time not everyone could be a part of the culture, I’d go to a Public Enemy show and I’d be the only non-Black person there and get looked at. Now its different, you go to a hip hop show and there’s no Black people there, it’s changed radically. I’m old enough to remember that phase so I don’t take my position for granted and I feel like I don’t take the privileges I’ve had for granted. It is my responsibility to keep those kinds of lessons at the forefront of what I do. It’s easy for people to slip in and out of hip hop now like a jacket you put on but it wasn’t always that easy. I’ve held onto the essence of it because I think its valuable, there was lotsa stuff… like when Chuck D said “recorded and ordered, supporter of Chesimard” I went to my dad and asked, who’s Chesimard? He was like, ‘maybe they’re talking about Joanne Chesimard, she was a member of the Black Panther.” So I went to the library and looked up Joanne Chesimard aka Assata Shakur and that’s how I learned about her and in 1997 I went to Cuba and met Assata Shakur. I wouldn’t have even known who she was if it wasn’t for Chuck D, but also I wouldn’t have known that Joanne Chesimard was Assata Shakur if I hadn’t taken the responsibility of taking it further, which I think Chuck D and KRS wanted us to do. Some of us did but some of us didn’t, some people took it as a fad and went with the flow. There were a lot of people my age that were politicized by hip hop and took it as an opportunity to learn. The first time I got serious about school is when I saw KRS lecturing, “you don’t have to love school but you have to love the process of learning, the process of understanding what’s behind the ideas that are being fed to you.”

Thank you for this interview Sake.

new SHOOK is out.

here are a few previews, a feature on the revolutionary homie Sake 1 and a run down of Fly Lo‘s favorite movie soundtracks…

enjoy and subscribe!

Danny Brown’s been buzzin for a minute but hopefully this is the year that some cool guy finally convinces you he’s “worth it.”

Danny Brown – Black

maybe my favorite off DSOM4.

“nigga this the detrimental of the lack of fundamentals, you ain’t never seen probation, you ain’t never seen parole”

Danny Brown – Fruit Cocktail

“real true and living, definition of an artist”

Danny Brown – Bag Back

“motherfucker I’m a Don, hood phenomenon, game so tight I could serve Farrakhan “

Danny Brown – Thank God

off the upcoming free album The Hybrid, droppin March 16th.

this song deals with poverty, nutrition, Detroit’s public assistance AND it’s still gangster.

comments are welcome