DJ QUIK....dope!

[Tito]

Remember “Tonite?” Well, it’s another Friday evening in Southern California, and DJ Quik is getting his drink on. But a few things have changed since 1991. A priceTK forty of 8-Ball has been replaced by a priceTK bottle of Chopin vodka. The setting here isn’t a house party south of the 105, but rather a plush studio where Michael Jackson has recorded nestled deep in the 818 area code. (For the record, yuppie-ass Sherman Oaks is most definitely not “just like Compton.”) And with the jheri curl safely locked away in gangsta rap’s archives, right next to the Raiders cap, Quik’s famous hairdo is braided up and hidden underneath a red and black do-rag.

But the slim, 5’11” rapper/producer/songwriter can still fit into that gray sweatsuit with the burgundy trim, and he can still craft West Coastin’ hip-hop masterpieces that never fail to put a hoodrat’s tail in motion. For Quik, it seems like partying and bullshitting go hand in hand with working and creating.

“I always want to put some energy in the music, dog,” he says, pouring himself a glass of orange juice and vodka in the studio’s well-stocked kitchen. “That’s what makes the music last a long time. Like ‘Tonite’—you could tell I really had a hangover doing that shit. I was drunk when I did the video! I was drinking real hard back then when I was 19. I was 8-Balled out!” Quik laughs, remembering his underage drinking daze. Taking a more serious tone, he continues. “In the studio, I just let everybody do their job. I do my job, and we all have a good time. And that good energy in the room gets captured.”

Hoping to catch some of that energy tonight is Amir, a fresh faced Persian-American MC (yeah, that’s right) with tatoos in Arabic on his arms. Amir has wisely sought the talents of one of hip-hop’s most consistent and innovative beatmakers for a track on his debut. DJ Quik is taking a break from mixing down the freshman’s song to check the text messages on his 2-way pager. The alert goes off to the tune of “Trouble,” the first single from Quik’s sixth and latest album, Under the Influence. It took him three hours to program the 2-way tune (complete with a vibrator bassline.) When did he find the time?

“When I was getting my hair done,” he says with a smile.

These days, Quik certainly has his talented hands full. He’s no longer recording for Arista Records, and his independence from a major label has given him a newfound sense of freedom. “I didn’t really want to play the game no more until I got out of that fuckin’ contract,” he says. “I’m in my thirties now. I can’t be signed as no stupid artist because artists get raped. I had to take over and do my own thing. And it’s a whole lot of fun because with creative control, the possibilities are endless now.”

“All the shit I’ve been holding onto, all the hot beats I never wanted to sell for ten or twenty thousand dollars a piece just to make some money, all them timeless beats that I kept buried away in the archives—I shitted on this album with all of them. I smeared them all over the CD.”



Before he first began defecating on wax, before he gained fame for gangsta grooves and pussy medleys, before Quik was even the name, David Blake was peddling dope and banging with the Tree Top Piru Bloods in the city where he was born and raised—the notorious Los Angeles suburb called Compton. In the mid-Eighties, when he was a young teenager, Quik’s older sisters helped him buy some DJ equipment. He started rocking school events and house parties to further pad his pockets. Due to some financial missteps, though, Quik’s family was forced to move out of the C.P.T. in 1988.

“My mama lost her house in foreclosure because we tried to buy a swimming pool we couldn’t afford,” Quik explains matter-of-factly. “In the ghetto. In Compton. What idiots.”

Around that time, the 18-year-old Quik was introduced to a dude named Playa Hamm who hooked him up with a short-lived construction job. Playa Hamm was also into making beats, and soon Quik and his new partner were able to convince Hamm’s mother to buy the pair an SP-1200 sampler from V.I.P. Records in Long Beach. Quik immediately fell in love with the classic hip-hop instrument. “I started sampling everything,” he says. “It was like I knew that drum machine instantly even though I had never worked on it before.”

Inspired by the sounds of King Tee’s Act a Fool, Eric B. & Rakim’s Paid In Full, The Great Adventures of Slick Rick, and Compton’s own N.W.A, DJ Quik began his music career. Surveying his surroundings, he came up with a novel approach to slanging his homegrown product.

“I thought, I know how we could make some money,” Quik says, shaking the ice cubes in his Screwdriver. “If I make tapes about the neighborhood and put all the dope dealer homies’ names in the raps, then they’re gonna buy them because they hear their name. That’s an automatic ten dollars!”

With the ghetto brilliance of his personalized tapes, Quik was able to flip a $10 box of blank Memorexes into a hundred bucks in a day, unloading copies in local hoods like Fruit Town and the Trees. Some of Quik’s associates would venture onto the Crip blocks where he couldn’t go and slang tapes there, too. Eventually, the cassettes found their way out of town and into spots like Las Vegas, Arizona and St. Louis, amassing a sizable underground following along the way. With Compton fresh on the map thanks to the World’s Most Dangerous Group, the time was right for DJ Quik to come up in the rap game.

“I really had no idea that people would like the shit,” Quik says, humbly. “I was just doing what I felt. There was no pressure then. It was all fun.”

And the fun he had creating it came through in the music. Though he was never one to shy away from gang affiliated rhymes and dopeman diatribes, DJ Quik celebrated his idea of a good time in the hood: fucking, drinking malt liquor and smoking some shit. He had the respect of the streets, but perhaps more importantly, chicks jocked his shit—no matter how bad he talked about them. His 1991 Profile Records debut, Quik Is The Name, and the ’92 follow-up Way 2 Fonky both went gold and Quik became one of rap’s elite.

Quik has let the homies have some too, introducing the world to Suga Free, Hi-C, AMG, 2nd II None, and the late, great Mausberg. A 21-year-old MC known around his way as the “Biggie of the West Coast,” Mausberg was tragically shot and killed in Compton on July 5, 2000.

“It’s funny, I was saying this while he was alive,” says Quik somberly, “but now, after he’s dead, [I can still say] Mausberg was the greatest rapper. Mausberg didn’t get a chance to show the whole world what he knew. His music’s gonna live forever and it’s going to be limited to those that really look for him. His voice was so strong that when you listen to Mausberg’s album right now it sounds like he’s still alive. He jumps out of the fucking speakers, he’s so big. He’s a big, beautiful dude and I can’t wait to see him.”

For Quik clearly life hasn’t been just a bunch of fun in the sun. He’s seen more drama than Mary J. Blige, and served up more beef than a LA Fat Burger. While Quik’s friction with Everlast has been largely forgotton, his on-and-off-wax battle with crosstown rival MC Eiht (of Compton’s Most Wanted) still stands one of hip-hop’s longest and most heated feuds. By the time he was recording his third album, ’95’s Safe + Sound, the Quiksta was rolling with Death Row (though still signed to Profile) and banging on wax harder than ever. Quik’s hair might’ve been relaxed, but the vicious lyrical threats on “Get At Me” and “Dollaz + Sense” were anything but.

But then ‘Pac and Big died and shit changed. DJ Quik spent his next two albums, 1998’s Rhythm-al-ism and 2000’s Balance + Options, denouncing the gangbanger lifestyle. Musically, Quik reached further than ever before, adopting exotic rhythms and Latin flavors in songs like “Down, Down, Down,” “Hand In Hand,” and “Do I Love Her?”

But even while promoting positivity and sonic experimentation, Quik still found time on Balance + Options to send some thinly-veiled disses at a rival. On “U Ain’t Fresh,” Quick rhymes about an anonymous, Ecstacy-popping, bisexual producer who puts his name on other people’s tracks.

Ask DJ Quik who he was talking about on “U Ain’t Fresh!” and you’ll get a “no comment,” but anybody who listens to word on the streets has a good idea. According to Quik now, it was that same “word on the streets” that created any tension that may have existed between the West Coast’s two greatest producers.

[Tito]

“‘U Ain’t Fresh!’ was me being mad because I had listened to the streets,” says Quik. “You know how the streets always try to be like, ‘Word in the streets is that this real famous producer is dissing you. The best producer in hip-hop’—which he is—‘is dissing you on one of his records.’ And I bought it, and I listened to it, and it was like, Y’all are right! That do sound like he’s talking about me. And I jumped the gun and just like shot some shit out there from some shit I heard in the streets. But I was fishing for straws instead of being thorough. I would rather be thorough like I usually do. I’ll be thorough if I’ma diss somebody. And I’ve come to find out, it wasn’t even true, man. Now me and dude end up making the best music ever in life. You know, I guess that was my way of meeting him. Dude is like a warlock. Dude is like a wizard. Dude is still young. Dude is still making the best music ever. It’s like, How the fuck? I look up to him because I wanna be like him.”

So When did Quik first hook up with Dr. Dre?

“Oh, we talking about Dr. Dre now?” Quik says, coyly. “Well, that’s another story. Dr. Dre is incredible. The ultimate chemist. He deserves that position that he’s got as the greatest hip-hop producer of all time. He will never be outdone. Even when he quits.”

Aside from their history-making collaboration on the Training Day soundtrack, “Put It On Me,” DJ Quik and Dr. Dre have recently work together on the debut single for an Aftermath songstress named Truth Hurts. Simply the hottest shit on the streets of LA at the moment, “Addictive” is produced by DJ Quik, mixed by Dr. Dre and features a guest rhyme from Rakim.

So there—another beef settled for DJ Quik. But even when your not looking for trouble, trouble can come looking for your ass. It came looking for Quik’s at the 2000 Source Awards in Pasadena.

“Oh, when I got beat up by the police?” Quik says. “What I did was, I defended myself. I’m not a coward. I was doing an interview with ABC talking about the influence that hip-hop and Latin music have on each other... I was out there trying to break up a fight my homies were in, and they [the Pasadena police] must have thought I started it. And they turned around and jumped on me and they tried to throw me on the ground. And I was like, this is wrong! They was grabbing me and kicking my shin bone and trying to break me down and stomp on me, and then two or three of them was on my back at one time. And then more of them were trying to take me down. And I’m a little skinny guy! But I will not lay on the ground in a white outfit. Ya know? If I’m wrong, I’ll go ahead and go to jail. But I’m not wrong, I’m just defending myself. Y’all wrong, I tried to break up a fight and y’all beat me up? So I sued ‘em. I sued the police ‘cause they tried to ruin my career, trying to make it seem like I’m an evil dude and fuck my shit up. And I end up talking about them on ‘Trouble’. They was wrong.”

[WE NEED TO FACT CHECK THIS:] The lawsuit filed against the city of Pasadena, the Pasadena Police Department and The Source last summer has since been [settled/dropped?] out of court.



On Under the Influence, DJ Quik continues to try his best to be on some “no more drama” shit. “Would you rather be in these streets scrapping and shooting with these niggas,” he asks on songtitleTK. “Or somewhere with a blunt in your mouth getting your dick sucked by a bad ass bitch?”

That seems like a pretty easy question.

“The new album is me going where I’ve never gone before,” says Quik, sipping his cocktail. “Musically and lyrically. It’s me being a rapper finally instead of just bullshitting on tracks and not being sure if people would like it or not. Like, when I was signed to fuckin’ Profile and Arista, I didn’t really have no confidence because they would never pay me. It’s like, just pay the man and let the man go in there and do what he gotta do or let him go. With this record, there’s a whole lot of confidence. I know I’m spitting some shit. And I ain’t on no ego shit, because I really look at myself as a producer first, rapper maybe third or fourth. Because I like playing music. But at the same time, I paid the exact same amount of attention to every aspect of this album—lyrics, music, guest artists. It was really meticulous, more than any other album I’ve ever done.”

It’s also his least “West Coast sounding” album ever. You know we live in a new and different world when super-lyrical East Coast cats like Pharoahe Monch and Talib Kweli show up on a DJ Quik album.

“The new album is not territorial and I purposely made it that way,” says Quik. “I would want someone in Duluth or Fargo, North Dakota, to listen to this record and say, ‘Hey, this is good music.’ Everybody can’t relate to gangbanging. Everybody can’t relate to the way Ecstacy feels, because everybody don’t do weird drugs. So I didn’t make no record with no references to dumb shit. There’s no gangbanging. Again. And I think you can be strong and hard without gangbanging, because if you a real gangbanger—if you lived through the bullshit—you become a general. I was always a street lieutenant, and now I’m a general. I moved up in rank. I got stars and stripes now, purple hearts and shit for saving muthafuckas. So give me my stripes, man.”

And since you know he ain’t ashamed, and you know he ain’t bashful, go on and pop the bottle so he can pour him a glassful.



PULL QUOTES
“All the shit I’ve been holding onto, all the hot beats I never wanted to sell for ten or twenty thousand dollars a piece just to make some money, all them timeless beats that I kept buried away in the archives—I shitted on this album with all of them. I smeared them all over the CD.”



“It’s funny, I was saying this while he was alive, but now, after he’s dead, [I can still say] Mausberg was the greatest rapper. Mausberg didn’t get a chance to show the whole world what he knew. His music’s gonna live forever and it’s going to be limited to those that really look for him.”



“The new album is me going where I’ve never gone before. Musically and lyrically. It’s me being a rapper finally instead of just bullshitting on tracks and not being sure if people would like it or not.”

www.xxlmag.com

[fortiey]

Yo, Dogg! Thanks for posting that dope ass, Dj Quik,interview.
Good look'in out homie!
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