During the rise of Composition, Paraphan Records, and Sunday School, my best friend and club manager came to me with a concept for a party. The rough Idea was a night inspired by the likes of Run DMC and Aerosmith’s collaboration, but to combine indie rock with hip hop. As a nod to Herbie Hancock perhaps, the party would be called Rocket.
The front room was anchored by DJ Omar of Sixxteen and Fake, with a rotating cast of regulars playing indie. The back room was DJ OtterPop, (the amazing Dr. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike) and myself playing hip hop and pop.
As a producer and DJ constantly trying to capture the original essence of juggling and sampling, that back room was my lab, particularly when I pulled the 9 and 10 pm sets, where the crowd was just getting started and could deal with a poorly executed blend, or a crunchy early mix of something new. And I was pushing the limits and trying some weird concepts in rock-oriented breaks.
I’m not sure what the first banger was out of my mixes at Rocket, but when I first dropped Alabama Gramma, there was no doubt it was a winner. It was a mix of Nelly’s Country Grammar and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama in an eye-rollingly ironic nod to both songs being described as love songs to the south. Over the next year, I proceeded to record my life mixes with a portable mini disc recorder, and worked on them at home, in a studio mostly composed of two Technics 1200s, an AKAI S-2000 sampler, and a cheap Tascam audio interface.
A Clash of Cultures
The truth is, all of my original Rocket Mixes were “agit-pop” and attempt to use pop music to influence politics. I was still actively involved as an international campaign coordinator for Buy Nothing Day, protesting the Iraq war, and wanted to bring political awareness to the dance floor, moving brains as much as booties.
The success of Rocket and the mixes I played there led to me producing a run of 1,000 CDs featuring 14 pop remixes, as well as dropping the collection on a number of popular P2P filesharing apps of the time, gaining 500,000 downloads in the first year. The CDs sold out in a couple of weeks, and to this day, The Rocket Mixes continues to raise eyebrows and garner DMCA takedown requests.
But Let’s Look At The Tracks
Alabama Gramma happened because I read an article talking about the rise of southern hip hop that praised Nelly’s song Country Grammar as a love letter to the south. I was immediately reminded of the beef between Lynyrd Skynyrd and Neil Young that led to Sweet Home Alabama. I was able to hop on it right away, as I had both the singles of Country Grammar, and Skynyrd’s Second Helping on vinyl. This was originally recorded using Cubase, two Technics 1200s, and an Akai S2000 sampler which I used to extend the breaks of Sweet Home Alabama for Nelly to groove over. This was categorically the biggest banger of the rocket era, with the idea being grabbed by another SF DJ and making it to the list of best mashups of 2005, a year after I sold out of physical copies of the Rocket Mixes. Both versions have been directly copied and claimed hundreds of times since then, but as I said in an article about the gaffling on GNN, I can’t claim to own my mashups, as I’m not the original artists, and sure as hell couldn’t afford to license them.
If Alabama Gramma was the dance floor banger of the album, Africa for Africa was the track I was most satisfied with. Slamming Toto’s anthem of appropriation in a locked room with Dead Prez’s attack on appropriation was my way of flipping off the cultural cancer of commercial hip hop in the early aughts. It was a great early evening dance floor filler, as the indie rock kids ironically loved Toto’s Africa, but the real hip hop heads got the joke. Fun bit of trivia, this remix has had more DMCA takedown requests than anything else I have produced, including two that came by certified mail. The fun part of that, was the club I played it at paid ASCAP, BMI, and a fist full of other licensing groups, so it was legal for me to perform. I just can’t put it on the internet… but here it is.
Every mixtape needs to start with a branded hype mix. Instead of screaming my name over and over again over airhorns, I decided to lead with a thesis. Pirate Nation is a sampadelic remix of Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture layered with a combination of creative commons audio, and tracks notable for generating legal issues when sampled. We live in a cut and paste culture enabled by technology. Looking back two decades at this track it is wild to see the path culture has taken.
Sometimes I start with a grand idea and work to put two songs together. That was not the case with this one. I have loved Motley Crue’s Shout at the Devil since I was a kid. I pulled it down into the sampler to chop up and loop not even knowing what I could possibly do with it. I messed with it for weeks on end (Apologies to my former roommates who sometimes would have to listen to a single riff for days on end). But once I found a copy of ODB’s Shimmy Shimmy Ya on 12″ with the acapella, I knew he had a new band to play with. Sadly, ODB died shortly after making this mix, and I’ve only played it one, in-memoriam since he passed. ODB is for the Children!
Mick Jagger once described the Rolling Stones’ song Satisfaction as “my view of the world, my frustration with everything… (disgust with) America, its advertising syndrome, the constant barrage.” Satisfuction was a mix of J-Live’s Satisfied, mixed with the saccharine cover of the Stone’s biggest hit performed by Brittney Spears. “Fuck that game plan, I’m not satisfied.”
