I have a friend that invited me to Zanzibar in Santa Monica where Anthony spins every Friday. It didn’t take me but about 10minutes to know he was DOPE. I also caught his show on KCRW. There’s no denying his music taste.
Last September my friend especially wanted to go check him out because 2 of our friends, one of whom is a DJ, had nothing but good things to say about his talent. The DJ homegirl said:
“He changed the way I listened to music.”
It was easy enough to see why she said that.
This was a great interview. The more he talked the more I wanted to keep talking to him.
Part 1
-How he fell in love with music.
-Paul Robeson, Michel Gondry, Michael Jackson, & Hulk Hogan.
Jay Stephens, the VP of Programming for Radio One, and a morning show coach named Steve Reynolds said…and I quote, “The 18-34 demographic in urban radio doesn’t want to be enlightened, they want to have fun!… 20-year-old Black kids are still watching Nickelodeon.”
For a while now musicians, especially in Hip Hop, have made a practice of “dumbing down”, or making music less about serious issues and more about partying. I’ve heard from countless rappers, producers, and more: “You gotta dumb down. Most people aren’t smart, and don’t want to be.”
“20-year old black kids are still watching Nickelodeon.”
Why does the Black demographic matter? Supposedly the biggest consumers of urban music are White suburban teens, many of whom have at least a high school education. The statistic on White kids being the main consumers of Hip Hop may be questionable; but, of the many live “urban” shows I’ve been to, I’ve seen more people of other races than Black in the audience.
So, it seems that for a while now, Black artists and urban radio stations have been dumbing down their material with a Black audience in mind…but Blacks may not even be the main consumers buying the product. Who’s the real fool then?
(Note: I’m in my mid 20s, have a Masters degree, and still watch cartoons. They’re more creative than “reality” shows.)
A lot of these execs think they’re smarter than they are, when many of them are making assumptions off “reports”. News flash- Numbers CAN lie.
I dumbed down for my audience and double my dollars./
They criticize me for it. Yet they all yell “Holla!”/
If skills sold, truth be told/
I’d probably be lyrically Talib Kweli./
Truthfully, I wanna rhyme like Common Sense/
(But I did five Mil) I ain’t been rhyming like Common since.
-Moment of Clarity, Jay-Z
But this isn’t just about Hip Hop.
Dumbing down has always made it’s way through entertainment, especially film and TV. Studios ask for more “action” because the audience is “too stupid” to catch metaphors and symbolism, or meaningful dialogue. How many “reality” shows have the same basic set up, and many times we can tell when something was scripted?
Diesel now has a campaign around the slogan “Be Stupid.”
Radio, television, film, advertisements, even public schools, work off the assumption that humans are dumb and like being that way.
This base-level thinking is imprisoning.
And last I remember, calling someone stupid was fightin’ words!
It’s one thing to simplify, and it’s another to dumb down.
As artists, we have to take minds to another level.
I’d probably be, lyrically, Talib Kweli./Truthfully, I wanna rhyme like Common Sense/
(But I did five mill) I ain’t been rhyming like Common since.”
With the rise of Serato & ipod DJs, there are a lot of people who think they know what it takes. It’s not as simple as you think. DJ Dizam is an example of skills.
I met Dizam through a few mutual friends last year. I heard her spin on a Hip Hop night. She was dope. Seamless selections & blends.
I heard her at another event spinning some Afro-Beat & international stuff a few weeks later.
Once again, seamless. Once I talked to her, I knew I had to get her story.
Part 1
-How she became a DJ
-What the hardest part of DJing was for her to learn
-Her favorite artists to play
-DJs breaking new music
PART 2
-Her future goal as a documentary filmmaker
-The business side of being a DJ
-How she got her name
-Where else you can catch her
When I interviewed her she was working on her mixtape…
HERE IT IS!: http://djdizam.podomatic.com/
Listen here. It’s dope as hell!
It was 1999. I was 17 about to graduate high school. I only really listened to two radio shows at the time: The Wake Up Show, and We Came from Beyond with Mike Nardone. Underground Hip Hop. It was around this time that some of my friends and I would declare : “I don’t listen to the radio.”
The statement was our way of rebellion. An “Overthrow the system.” type comment. When I was in middle school MTV and BET played all kinds of music I never heard on the radio; but, by my senior year in high school both of those stations reflected commercial radio.
Then it got worse.
I had friends during college tell me they would drive in silence, or maybe play mix cds. The radio was rarely turned on.
Once the iPod arrived, there was a point where I saw people everywhere with their earbuds in ALL the time, even IN THE CAR!
A lot of my peers now don’t listen to the radio at all. A lot of the underground shows have changed or not around anymore. It’s hard to dance all night at a club because a lot of “new” music sucks. My friends would say we’re at the age where there’s a generational gap with music today.
I don’t believe that.
Good music is good music.
I’ve been asking younger people what they’re listening to, and in a lot of cases they’d say the same thing I said when I was a teen :“I don’t listen to the radio.” In fact, many of them seem to be listening to the music I grew up to.
I once had a 15 year old tell me, “It’s not like when Biggie was out and people had good albums.” He was born around the same year Biggie died. He doesn’t have the same context I had when I was 13 and Biggie stepped on the scene; yet, he feels a drop in quality albums just like my older friends.
I had a 19 year old on Myspace tell me he “…discovered a group called The Wascals” and had been bumpin’ them lately. Little did he know me and my crew wanted to be just like The Wascals when we were in 8th grade.
A lot of the music coming out today is supposed to target young people with a more disposable income so they can buy albums, but a lot of them don’t seem to really be paying attention. I can’t ask every young person in the world to verify it all, but even when I look at Youtube comments on old videos, I’ve seen some say “I’m 13 years old and I love this song. I can’t stand the stuff that’s out now.”
I guess not much has changed since I was in high school…
I have a friend that invited me to Zanzibar in Santa Monica where Anthony spins every Friday. It didn’t take me but about 10minutes to know he was DOPE. I also caught his show on KCRW. There’s no denying his music taste.
