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These are the Breaks

Def Jux's RJD2 tells us about his pursuit of DJ Shadow's Hip-Hop instrumentalist throne.

by Douglas Passion | 2002.10.19

RJD2's debut album "Deadringer" is a lush instrumental assortment of hiphop, funk, soul and rock. Loosie talks with the Columbus, Ohio native about beat digging, stealing records and being plagued by comparisons to DJ Shadow.

How many records do you own?

I don't fancy myself a collector. I have like seven bullshit $40 Target wooden bookshelves. I don't really know what it adds up to.

So you're not technically one of those audiophile guys?

I've never worked off of lists, I'm not a guy that's been like 'oh, I've gotta get this fuckin' Stark Reality LP', you know what I mean? It just doesn't interest me -- that shit is too paint-by-numbers for me personally. I've not dogging it, I'm just saying that, to me, to follow record collecting in that manner kills the fun of it. Now, a lot of that collecting shit has gotten to the point where it's not even necessarily that someone has sampled it, it's more like it follows this rarity. A small example on the microcosm level what the product placement and brain freeze tours did for record collecting is just amazing, it's just unbelievable. They played records on that tour that I've literally tried to sell the 45s three or four years ago on E-Bay and people wouldn't bid three dollars for them and now they go for like 40 bucks. Just because of that tour - it's fueled this 45 craze among kids. People can use the Internet and liner notes to find out where samples came from. Back in the day, someone had to just know it or run across it. There's no romantic aspect about it anymore. It was cool to me if it was like '95 and somebody was like 'Oh yeah, such-and-such sampled this Eric Gale record or that fucking thing on P.T.I. or Bluenote or whatever." If your boy just told you, then I could understand going out and looking for it. At that point in time, I was still looking for records because somebody sampled it. Now, if somebody sampled something, it makes it completely unappealing to me as a record.

Now, where did you steal most of your records from?

Ohhhh! I don't steal too much, actually.

But you had to at one time - anyone who owns a lot of records stole a healthy amount.

Most of the shit that I've stolen has been from radio stations, I actually made a killing at a radio station this year. It was a gig, and I'm not exaggerating when I say I took literally about four armfuls of records out of there - I took about 75 or 80 records. Any gems? I got about twenty Canadian library records out of it. It was me and a couple other DJs, we all found shit that we were looking for. I was looking for foreign records, radio joints…I mean library joints, drum-breaks and stuff. But Edan…I was out with him and he hit this pocket of early 90's Elektra promos, so it had like every Leaders of the New School, every Del single, all the Brand Nubian singles from the first album. Yeah, I found a couple gems out of that.

When you get together with other producers, do you worry about other guys looking at your records?

You gotta kinda worry about trainspotters and stuff. People haven't really given a shit until now. Two years ago, people didn't give a shit what I was playing or buying. Now I'm definitely covering shit up and crossing stuff out with a marker. A good trick I learned from my boy Dante is to take the label from other records…the vinyl will be manufactured so that the actual paper label, there'll be two of them, one of them sticks to the record and the second one is just slightly adhered to the thing. You can peel it off so it's virtually intact. If you peel off enough of these things, you keep them and glue them on top of other records. You just keep'em around, any bullshit, like Aerosmith. You peel off the top label…now you tape that on your rare shit. Every time you play it people are just going to see an Aerosmith label on the actual piece of vinyl.

How are you going to escape comparisons to DJ Shadow?

I've only been doing press for this album for a short period, only a month or two, and I've encountered this issue so much. I know for a fact my next album is gonna have no fucking traces of anything near Shadow, moodwise or aesthetically.

Are those comparisons fair?

I'm not wild about it. I think the context that people use [the comparison] is a compliment, but I explain to them how someone could see that as not a compliment but a dis, if you come from a hiphop perspective. It's almost like saying 'you're biting somebody's shit.' People say [my album] gives them the same kind of feel as when the first heard 'Endtroducing', I don't know, I think some people mean it's an important sample record or whatever the fuck. If people mean it as a compliment, I'm completely flattered. But, you know, nobody wants to be a biter.

So are you based in Ohio or New York now?

I'm not really anywhere right now. I'm in Ohio, but I don't have a home here. I've been bouncing around. Right now, I've got a storage unit and a car. In May, my apartment's ceiling cracked open and there was a 15-foot crack and extensive water damage. It was my house and studio. I had to put my stuff in storage and move out - it was literally a heath hazard. There was fuckin' rainwater pouring directly on my keyboard and sampler. I'm on tour so much between now and November that I've not really too pressed about finding a place.

Being based in Columbus, how did you hook up with El-P and Def Jux?

We had this connection with El 'cause Copywrite and I DJed and produced with the MHz. We did a couple singles on Fondl'em. Some of the guys in my group got introduced to Def Jux and El-P - this was before El-P had actually started Def Jux. Then he pops up with this label, and my friend Copywrite, he had a demo of mine and he ends up playing it for El. He expressed interest and was like 'what's this kid doing, is he looking for a deal?' We've still remained centered out of Columbus. We've got the Internet, we've got mail, it actually hasn't been much of a hindrance.

Have you been given complete freedom as an artist on Def Jux?

Those guys are so fucking great. El and Amaechi are super cool about artistic direction - they were like 'do whatever the fuck you want'. Honestly, if anything, I'm more eager to make a palatable record than they are. Seriously, they don't give two shits.

On "F.H.H.", Jakki makes a lot of remarks about nerd hiphop. Def Jux has been known as a haven for the backpacker. Was that intentional?

Not really, I wanted Jakki on my album, I gave him a beat, he liked it, and that was really just the way the song came out. There's definitely a certain irony to it on a number of levels. Whatever, if kids get pissed off, then they get pissed off. I respect what he did on the track, but at the same time, him saying "fuck hiphop" in that song is not necessarily something I feel at the moment. I feel like hiphop's in a great place.

Expand on that. Saying "hiphop's in a great place" is contrary to what a lot of fundamentalists are chanting.

The sad thing for me is when I meet kids who started listening to hiphop when Gangstarr put out Moment of Truth and they're already bitter. These kids that are really new to hiphop…I almost feel that there's been a point in time where it became cool to inherit other people's cynicism about hiphop - almost blindly. There's a lot of kids who think they're supposed to act like hiphop sucks. I don't fully understand it, like they're supposed to be cynical because it makes them cool, I don't know…the whole 'keep it real thing'. I'm just too old for that shit. I'm 26 - I went through that phase, but I went through that phase in high school. If you don't like something, why waste your time? If you don't like hiphop, go buy country or R&B or rock or punk or metal - if you want to go back to the fucking past, go buy a time machine and fuck yourself. If you don't like hiphop, don't pay attention to it and don't be a part of it.

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