How Jay-Z and Roc-a-Fella Used DJ Envy to Conquer New York Rap

Of their new e-book Do Remember!: The Golden Era of NYC Hip-Hop Mixtapes, authors Evan Auerbach and Daniel Isenberg hint the historical past of New York rap via its humblest and most world-alteringly necessary supply system— the mixtape. Because the legendary cultural ambassador Fab 5 Freddy notes in his introduction, hip-hop’s international takeover started with cassette recordings of events and stay performances handed from hand handy and hood to hood. By the early twentieth century, cassettes had been supplanted by CDs and hip-hop was on its strategy to changing into a extremely corporatized multi-billion-dollar business— and celebrity mixtape DJs like DJ Clue turned all-important tastemakers, able to shoring up a newly-mainstream rapper’s road cred or signal-boosting an underground crew into the stratosphere. On this excerpt from Auerbach and Isenberg’s e-book, music govt Lenny Santiago— greatest generally known as Lenny S— talks about how a 2001 mixtape enabled the rise of Roc-A-Fella Information, the label based by Jay-Z, Damon Sprint and Kareem Burke in 1994.

Lenny S was a distinguished Roc-A-Fella A&R who knew the significance of the mixtape. Actually, earlier than he got here to the Roc, he labored on Unhealthy Boy’s road workforce as they have been pushing the groundbreaking Unhealthy Boy mixtape collection. Impressed by this and among the challenges occurring on the time at Roc-A-Fella, Lenny S took benefit of his in-house connections and teamed up with DJ Envy to begin his personal Roc-A-Fella mixtape collection. This not solely gave the label an opportunity to regulate their very own mixtape narrative, nevertheless it allowed him to construct his private model within the course of.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LANDING EARLY JAY-Z MIXTAPE PLACEMENTS

Lenny S: At the moment for us, it was monumental. Particularly [DJ] Clue—he was solely going for the highest notch. He was chasing down B.I.G. or Naughty By Nature, or whoever have been the highest individuals. Any person like Jay, he wasn’t B.I.G., he didn’t have a success report, he wasn’t high of the charts, he wasn’t any of that. He was simply an unwell, dope, self-contained, self-funded rapper from Brooklyn who hustled prior and bought cash.

These Clue tapes spoke on to the streets, in order that was a giant deal for us. You had the radio DJs at night time doing their factor, however the mixtape lived 24 hours a day on each road nook. In order that was necessary when these issues bought shuffled all the way down to Baltimore, Philly, and North Carolina.

We relied on the mixtapes as a result of they traveled across the nation by getting bootlegged and copied, and by phrase of mouth. Mixtapes have been how we found Nas introducing Nature, Clue introducing Fabolous—all these guys we discovered on mixtapes.

ROC-A-FELLA MIXTAPE SERIES

Any person had a report of Jay’s that they weren’t purported to have. Lengthy story quick, the man bought caught with the report. He had it outdoors the workplace and was taking part in it. Dame came upon and was pissed, clearly, as a result of we weren’t purported to let music leak. He was so pissed that the entire employees bought docked as a result of he was like, “One workforce, one household, one unit. One particular person will get in bother, all of us get in bother.”