The Legacy of DJ Drama (Article)
What up one & all. Sky Bento here. Big Bento Energy is most definitely in full effect. I hope you & yours are doing marvelous today. If not, a couple of heavily anticipated projects just dropped that can hopefully get your mind right. The most anticipated for me was Tyler, the Creator’s 7th studio album Call Me If You Get Lost.
Last week when he dropped “LUMBERJACK” as the first taste of the album, I was welcomed by a familiar voice - the legendary DJ Drama. Immediately, the internet was split. Tyler’s core fanbase of predominantly hipsters reside in a world largely separate from Mr. Thanksgiving’s legendary mixtape run in the mid-2000’s. Then there were those of us who grew up with the tapes, who hoped Tyler’s whole project would be a Gangsta Grillz throwback. So when this came to fruition, Twitter was in shambles. On one side users were happy for not only the nostalgia trip, but also to see Drama outside of the typical hood-friendly banger environment (not unlike when he hosted the In My Mind Prequel by Tyler’s idol Pharrell). On the other hand was the new generation telling a legend to stop yelling at them. It just didn’t sit well in my spirit. In this TED talk, I will be attempting to summarize just how important this man is to our modern day culture.
Born Tyree Simmons in Philly, Drama moved to Atlanta in 1996 to attend Clark Atlanta University. While there he met longtime collaborator Don Cannon, a fellow Philly-born DJ who would play a vital role in his career later. At this time, hip-hop was still predominantly based in the East Coast with a lot of love being shown to the West Coast as well. Southern rap was still coming up, and we were a long ways away from trap music. Enamored by the new music scene he was being exposed to in the South, he began working on a few mixtapes with artists from the local scene. In 2003, he founded the Aphilliates (pay attention) with Cannon & DJ Sense. This led him to distribute his new mixtape series on a wider scale. It was called… Gangsta Grillz.
Atlanta rapper T.I. had been dropped from his record deal with Arista Records after poor sales of his debut album I’m Serious. With no desire to quit pursuing music, he returned to the streets. This resulted in him founding his own label Grand Hustle Records (which Drama would later sign to) and releasing a few mixtapes leading up to the first major hit for Drama’s Gangsta Grillz series, 2004’s Down With The King. This mixtape was full of disses to Texas rapper Lil Flip, which only made the record hotter in the streets. Ironically enough, this underground project would help to re-establish T.I. in the mainstream. About a year later, Drama would assist in breaking another Southern act into the mainstream with Young Jeezy’s Trap Or Die, a true Southern classic. Amazing as these artists were, Drama himself played a big role in making these projects as special as they were. Drama was an A&R before he was even an A&R and knew just how to pop off to present these artists. While most DJ’s leaned more toward clubs and parties with their tags and drops, Drama’s husky, raspy voice screaming over every record made it feel like you were in the streets, even if you weren’t.
The branding was incredible. “GANGSTA GRIZZILLS!” “GANGSTA GRILLZ YOU BASTARDS” “MR. THANKSGIVING!” “CATCH UP N****S!” If you grew up listening to hip-hop in the mid-2000’s, I bet these phrases still live in your head rent free. Some of the records from these mixtapes would go on to be released on official albums. In fact some of these artists treated these tapes like they were albums. The brand carried that much weight at this point. But everything was about to change forever when instead of breaking a new artist, the Gangsta Grillz brand would breathe new life into a most established act. In fact, you can almost blame Drama for the reinvention of rap through the greatest child star to ever rap - Lil Wayne. The early days of Lil Wayne at Cash Money Records are well documented. So for now, let’s just say Weezy was very much cemented into the sound of New Orleans rap. He began to shy away from this, and emulate his idol Jay Z more and more in the early 2000’s, but was denied creative freedom by the higher ups at Cash Money. Having sworn off of writing his raps, he began freestyling over popular instrumentals to keep his skills sharp, despite being legally unable to release these as an official commercial release. And on a rainy day in April 2005 (or maybe it was sunny, I don’t know, weather is different everywhere) Wayne would begin to change the rap game forever. He emerged as damn near an entirely new artist with his Gangsta Grillz mixtape, The Dedication.
This new project brought DJ Drama to whole new level as it quickly evolved into a series. In fact, it’s most recent entry was released in 2018. Drama definitely rubbed off on Wayne in terms of branding. As every Drama hosted project typically had a few of his catchphrases for listeners to look forward to hearing, every Wayne verse typically had something new for the F in Weezy F. Baby to stand for, surrounded by out of this world similes and metaphors as Wayne’s mixtape run progressed on and eventually his famous “Young Mula Baby” tagline. This new “Mixtape Weezy” (as coined by Wayne’s favorite rapper himself) would go on to continue his string of tapes without Drama. He began releasing tapes in Da Drought series as well as No Ceilings and Sorry 4 Tha Wait (which both received their own sequels) later in his career. At this point most artists would take this approach to building their buzz themselves, freestyling over the industry’s hottest beats with no DJ in sight. Drama would still get work hosting tapes with T.I. & Young Jeezy as well as everybody from Jim Jones to Pharrell. The Gangsta Grillz brand had become a household name, which would be great if it were a legal operation but only made the illegalities of it hotter.
In 2007, DJ Drama’s studio was raided on RICO charges. NPR’s Louder Than A Riot podcast goes into deep detail about what exactly happened and has an exclusive interview with Drama about this incident, but I’d like to focus more on the music side of things. So let’s just say this moment could’ve effectively killed the mixtape. But at that point, the legacy was already cemented. We’d all seen just how incredible a mixtape could be, and that these types of project were really cultural movements. It brought things back to the essence of hip-hop, where the MC and DJ were a team to either rock the party or drop knowledge. More than that, mixtapes gave up and coming artists a way to feed their families and break into the music industry.
As for Drama himself, he continued to host mixtapes (legally this time) such as Nipsey Hussle’s Crenshaw & 50 Cent’s The Lost Tape. Beyond this, he’d already used his platform to secure a position at Atlantic records and went on to release a few albums, two of which (and technically a third) bear the legendary Gangsta Grillz name. These projects feature all the friends he’d made along the way as well as new faces, such as Tyler the Creator himself on 2012’s Quality Street Music. This was Drama’s first album with no connection to the aforementioned Gangsta Grillz series, meaning Tyler had just missed his chance to be connected to the legendary series… until now. These days Drama typically resides in the background of the music industry via his label Generation Now, known for bringing us both Lil Uzi Vert & Jack Harlow. But Tyler wanted to recapture the magic of his childhood, and got DJ Drama to host his new album Call Me If You Get Lost. If that isn’t the culmination of all of Drama’s hard work, I don’t know what is.
And like that… we gone.