MIXTAPE: The birth of the hop hop economy.
Now that we’re in the midst of the streaming/playlist era where new music is available at our fingertips, it’s important that we look back and explore the enormous impact mixtapes had on hip-hop music and culture worldwide, and how they helped us get here.
Back in the late ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s, DJ mixtapes played an extremely important role in hip-hop, both in New York City and beyond. They helped dictate what rap songs were hot in the clubs and in the streets, plus influenced which artists would get played on the radio and signed to major label record deals. And of course, they showcased which DJs had the most skills, and also who had the juice to pull the illest exclusives.
PART1.
Prior to this, getting your hands on a mixtape was a very limited and tangible experience. Sort of producing a snobbish hip-hop subculture. You’d have to find the block where the tape was being sold, sometimes out of a trunk or the corner store and get your hands on one before they were all gone.
Once homemade and sold door-to-door, in barbershops, and flea markets - the tapes grew into a multi-million dollar industry. RIAA reportedly estimated that in the early 2000s mixtapes were generating as much as $150 million dollars in sales each year. During this growth the music industry, for most part, turned a blind eye to the enterprise.
Nowadays, it’s fairly normal to see artists routinely flood the hip-hop streets with an abundance of content. Every other week it seems rappers are delivering new music to fans - a far cry from earlier eras, times when listeners waited sometimes years to hear anything new from their favorite emcee. Twenty-plus track playlists, as is the en vogue terminology, and “commercial” mixtapes appear on platforms like Apple Music and Spotify with great regularity but in days past this sort of saturation did not exist.
Over their lifespan, mixtapes have changed in body, but never in soul. Whether the vehicle is zip files, MP3s or C60 cassettes - they’ve always been an integral part of hip-hop’s maturation. Many fans have benefited greatly from the projects that introduced new artists and DJs to the listening community - even though they were candidly, loosely ethical, bootlegged copies of intellectual property that created questions about fair use and legality - they also grew to mega popularity and demanded substantial financial returns. Overall, mixtapes have and continue to have a convoluted but important legacy.
Mixtapes famously incubated the early rap careers of artists like 50 Cent, T.I. and Jeezy. Like them, many rappers built the groundwork for their careers with mixtapes. Gaining the attention of major labels through the buzz those compositions created at a grassroot level.
Mixtapes have long been a grey area for both record labels and artists who bend copyright laws to facilitate the distribution of the mostly promotional projects.
Mixtapes were some of the first building blocks for hip-hop - appearing as early as the mid-1970s in New York City. The groundbreaking compilations featured artists such as Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa. Classic records like “Planet Rock” emerged from mixtapes. They were incredibly effective in the early days and fans would collect and trade these tapes which helped spread hip-hop.
PART2.
From the 1980s into the 1990s, DJs began to join in on the mixtape craze and became a driving force in their revolution. Music personalities like Kid Capri and DJ Clue took tapes from sets on cassette, to an exclusive consumer experience featuring hard-to-find tracks and verses — he infamously had Biggie’s “Juicy” on one of his mixtape cassettes prior to the release of B.I.G.’s Ready to Die album, resulting in a furious call from Biggie on-air at Hot 97. DJ Clue is no doubt a pioneer in procuring the medium as its own art form. Clue helped build the prototype for tapes which became iconic.
After the fall of the “mixtape martyrs,” in 2010, the mixtape industry looked to be on life support and in desperate need of defibrillation. There was a time when you needed mixtapes to find the newest music but blogs and websites partially replaced the importance of the tapes in that they exposed listeners to new content without the quest.
Today the mixtape is no longer a reflection of its name. The black Maxell cassettes of self-produced music are no longer peddled on Canal Street in Manhattan, and there are no DJs to mix. However, it has left an impression on the music industry despite evolving into something completely different than what it was originally intended for.
Cannon was influential in his own right with the Affiliate Music Group - also producing tracks for previously mentioned “Gansta Grillz” series. The pair were incredibly formidable in the early part of the decade. It was a comeuppance and turning point in the timeline of mixtape culture.
A mixtape introduced the work of DJs and artists to the streets before hitting the radio and was part of the culture’s black market, as it was often curated by DJs who bent music industry rules to acquire exclusives.
Making a name for himself in the 1990s with his stellar mixtapes and groundbreaking 50 MCs series The Piece Maker, “When was the last time you held a physical tape?” says Touch. “Why do people even call it mixtapes, because it’s not even a tape anymore? It’s not even a CD. When we put our mixtapes on CD we still called them mixtapes. It’s a stigma that we started, and it has stuck with the culture.”
Classically dubbed the “mixtape martyrs,” Drama and Cannon bit the bullet for the industry. Drama, of course, pioneered the insanely popular “Gansta Grillz” series.
In 2007, DJ Drama and DJ Cannon were arrested on federal racketeering and bootlegging charges from the alleged sale of mixtapes. With the endorsement of RIAA, authorities raided the pair’s Atlanta studio - seizing more than 80,000 CDs and thousands of dollars in producing equipment.
PART3.
For fans, possessing one of these mixtapes was like having a cheat code that could unlock all of Hip-Hop’s mysteries. Giving unprecedented access to unreleased songs and breaking new artists, the mixtape was Hip-Hop’s holy grail.
DJ Doo Wop’s 95 Live mixtape was regarded as a street classic due to its featured range of talent that included Q-Tip and Busta Rhymes dropping freestyles as well as the debut of Mobb Deep’s classic “Shook Ones.”
After pioneers such as Grandmaster Flash laid the foundation in the 1980s with live DJ mixes, the art form took hold of the New York streets in the early 1990s. The likes of Kid Capri and his 52 Beats mix paved the way for a second wave of DJs, including the aforementioned Touch, to curate the cultural explosion that shifted from mixes to distinctive works of art that featured exclusive freestyles and songs from up-and-coming artists and conveyed the musical tastes of the man behind the turntables. Showcasing works such as DJ Premier’s Crooklyn Cuts, Touch’s Power Cypha, DJ Clue’s Cluemanatti, and DJ Spinbad’s Rocks the Casbah mixtapes delivered something special to avid HipHop fans.
Meanwhile, up-and-coming MCs began making a name for themselves on the mixtape scene by freestyling over other artists’ beats, which led to label deals for some of the biggest names in Hip-Hop including 50 Cent, Fabolous, and Cam’ron.
DJs such as Ron G, S&S, Doo Wop, Kay Slay, Clue, and others turned the mixtape from a physical music-delivery device — often self-produced by new artists, possibly featuring a mix of artists or even a recording from a gig — to a term now used by the mainstream to describe a collection of new music. With New York widely recognized as the cultural epicenter of Hip-Hop, it stands to reason that one of Hip-Hop’s most significant innovations was born there.
“I think we were a major part of the equation for artists getting signed to labels,” Touch says. “Having that mixtape hype behind you was a big look for a lot of artists.”
“The mixtape was like a business card,” Touch says. “Eighty percent of the time I was giving them away for free as a way to get heard and build relationships,” Touch says.
“DJs could break records and had access to music that you couldn’t get anywhere else,” says Trackstar the DJ. These DJs became household names that were just as big, if not bigger, than the artists featured. As much as it was about getting the music out there to the fans, the mixtape also assisted DJs in getting gigs and, eventually, record deals.