ABOUT
[a lil' introduxion
about me & my fetish]
It all started in 1986... on the streets as a 10 year old kid playing or just hangin' around with other kids from the neighbourhood. Once, a little older one of them had a walkman and let me check out 2 songs from the tape he was playing; LL.Cool.J - Rock The Bells and Spyder D - I Can't Wait.. For me this was a brand new sound after hearing the boring mainly country/rock/pop music my parents used to play and so on that day I finally discovered the style of music I still like. That was what made me decide to have my own cassette player, but being a 10 year old without any cash I had to beg my parents for one. Fortunately they agreed to buy me a portable tuner-cassette combination <a 5 Watt Ghetto Blaster to blow your mind> with a 5 pack of Maxell cassettes. Boy was I happy! I started tuning around on a wednesday afternoon and just when I was about to give up my search for the sound I was after I heard a Mr. Ed tune with a break over it ->The Beasties' "Time To Get Ill" was playing on VPRO’s “Wilde wereld” (“The wild world"). Immediately I threw in a tape and pressed the play+record buttons and this was the birth of my first Hip Hop tape, which I played over and over again. The radio program I just mentioned played all the actual music at that time, so soon I was surprised by hearing more and more great tunes, what did I know... It was a weekly program so the next few years you could always find me in my bedroom on Wednesday-afternoons getting hooked to the sound of Hip Hop. Also I found out that -tuning around daily- the Thursday evenings had a great surprise for me as well, TROS' "Soul show" played that stuff too! So soon I had to buy more tapes to record my "needs". Later on the older kid from the hood noticed I also liked the same music as he did so we talked about it and he started to dubb tapes for me, he already had a few rap records and when he gave me a tape he wrote down the titles for me as well so with the combination of that and the radio shows I was slowly being taught a lesson into Hip Hop.
Inspired by the music, and influenced by other young -but older- punks in the hood I also got involved in the writing scene. Soon I got my hands on copies of the underground "Freestyle" magazine which was spread all over the country; a black-white mag xeroxed a million times from one writer to the other consisting of mainly graffiti pix, info on local Hip Hop jams, drawings and designs for pieces and so on. So I started to develop my own tag-handwriting and came up with various aliases to tag up the neighborhood with. All my pocket money got spent on buying fat Pentel markers (black/red/blue/green - 7.50 Dutch Guilders a piece at the time) and when I met some guys doing the same shit we went increasing our "working field" by bike just taggin' it up all day. This went on for a few years, from Pentels to Posca paint markers and of course soon to spraycans but to be honest I failed setting up a real piece (of art) so I gave that up later and focussed more on the music. In the meantime my portable was destroyed by pressing the rec-, play- and pause buttons too often and since I was a little older I saved some money to buy me a HiFi Set. I remember it was a quite impressive one for me at that time, an "Amstrad" with some mixing options on it, a 4 track tapedeck, a (belt-driven) turntable and a tuner with aerial lead input to be able to receive my favorite radio programs on cable instead of antenna. It opened a new world for me because I could play records myself, record them myself, experiment with the 4 track deck and discovered a new radio station now being connected to cable: the BFBS' "Danceshow" Capitol radio show with Tim Westwood, on friday evening. It was def, all the latest Hip Hop was being played there and almost every show featured known artists as guests performing live freestyle sessions and being interviewed or just making noise out there in London. I recorded a lot of that stuff and still have a few tapes with nice freestyles. Some rare shit was being played there as well, I remember him playing "Lethal weapon" by CL Smooth and Pete Rock which was meant to appear on Marley's "In Control" album, but unfortunately it never did. Anyway I enjoyed this higher level of broadcasting Hip Hop in Europe a lot and I was quite pissed off when the show seamed to be kicked off the air (in 1991?) as I didn't receive it from one day to the other! The other -Dutch- radio shows also got to an end and the days of receiving good Hip Hop music on my radio were over.
With the years I met some other
guys into the same music as I and we started swapping tapes, 12"'s and cd's and
we went to the record stores weekly to find out if there were any new records
out since radio didn't update our knowledge on that anymore. Some months turned
out to be expensive buying several cd's -yes you read it right, mainly cd's
instead of vinyl unfortunately, because of the invention of the bonus tracks
featured on cd's only at that time-, but it got less when the quality of
music was gone at a certain point, I guess artists started to loose their
inspiration and creativity when Hip Hop went mainstream, all that shit sounded
basically the same (of course there were exceptions). Some people label
this as the "Golden era of Hip Hop", but I'm certainly not one of them!
So what did I do when
it went the wrong way (starting from 1992) with my favorite style of music.... I
started to dig up my old cassettes and LP's again, listening to the Platinum era
of Hip Hop music! In my humble opinion that's 1985-1991, no matter east or west
coast, both produced crazy mad shit in those 7 years. And while browsing my
old tapes, records and magazines recorded / released in that era I started to
collect and search for records I once heard, heard of, or recorded but never
actually bought at that time. If I than knew what I know
now, I would have bought multiple copies of all good records at their reasonable
prices and be a satisfied collector and a rich seller, instead of being a
frustrated Hip Hop junkie still looking after loads of rare records selling at
abnormal high prices nowadays. In the beginning, around the middle of the 90's
the collecting hype wasn't that huge yet, you could find a dope classic release
at a normal price, not much higher than the price it cost when it was released originally. I went through the whole country, sometimes abroad and to record
fairs year after year diggin' in the crates to decrease my want list, it was
exciting and giving me adrenaline rushes when I dug up an old piece of black wax
I was after for a long time. Later on Ebay was the easier way (but less fun) to
find records that showed up there from all over the world.
In the meantime I also spent more and more time practising scratching. I remember I first heard
the DMC world contest in 1989. I started to try and cut up old records on an old
turntable and without a mixer with crossfader, instead I used the volume knob to
have the effect to fade away the sound of spinning the record back. It took a
while to get my first JB Systems turntable set with Numark mixer but as I got better I was annoyed
by the fact that those JB's were slow-starters, because they were belt driven,
so I had to save up more money to buy direct drive turntables. My neighbour at
that time (may
he rest in peace) knew about me and my vinyl addiction and one day he offered me his Technics SL 1600 full automatic direct drive
turntable for 300 Guilders. That was very cheap even for a second hand. I bought
it and destroyed the auto off it, scratching my ass off!!! Even now I still use my
reliable 1600
to cut shit up!
But those are not the only things what my Hip Hop Fetish is all about, I am just obsessed with it. At any given day, at any moment, anywhere Hip Hop is on my mind. When there's no radio I have dope beats in my brain or some song just playing from my memory. When going somewhere by car I always have Hip Hop cd's with me playing in my car stereo, no radio airplay shit when I'm driving!! When talking with friends -that even don't like this music- the subject Hip Hop might often pop up. When browsing the net, ask yourself what kind of sites I might be visiting... When hearing other music I imagine what kind of beat might be created from it or how it could be mixed with Hip Hop. When walking the dog I might spend that time beatboxing while he's dropping his load. At work I might irritate my colleagues banging on the desk thinking it's an 808. Man I even teach my daughters how to scratch.
This site is brought 2 u by Rude a/k/a DJ MoMzL-1, into Hip Hop for 24 years now, still addicted to the mid 80's ghetto sounds; raw beats, rough scratches & dope raps. Still enjoying to see fools spinning around on linoleum or vandalz bombing your town, amazed by the inhuman moves and incredible pieces of art created with spraycans. I am obsessed by that shit. If you are too, this site might be interesting for you.
Peace audi 5000