DJ STRONG
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hat does the union of DJ Strong and DJ Warrior mean to the West Coast? Well, we came together around 2001 and formed Cali Untouchables, which was a collective of not just DJs, but anything that has to do with entertainment and music. It’s a collection of professional individuals, but me and him built it off our love for DJs and the mixtape hustle we saw that was untapped and that’s L.A.. There really was no West Coast mixtape scene. Generally if you were gonna go find mixtapes you would have gone to the swapmeets or something like that and you’d find radio mixes. At the time the radio DJs were getting songs from the labels and they were getting the exclusives and they would go and put out there little radio jam mixes and shit like that. So it wasn’t like New York where it was an exclusive and they were producing and making albums basically. So we got with a bunch of artists (Boo Ya Tribe, Crooked I, Outlaws, Kurupt, etc.) and started getting them mixtape beats. So we basically started doing our own shit. We always looked out for the West Coast. We always DJ. We know how to mix and we took that with all our freestyles and started making concepts, Cali Untouchable Radio, the Palm Trees and Gangsters series and just started building a whole scene for the West. Keep in mind there’s never been a mixtape culture over here and we did it our way. What brought the two of you together initially? I knew him through doing work with Stronghouse Records, which was my record company that I had. I was putting out singles of people that were around me or that I just knew. Turns out I met some underground rappers so I just started putting out vinyl singles. He was doing a record pool and at the time he was trying to get me to join. I was like, “Nah, I’m cool,” but we just started building a relationship and started running with the Cali Untouchables and started grinding and promoting. We’ve always been real [serious] about getting our promotions out through emails, clubs, networking and knowing people. He’d been hollering at a lot of people in the industry more than me and I was just doing my thing starting my company. We generally have a lot of fans that are consumer based and they just started recognizing us. We put out several hundred mixtapes a day.
The more that you wear this CEO hat do you step further away from DJing or does your creative energy still call you? I’ve been going in that direction more. Right now I’m just trying to find the time to do a little bit of both because I’m still an artist myself. I still like to be creative and work with [different kinds] of music. But Hip Hop West and the business end of it is taking up a lot of my time. I’ve been wearing the CEO hat a lot and it’s cool and it feels comfortable to me. That’s what I’m good at. Then we do the radio show, the Sirius Satellite Cali Untouchable Radio Show and work with new artists like Tri Star. We’ve always supported artists like Game and Omar Cruz and Glasses Malone, all the people before they got deals. We put a lot of their singles on mixtapes before anyone. Some people know that. A lot of people don’t. What’s the most memorable mixtape you’ve done? Palm Trees and Gangstas. It’s the first one that Kurupt hosted, one that I really took my time with. It just kinda made itself. You can play it all the way through. It doesn’t get boring. 40 Glocc, Kurupt, Jayo Felony and Prodigy from Mobb Deep, so I got a lotta exclusives from them. But yeah, people still hit me up to the day about that. Now they’re more on the Lil Eazy E tapes, the Cali Untouchable tapes and stuff like that, but that was my best one. Eventually I wanna turn it into an album – Palm Trees and Gangstas: The Album. You moved to the Jersey for a minute before things cracked off for you. Did that have anything to do with you wanting to DJ? My big influence was my brother. He was four, five years older than me. He always came home with Parliament, Funkadelic, introduced me to Too $hort, Run-DMC. I lived over in Australia in Sydney for a year and that’s actually where I got introduced to Three 6 Mafia. It was fuckin’ crazy. The only dude I ever met out there was a local cat who was holding down a lot of shit. I befriended him because he was the only guy that was listening to underground rap. Everybody else was listening to Techno. But most of my influence came from Southern California – the gangster culture, N.W.A. – shit that I was listening to while I was riding the bus. But I also listen to classic rock and hard rock, Metallica and shit like that. I’m pretty diverse. OZONE WEST // 17