The vice Guide To Dj Quik

If there’s anybody you need to be jocking in this rap game (besides Ghostface) it’s DJ Quik. Dude is a West Coast legend. Peep game: he’s been jheri-curling it for over twelve years, has rhymes that make Too $hort sound like a feminist and beats that got Dr. Dre shook. He gets love from gangbangers and URB magazine readers alike. All his records are classics (except maybe one), but for some reason he got jinxed with every release. And although he’s known for crafting highly orchestrated funk that sounds like 1976, Quik is currently changing his musical approach, as evidenced by the ridiculous Bollywood-meets-Compton gangsterpiece he produced for Truth Hurts. Apparently, there is more of that to come on his new independent album, Under Tha Influence. In the meantime, here’s a career retrospective, from an old G’s perspective.

Quik Is the Name
(Profile, 1991)
We did that record just to make money in the neighborhood. We didn’t want to sell drugs and we really didn’t want to work at Taco Bell no more. So we started doing underground tapes and putting the homies’ names in them cuz we figured “even if we can’t rap or these beats suck, if we just mention one of the homeboys’ names they’re going to spend ten dollars on this motherfucker, so we’re going to be making at least a good twenty dollars a day.” We were the first people to come out rocking red, doing it the gangsta way from a Blood core. I think that was a selling point: We were the first Bloods doing it and we had talent. We weren’t just run-of-the-mill bustas. Recording the album was a weird thing for me cuz I had never been in the studio before, with all them knobs and shit. Keep in mind I was just a 19-year-old dude, like I didn’t really know nothing. So the shit comes out like January 21st of 1991 and my life has never been the same since.

Way 2 Fonky Safe + Sound Rhythm-al-ism Balance & Options Under Tha Influence DJ Quik’s Under Tha Influence album is out on Euponic/Universal, homie