Jordylu1007

My man down in the ATL that’s Brooklyn, Jersey, Philly south hahaha. Alrighty then. A list of things to play that should get the folks moving. Alright now keep in mind this is off of the top of my head and I am getting old haha.
LL Cool J Jingling Baby
EPMD Crossover
Pete Rock CL Smooth TROY
Tupac I Get Around
De La Soul Me, Myself and I (kinda helps you do a transition to the P-Funk stuff)
Bobby Byrd Know you Got Soul
Guy Groove Me
BBD Poison/Thought It was Me/Do Me
Christopher Williams Dreaming
Heavy D Somebody For Me/Now That we Found Love
Mary J Blige Real Love
Main Source Looking at the Front Door
New Edition Candy Girl
Bobby Brown Every Little Step/My Perogative
Brass Construction Moving
Commodores Brick House
Carl Carlton Mama Jama
Frankie Beverly Before I Let Go
GQ Boogie Nights
Pleasure Glide
Brandy Baby/The Boy is Mine
Aaron Hall Don’t Be Afraid
If you have some steppers in the group I know the Leon Huff I Ain’t Jivin I’m Jammin has that hard downbeat that the old school steppers lose their minds for.
East Coast Family All 4 One
ABC At the Playground
Johnny Gil Rub You the Right Way
Janet JAckson Heavy D Alright
Jackson 5 Can You Feel It/Lovely One
Patrice Rushen Haven’t You Heard
The O’Jays I love Music
Imajin Shorty(You Keep Playing with My Mind)
Rodney O and Joe Cooley Live and Learn
Levert Cassanova
Big Daddy Kane Smooth Operator/Raw
MC Brains Oochie Coochie
Father MC I’ll Do for You
Blu Cantrell Oops
SWV Anything(WuTang)
Nina Skye Move ya Body
Peter Metro Debi Debi Girl
Chaka Demus and Pliers Murder She Wrote
Barrington Levy She’s Mine
Yeah I know the last 3 are reggae but the are fast enough that you can incorporate them into a hip hop set. EVERYBODY knows the melodies to them and women love dancing to them.
That should help lead you to other tunes and help trigger some memories

Played a gig where during my initial meeting with the promoter he made me aware that he wanted underground Hip-Hop, R&B and beats type get together(He didn’t want stuff you hear on the radio and if it was a radio cut he wanted remixes and b-sides). Met up a couple days before the gig to finalize everything and confirmed we’re still underground/Obscure. Got to the gig and about 30 Minutes in I’m getting the request for top 40 “How come you aren’t playing….” by the patrons but I keep it breezy and play what I’m playing figuring the promoter hired me to play this until about 10 minutes later promoter comes up to ask’s me what am I playing. I’m playing what we agreed. The problem was this dude promoted the party as you standard run of the mill top 40 Hip-Hop R&B fest not as the obscure 3rd white label release of a Madlib remix of a Dilla remix of the Herbalizer original album only released in Papau New Guinea(For the record I really don’t know if there is such a thing as this haha) or that b side re-re-remix of Real Love by Mary J Blige that sounded NOTHING like the original. I was lucky that I had a crate(this was 2004/2005) with nothing but top 40 and club bangers that I used to carry just in case things went sideways. So I had to mix the top 40 stuff with the underground I would get them dancing for about 3 songs and try to slip in something else and the dance floor would scatter except for 2 or 3 people out there losing their minds over the fact that I’m playing MF Doom hahah

LukeAlive, post: 36781, member: 270 wrote: And before that in the 40s and 50s you had the black radio jocks with “jive” talk that predates the MC. In the end our black brothers just know how to throw a rhyme its in your blood lol Respect!

Very true very true. Up until about 1995 when the guys starting passing away there was a station here WDAS that used to do this event every New Years Day where they would bring back the older retired DJ’s from the station. The very same folks you are talking about from the 60′ and 70’s like Jocko Henderson, Georgie Woods and Butterball in fact some of THAT stuff is on Youtube if you put in their names. Now if you want to learn how to hype a crowd and work the MIC check those cats out. Now granted some in fact a lot of the slang is dated but really their approach to working the MIC is impeccable.

I’m a hip hop DJ and any “Mic Work” is to basically hype the crowd. Truth be told to get an idea of how they work the mic youtube videos of Kid Capri, Funkmaster Flex and DJ Premier. Capri especially was an early master of the Mic Work for hip hop DJ’s. Keep in mind you are really looking to keep the crowd up without over doing it. Even repeating certain portions of songs will help you achieve your goal. Depending on where you live you can also get a “hype” person…Here in Philly you shake a tree and 10 fall out hip hop DJ’s here usually had a habit of having them because they didn’t talk to much. Will Smith started out as Jazzy Jeff’s hype man and MC Marvelous and a dude named Supreme All World were DJ Cash Money hype men and even now Skillz serves as Jeff’s hype man so you don’t need to talk. Get a person you know that has an outsized personality, witty and slick with their ability to turn a phrase and voila there you go.

It takes a bit of practice but it can be done. I converted from vinyl(Actual 12″ mixes I picked up at the store big thumbs up to Armands here in Philly) to a controller. Initially I looked at the wave forms to make sure I had the correct place in the song I wanted to scratch. I now put markers on those parts of the song and then do my chops and chirps and even have been able to get a decent transformer done. As an hip hop dj if I don’t scratch I get discomboulated haha. I often will take the drum drop on a song and scratch it into my other track. With some practice I was able to get past the size of the jog wheels. Great advice by nietzSKY give it a try. The more you practice it the more comfortable you’ll be. Try the simpler chops scratchs initially and then see if you can do some more complex scratch patterns. I think once you are confident in those simple scratches you’ll be ok. The beauty of it all is that the needle WON’T skip so no matter what you do the worse that can happen is that the track slips and goes a half beat before or after the part you want to cut.

Coltrane09, post: 32740, member: 2800 wrote: Hey, Jordylu…what do you know about that Slum Village “Climax”? Woooooo weee that’s a jam. When I first heard that cut I thought SV came from a time warp…LOL. Consequence’s “Please Disperse” sort of fits that bill too.

What’s up Dan. I take it that you’re entertaining a certain age group when you refer to 90’s hip hop and R&B? The previous responses pretty much laid out a LOT of music from the 90’s. I think 90’s R&B and Rap was a golden era for Hip Hop culture. I’m sitting here now wondering how long did it take the other guys to come up with all those names because they covered a lot of them. There were a lot of folks releasing banging hits back then, and for the most part it was GREAT music. Believe it or not, in most cases you could distinguish southern rap from west coast and up north flavors. Now, it appears everyone commercial are using a handful of producers that put out country rap tunes.

If you have a chance check out this brother’s Youtube channel in the UK named DJ Soops. He does a lot of Neo Soul mixes, but he also has a few videos where he mixes 90’s R&B and Rap. I’m also sure you can find more mixes available on Youtube if you do a search for 90’s Rap or 90’s R&B.

BTW, there’s one group I don’t see, but someone they’re associated with Del the Funkee Homosapien who was mentioned on the Reddit forum, and that’s Souls of Mischief. They had a bangin’ track called “’93 ’til Infinity”. And while we’re on the West Coast, we can’t forget Tha Alkoholiks. Check out Tha Liks album “21 & Over”. The West Coast had their own style. For the East Coast, Doo Wop’s “’95 Live Part 1” has to be one of the greatest mix tapes ever released. Doo Wop’s mix tape will give you more flavor of the 90’s gritty lyricists flaunting their talents. Can’t forget MOP, Group Home, Gangstarr, Nice & Smooth, Mob Deep (I nearly lost my mind when I first heard Mob Deep’s debut song “Shook Ones Part II” in a club), Digital Underground (West Coast), Sweet Sable (not rap, but a clash of R&B and hip hop), Queen Latifah, Naughty by Nature, Rottin Razkals, Special Ed (late 80’s, early 90’s), Da Bush Babees, Poor Righteous Teachers, Main Source, Nas, Mos Def, Jeru The Damaja, Ill & Al Skratch, The Roots, Brand Nubian, Grand Puba, The Pharcyde, Redman, Keith Murray, Jamal (formerly of Illegal), Kriss Kross, Common fka Common Sense, Black Moon, The Beatnuts, Big Pun, Fat Joe, Digable Planets, Apache (“Gangsta B”), Diamond D, Big L, Goodie Mob (Southern Rap, but not what you think, Ceelo was a member of this group), Too Short, Geto Boys (they represented southern rap, but the Texas way: in other words, southern rap was conscious too and wasn’t all about Miami bass music), Lords of the Underground, Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Mase, Craig Mack, Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz………

Ok….that’s a lot of people and I’m 100% sure I didn’t get everyone nor will we ever finish the list from all the responses here…LOL. It’s just a lot of folks to name, but I hope by now you have a good listing. You have a good 10 years to cover (give or take a year) so take your time. It never hurts to go with the chart busters because a lot of songs remained “B”side, but they are club classics.

Oh, let me give an honorable mention to DJ Kool’s “20 Minute Work Out” and “Let Me Clear My Throat” which had the clubs bangin’ back then too!

Good luck with your discovery because once you go down the road of hip hop of the 90’s you’ll soon discover the artists and producers sampled a lot of the music from a wide variety of genre’s from Soft Rock to Jazz from prior years. Back then artists and producers were very creative and tried to make different tunes from their parent’s music. Yes, some of it was a direct sample, but a lot of it was made from short snippets. It’s very cool to figure out where they got the music from. There are probably only a handful that do it now.

Loving this thread even if I only check in on it every couple of weeks or so hahahaha. You are a hip hop head as well good to see. Yeah that Slum Village climax is just WOOOOOOOOOO. I used to play a lot of tunes of that ilk when I was starting the evening out and 3 people were standing in the room I was playing or ending the evening and wanted the I’m just here to dance to the radio bangers crowd OUT of the room. What’s THIS????? Uhhhh its Slum Village Climax…It sounds weird….Yeah I’m sure it does. Most folks had no clueand just wanted to hear the track that ALWAYS got radio play. In fact if you tried to school them on hip hop outside of the mainstream they would look at you like a unicorn was standing behind you. I always had a leaning towards that whole mellow ethereal sound though. Really good tracks to but the harder boom bap beats behind and most of the time you could get away with playing the songs you really like as long as you had a decent enough track to mix with it. I used to drop the instrumental of Jazzy Jeff Fresh Prince Brand New Funk 3 or 4 times a night because it would be behind Slum Village or behind Bahamadia so people were toleratiing the songs I liked by Slum and Bahamadia because at the end they knew I would eventually drop the Brand New Funk vocal or put Climax on and cut in the instrumental track of Get into It by Big Daddy Kane. Couple scratches and let it go and voila of course you could only play that for about 30-45 seconds before the crowd would get restless and start to go sit down so then you’d have to cut Rock Dis Funky Joint in by Poor Righteous Teachers to keep the crowd moving but yeah. That list you have is impeccable love it. I have been fortunate that a ton of the clubs, bars and lounges here in Philly play/played a lot of that type of hip-hop. When I briefly moved to Oakland Ca I noticed that in both Oakland and San Francisco while they certainly wanted to hear their hometown artist and had a brutally underrated hip hop scene the minute they found out I was from back east if I attempted to play a Bay Area cut folks would do the walking strong routine up to where I was DJing and ask why I wasn’t playing stuff from the east coast. Sometimes I would throw on these obscure cuts strictly local to Philly or Regional to the PA/NJ/DEL tristate like a group out of Camden NJ called the Krown Rulers had this song called Kick the Ball and these folks would dance to them like they had been fans of that particular cut for years. Another time I played this song called My Part of Town by the Tuff Crew out of Philly and these cats were on the floor going for broke. I guess that why I really hip hop culture or the older classic cuts because there is nothing like seeing a room with a mixed age crowd(from lets say 21 or 22 to 33,34) and everyone is saying the words to T.R.O.Y by Pete Rock and CL Smooth then you put on another less well know cut by them like Lotsa Loving and now its a much smaller portion singing but the ones who dont know it continue to dance because to them this cat next to me that was kicking T.R.O.Y at the top of their lungs is all in on the cut too so it must be pretty good. Oh well again good thread, great song/artist suggestions guess I’ll be back in another 2 or three weeks with hopes that there are a couple of more comments.