When I first heard DJ Quik in the early 90’s I instantly knew that my Eazy-Duz-It and Straight Outta Compton cassette tapes were going to be put on pause for a minute. While NWA introduced me to the city of Compton with the banger “Straight Outta Compton”, it was DJ Quik that helped carry the Compton torch with the drop of his smash single “Born and Raised in Compton” in 1991. That cut is as strong today as it was back then and the entire Quik is the Name album is a not only a West Coast Gangster Rap classic, but very much a Golden Era Rap classic as well. Quik’s debut album pushed boundaries in so many ways. Quik has one of the most unique voices in hip hop history and his flow was ahead of its time from his double time rapping, his sing-song R&B flow and even his reggae singing. Rappers just weren’t this versatile back then. While Quik had his gangsta raps, he also had playful bars that showed you that he couldn’t be pigeonholed as simply a gangster rapper. And let’s not forget that Quik produced EVERY song on his debut album and most of his albums. We always make lists of the best rappers dead or alive but if you’re making a list of the best rapper producers (aka rappers who make their own beats), Quik is right up at the top with legends like Dr. Dre, Kanye, and Q-Tip. I’d also knock Dre down a bit as he used ghostwriters (somebody else writing for raps!) for most of his songs but that’s to be debated another time. Quik opened me up to genres like jazz, funk and reggae on his debut album with his clever sampling. He also laid down one of the best instrumentals to ever be included on a rap album with “Quik’s Groove”. Quik is the Name is a masterpiece in my opinion and I let that tape rock until the tape popped in the 5th and 6th grade. As an 11 and 12 year old in those years, Quik was dropping hood knowledge on my young white virgin ears and I ate it all up.
Like the other music that I got into during this era, I have to give props to my older brother Todd who helped open these doors for me and show me some of the my favorite songs and albums to this day. And it’s not like he was schooling me on what to listen to, I would simply pillage through his Case Logic cassette tape holder and his night stand drawers to steal his tapes, throw them in my walkman and press play. Todd’s musical interests ranged all the way from Public Enemy to the Dead Kennedys to Peter Tosh in the early 90’s with a some wild card pop singles like Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam” sprinkled in here and there to keep the party rockin’. I listened to everything in his collection just to see what I really liked and I was open to all types of music. Todd’s high school crew all listened to the same music and I was the one to get a lot of my friends to listen to rap music back in elementary school because I’ve always been a promoter at heart. My crew and I would make rap videos during slumber parties for songs like The Digital Underground’s hit “The Humpty Dance” and try out for talent shows at school with rap songs like “We’re All in the Same Gang” featuring many of the West Coast legends from way back when. We would talk about music at kickball and at the handball courts and also have our boombox bumping when we played hoops at each others’ houses after school and on the weekend. I also tried my hand at performing in our living room right as an 11 year old right in front of my childhood babysitter Pory with songs like “Sweet Black P*ssy” from Quik so I could improve my stage presence. And yes, a song called “Sweet Black P*ssy” is just as bad as it sounds if not worse. I’m not proud of that performance but to be fair, my babysitter Pory was Iranian so her English wasn’t the strongest. To this day I think that Quik’s absolutely vulgar rhymes on that track went right over her head so that helps me be okay with it. Quik and the genre of rap music had taken over my life and I couldn’t get enough of it. Hip Hop helped get me to my 6th grade graduation from elementary school with some raps jotted down in my notebook and some swag in my soul.
The summer of ‘92 was a transitional time for me as I was getting ready to step foot onto a new campus as a 7th grader at Standley Junior High School in San Diego. In 6th grade, I started to hear about how different junior high was going to be from elementary school. There were supposedly kids who did drugs and even ones with gang affiliations and that was something I only knew about through my rap music, the LA Riots coverage on TV, and the movie, Boyz N The Hood. As a tiny white kid, I was scared at what was ahead of me at this new school. A short time before school started, DJ Quik dropped his second album, Way 2 Fonky in July of 1992. I got my hands on that tape as soon as I could and remember it being on repeat in my Sony Walkman while we were on a family road trip. (While kids nowadays have tablets with them in the backseats of their parents’ cars, we had our walkmans on long road trips.) The song “Jus Lyke Compton” from Way 2 Fonky was a favorite of mine and showed me that there were others cities in the US outside of Compton that were also rough. I would look out the window of our station wagon and just bob my head to Quik telling stories about the violence he endured while touring to support his music. I knew so much about these rappers lives through their storytelling in their rhymes. When school finally started, I knew the Way 2 Fonky album from front to back but how would this street knowledge from my tape deck translate to my new school? Junior high was a total culture shock for me on day one as our school consisted of local kids from the University City and Clairemont neighborhoods but there was also a lot of kids bussed in from Southeast San Diego neighborhoods that I had never been to like Paradise Hills, Skyline, and Lincoln Park. As a result, you had a total melting pot of kids from different areas of San Diego all integrated into the same classes. Where in elementary school, I had my comfort with kids I knew and saw everyday. Junior high at Standley threw me a curve ball as I was surrounded by a lot of unfamiliar faces from all sorts of different cultures. Fights broke out all over the place at school and the yelling of “FIGHT, FIGHT!” meant you were sprinting to go watch some kids scrapping on the schoolyard. And these were craaazy scraps! Locker bays getting locked down so teachers couldn’t get in to break things up, girls pulling handfuls of each other’s hair out just going after each other with flailing limbs, and scheduled fights after school at 3pm at the church. When you heard the words “3pm at the church,” you cancelled all obligations and made sure you were at that damn church to see that fight. Fights were one of the main attractions at junior high school.
While my love of rap music was something I mostly kept inside of me, I began to overhear other 7th grade classmates of mine that talking about all of the same rappers I knew and loved which perked my ears up. A lot of these kids talking about gangster rap were ones that I had never met before and I had never been the one to approach strangers and strike up a conversation. These new kids wore lots of red to school and talked about being affiliated to the Skyline Pirus blood gang (aka East Side Pirus) while flashing their gang signs and throwing up their sets in between classes. This was something I knew nothing about but I never looked at those kids differently because they were all cool to me. Many of them were friends from where they were from just like me and my crew from elementary school. One day, I gained up the courage to join in on their classroom conversation about gangster rap music and the look on their faces was priceless. Here they probably saw me as a white kid who knew ZERO about rap and instead listened to white bands like Nirvana, Metallica, and GNR. While I did listen to those “white” groups, my true music affiliation was with rap and hip hop and I had to express myself with these kids. The fact that I could chime in on songs from rappers like Spice 1 and Too $hort gave me instant rap cred with my fellow classmates and at school in general. White boy Tim knew what was up with rap… From that point on, I was accepted by these new kids and color barriers were broken down. It didn’t matter about the color of our skin or our background because if we all liked the same music or liked the same sports, we were homies. When we saw each other between classes we would dap each other up and even trade rap tapes out of out Jansport Backpacks. Rappers liked Quik, Dre, Eazy, and Cube always got a bad wrap in the media but it was because of their music that I built friendships with kids from all different walks of life. Albums like Quik’s Way 2 Fonky helped bridge the gap for me at school and my love of rap music continued to grow.
Way 2 Fonky
I had a great time in junior high school and the new release boards posted behind the register at music stores like Tower Records, Sam Goody, and The Wherehouse always let me know which rap and hip hop albums were about to drop. Looking back to my junior high years of Fall ‘92 to Spring ‘95, it blows my mind to see all of the dope albums that came out during that time. People will always debate when the true golden era of hip hop was but I’m pretty confident that I lived them from the 7th grade through the 9th grade years of junior high school. Just look at these albums below and let me know what 3 year stretch is better than this. I’ll wait….
Quik’s album Safe & Sound came out in the Spring of ‘95 which was my freshman year at Standley and my last year of junior high school. I still remember the day Safe & Sound dropped because I went with my homie Ryan to the Music Trader record store in PB (Pacific Beach) to buy the album. We often rode our BMX bikes to hit the music stores but PB was far so we got a ride so we could go dig in the crates. I grabbed that new Quik album with the quickness because that is why I was at the record store in the first place. After we walked out of the store, I ripped the packaging off of the CD (never an easy task!) and I could not be bothered by anything other than that booklet of liner notes inside of the CD. When I got home, I tucked the CD in my waistline under my t-shirt and sucked in my gut just like I did with all of my rap tapes and CD’s when walking into my house. Remember, rap was frowned upon back then so I couldn’t let my parents see any of the rap evidence on me. Once I cleared my parental hurdle, I beelined to my bedroom and shut the door so that I could give Quik’s 3rd album its first spin. Safe & Sound saw Quik taking a step forward with his production by using classic P-Funk samples and working with Roger Troutman from Zapp & Roger to create some smooth G-Funk vibes. The Safe & Sound album was one my crew and I played all the way into high school because you had slappin’ beats, lighthearted raps from Quik, and an epic diss track against MC Eiht from CMW called “Dollaz + Sense” that rivals Pac’s “Hit ‘Em Up”, Jigga’s “Takeover” and Cube’s “No Vaseline” as the best diss songs of all time. It also made for a great hype song before soccer games for us. And if “Dollaz + Sense” was too aggressive for you to listen to with your girl in the car, “Let’s Get Down” was a song that everybody loved in high school. The Tony! Toni! Toné! and DJ Quik combo is one of the best R&B songs of the 90’s and there wasn’t a school dance or a house party in the late 90’s where that wasn’t played to set the mood.
DJ Quik is one of my favorites of all time not only for his string of dope albums, but also for the timing of each in my life. Quik was a major part of my soundtrack through elementary school, junior high, and high school. After I graduated high school, it was only right that Quik came through once again as I began college and needed some more hits to play at house parties while out at school and then back home for holidays and the summer with my SD crew. Quik released the Rhythm-al-ism album during my freshman year at college in 1998 and Balance & Options during my sophomore year in 2000 and he couldn’t have dropped better albums for where I was at that point of my life. College represents a time when we’re all supposed to begin to mature and grow up and that’s exactly what Quik gave us. He left the gangster raps of his past behind and came out with albums that could be played front to back at a house party or a summer BBQ that wouldn’t scare the girls away. They were rap and R&B albums that the fellas weren’t ashamed to bump in their whips because Quik was always fly with the beats and rhymes. Quik had concocted the perfect party albums for the late 90’s and early 00’s and even today the beats still sound clean and they stand the test of time. The Rhythm-al-ism album cover tells you everything you need to know about the vibes from these albums.
The hair, the shirt, the album name…. SMOOTH
DJ Quik is a legend in the game but for some reason always seems to be underrated by those outside of Cali. Quik was so influential with his rhymes, production, and engineering and influenced rap stars such as Dr. Dre, Tha Dogg Pound, Snoop Dogg, The Game, Kendrick Lamar, and so many more in the genre. I recently saw that Quik had turned 50 and with my own 40th birthday quickly approaching, I wanted to pay homage to the music catalog of Mr. David Blake aka DJ Quik. Below are some of my favorite songs from Quik. If you’re unfamiliar with a lot of his work, this would be a great place to start. My Spotify playlist of the best of Quik is also down below if you have a subscription to that music service.
Top DJ Quik Tracks
“Tonite”