Uphill Both Ways

Early Discord was rough.

Anyone who used it before ~2017 remembers: voice died the second you had over a dozen users connected simultaneously, moderation tools were almost non-existent, themes changed constantly, and server discovery was a fiction. The platform shipped fast and broke everything along the way.

Discord? It’s like Skype, but better...

It really was like Skype and Slack had a kid, except the kid was smarter than both parents and already knew TeamSpeak had failed its “community interactivity” exam.

You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole.

Sure you can, you just make the peg smaller.

Know Your Roots

An online community lives on organic discussion and interaction until it doesn’t. The second it switches up, trust dies and never comes back. There had to be greener grass, and if my crew and I couldn’t find it, we’d have to build it.

Forums weren’t new to me; owning one was. I was never that good at math, but could confidently calculate this was going to be an uphill battle.

Getting people to move is one of the most difficult things you can do within online communities. Users hate change, myself included, and begging never works; you just get buried in quote chains.

Only two things separated what I could do on Discord from everyone else.

Care, and never sell out.

News that KanyeToThe had been sold to VerticalScope made its way across DMs, removing the last bit of faith left. That push was all it took.

Friends IRL clowned my love for hip-hop; the conversation moved online and stayed. Every few years, whichever community felt most like “home” sold out, got bought, or imploded due to careless admins. Clockwork.

The goal was simple: a space where the only thing anyone judged was your Top 10. Not ethnicity, not your GPA, not which way you swing. A fandom can exist around a subject, but a community only exists around the people in it. Build for the subject alone, and it dies the moment the subject gets boring. Build for the people who create the culture, and they become autonomous.

There’s an academic term for what fans do in spaces like this: participatory culture. Fans aren’t just consuming; they’re building. The in-jokes, the slang, the entire social architecture; fans generate all of it. What the academics don’t write about is who shows up to collect once the building’s done, or what happens to the builders when someone who never held a brick starts managing the site.

I made a hip-hop community, one of Discord’s first ever music servers.

Something was there, unmistakable, and everyone from my clique felt it.

Only the scale was unknown.

Talk is Cheap, Chat is Cheaper

With almost no built-in moderation tools, growth showed up hand-in-hand with chaos. Slowmode did not exist, but raiders did.

It quickly became meta to interact with them. Sometimes it felt like virtual turf wars; regulars began to play personas, shitposting strategically, asking wanderers for “train tickets” or “admission slips” to join channels that did not exist. One guy showed up every night for two weeks just to type “L” in general chat before getting banned. The mods started greeting him by name.

Culture grew from the chaos, not despite it.

The server never needed 24/7 high-brow conversations. It just needed to feel alive.

One real rule existed: show up every day. Not because someone was watching, but because every user who walks in is silently asking why they should return tomorrow. You answer that question through the way you maintain the space; it gets answered daily whether you like it or not.

Ask Me Anything

Reddit nailed the AMA format. I took it, ran with it, and brought it to Discord—real-time text AMAs for hip-hop. Chaotic and inefficient as you’re imagining.

The first guest was Stanley “Substantial” Robinson, a DMV-based artist, educator, and one of the earliest collaborators of the late Seba “Nujabes” Jun. A month after launch, a text AMA went live. Then another. Anyone with a story was welcome.

After about a dozen text runs, the format leveled up to voice. No more just reading answers; live timing, awkward pauses, all of it became part of the experience. Inside jokes, memes, poking fun at both hosts and guests.

Discord’s voice stack improved. Everything looked ready.

Then Pusha T showed up.

The Exact Moment

Word about my hip-hop server eventually reached Summer Watson, Pusha’s long-time business partner. A few messages later, a time was set. No agenda, no promo, no plug required.

Pusha wanted to understand what this “Discord” thing was, how a hip-hop community was thriving on a gaming app, and to be there before it blew up.

7PM, August 8, 2018. Drake was still riding Scorpion, Astroworld had just dropped the same week, and the Pusha-Drake beef had turned every hip-hop conversation on the internet into a referendum on authenticity. Fitting backdrop.

1,700+ people queued up in voice channels, with hundreds more in overflow. We made a taped-together relay system because voice channels had limits far below the number of people trying to get in. A recent move IRL meant internet was live but only an old Chromebook was available; no desktop, no backup plan.

The instant Pusha joined, the server melted. Thousands of messages per minute.

Phone frozen. Chromebook frozen. Audio became the only lifeline, which was also frozen. Texts and calls to my crew weren’t going through; connection was spotty and everything teetering on collapse.

Audio distorted into an endless static. A relay channel bought a few minutes of sanity; then everything tapped out. Server dead, then alive, then dead again.

Complete chaos.

On paper, a technical disaster.

In reality, impossible to stop smiling. Everyone including Summer and Pusha knew something was in the water here; the only question was how to wrangle it.

Corporations Cometh

Discord has now been in the wild for six years, three since the Pusha chaos, and has rebranded away from gaming into a generalized chat platform.

The platform’s potential for real dialogue in music was obvious from the start. Internal pushback from staff, warnings about bandwidth and risk, and AMAs being frowned upon were just corpospeak; the people building the product knew better.

Now the suits show up.

For most major-label teams, Discord remains alien terrain; someone has to walk them through it.

Hip-hop especially is a culture that must be lived. I’ve watched A&R reps confuse Griselda with Dreamville in a pitch meeting and still expect to run a hip-hop server. That’s the talent pool.

Spotify proved in ‘18 with a partnership that music has a place on the platform. Corporate-backed communities are another story entirely; the majority of brands want to spray a message, farm a metric, and leave. Launch loud, go quiet, then ghost. The server stays online, and the users bounce.

The question isn’t whether they sell out. It’s whether they know what they’re actually selling.

Selling Out

Corporate presence at scale is a one-way door: exposure on one side, authenticity loss on the other, and no reverse gear.

At some point, Discord has to pick which side of that blade it’s willing to hold when the acquisition closes or the IPO bell rings.

The monetization route doesn’t require genius to see. Facebook, Reddit, mobile games already ran the playbook: you don’t monetize the conversation, you monetize the costume.

The platform will inevitably sell identity to users, and in whatever flavor they want:

• Profile picture frames and avatar decorations (like Facebook, but paid)

• Seasonal flairs and themed collections (Naver has done this for years on its Blog platform)

• Username and role-icon theming (like old-school forums, but modern)

• Profile effects (like Steam did this past year with Steam Points Shop)

• Client skins like DOTA2

• More tiers of Nitro, up or down

• Dedication rewards, streak badges, digital collectibles

Eventually, some form of engagement-driven virtual currency shows up: earned through paid CTAs, redeemable for cosmetics and subscription credits.

The corpospeak term for this is “earned, not purchased.”

Identity is social currency in any online community, and when it can be bought to boost status, regulars swipe. Years in esports back that instinct up. Scrappy to manufactured, but larger than anyone expected; big sponsors, money pouring into teams, seven-figure prize pools. Any prediction of that in 2010 would’ve sounded like a joke. K-pop’s climb from subculture to export machine is the same trajectory; every piece of K-media that goes viral adds eyeballs that never leave. Give it five years. Esports did plenty of good. The truly grassroots version is mostly gone. That’s the trade-off, and it’s the same one Discord will have to make.

More than two dozen conglomerates, majors, and assorted players have reached out to me directly with some mix of: free or paid promotion, offers to buy the server, guest booking pitches, and quiet astroturfing angles to make their presence “feel” organic.

Most take the cash. Business without roots wouldn’t be hip-hop, it’d be greed, and I live hip-hop.

A few reps openly admitted this was part of a wide campaign across hundreds of servers. The quiet part isn’t even quiet anymore; it’s a checkmark on someone’s social strategy.

Take any offer large enough to make this particular server fold, write that number on a piece of paper, and hand that same number (or a fraction of it) to a younger owner looking for a quick bag. Now the logo and owner stay the same, but the agenda quietly changes.

A subtle push of one label’s artist over another, a generic meme that gently sways opinions over time, a content strategy calculated with precision to appear genuine. The shape of the server shifts, and nobody voted on it.

Regulars can always sniff this out. Even if you think you’re slick, you aren’t.

The moment the person making decisions about a space stops being the person who lives in it, the space starts dying. Doesn’t matter if it’s a forum, a server, a record label, or a league. Fans show up, build something worth caring about, and the culture they generate catches someone’s attention. Then someone with no stake in any of it acquires control, and every decision optimizes for the view from outside the room instead of the experience inside it.

The community doesn’t die from neglect. It dies from management.

Chi Modu—

I look at hip-hop as an art form. It was a voice of the people. You can go wherever you want but if you leave the roots, and to me the roots are the voice of the people, you lose your soul.

If Discord walks away from its own roots, what’s left is anyone’s guess.

Discord’s Secret Weapon: Stages

Since 2016, a single-page pitch called “The PDF” has done all the heavy lifting for HHD’s AMAs. Artist teams, PR, anyone remotely relevant: it all started there. More than a thousand emails sent.

Names came from scraped bios, old interviews, dusty tweets. Most ignored it. Some replied only to say Discord didn’t “fit our vertical.”

Many of those same majors and creators now quietly operate Discord servers of their own.

No backing, no sponsor, no budget. Just that PDF. Just under 100 AMAs hosted. Every guest and event on HHD traces back to that one page.

Then Discord shipped Stages.

Stages is built-in live audio; Clubhouse without the velvet rope. The platform’s biggest strength has always been in-app reach, not its Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube presence. Lean into the users already here, and new users follow on their own.

Once Stages came into play, visitation on HHD jumped 1,107.9% in a single week. The largest day-to-day spike since the server’s creation. Nothing else has come close.

Stages work. The conversations people actually want are the ones that can’t be replayed, clipped, or optimized after the fact. Live, messy, real. Discord already has the users and the technical infra. The goldmine is right there, and it won’t sit unclaimed forever.

Don’t Let It Slip

Instead of leaning into what Stages proved, the platform is securing brand collabs and calling it music strategy. Servers for The Weeknd or Eminem where it’s obviously an intern pushing NFTs through an artist-branded account do more damage than good. The Cactus Jack collaboration with Travis Scott was deleted from Twitter for reasons unknown.

Discord is a company with hundreds of millions in funding and a multi-billion dollar valuation, and the best it can do for music is a branded server that goes dark after three months. Real conversations—the type that only happen when artists, fans, and live audio collide—can’t be manufactured and sold back on a content calendar. You can fake spontaneity, but you can’t monetize it. The audience knows.

HHD proves what happens when someone who actually lives in the culture runs the room. No budget, no sponsor, no partnership deck. A PDF and a decade of caring about the same thing every single day.

Music has real depth, and Discord barely scratches it.

Chi Modu

In early 2018, a virtual link-up for a piece turned into an ongoing exchange, and eventually an IRL meetup. Most evenings on the way home from work turned into shaky long-exposure attempts on a phone at crosswalks, sent straight to his inbox. The shots weren’t good, but feedback was always kind, honest, and paired with small tips.

Late 2019 brought a trip to NYC. On the very last day in the city, Chi agreed to meet.

He walked in with UNCATEGORIZED shrink-wrapped under his arm, a Sharpie, and a small bag.

“Let’s do this,” he said.

Two hours vanished. Hip-hop. The city. Stories from his favorite shoots, behind-the-scenes shots on his phone.

“What you see is 1% of what I have in the vault.”

Lunch was on him. The book got signed. Then came the line that killed the thought of quitting HHD after years of feeling stuck:

You see the beauty in this city, in its flaws. That’s rare these days. I can tell you genuinely love hip-hop.

A joke about escaping the noise to Jersey City and a prediction that anyone who really loved the city would eventually do the same. As the meeting wound down, a Leica M3 came out of the bag. The strap wrapped around his wrist, lens turned inward.

“...mind if I get some for the road?”

A few quick frames later, selfies with the GOAT.

“I’ll send these in a few. Until next time. Peace!”

That moment replayed on loop the entire flight home.

That anecdote has been pitched to nearly a dozen well-known music outlets looking to feature HHD.

None ran it. “Irrelevant.”

Once things turn corporate, traffic outranks meaning. Culture gets filed under “not a fit.”

So it lives here as an ode to a legendary documentarian who inspired the way I move through hip-hop and music itself. Chi influenced people every day, even when the story behind the image never made it to print.

The Formula

Community cannot be forced. It takes time; more than anyone ever budgets for.

My hip-hop community is far more than just a Discord server. It is also just a Discord server.

Would I do it again? Absolutely.

Whatever Discord becomes, the only thing that matters is who’s still building for the people, no one else.

The people who were here before any of it mattered will also be here after it all stops mattering.

You’ll never see that part in a pitch deck.

Since its initial release, the work has been plagiarized and reproduced on multiple occasions without proper credit. If you incorporate any portion of this work into your content, please provide appropriate attribution and include a link to the original source.

This piece is published with no intention of monetization.

It is offered as an evergreen archive, in respect and gratitude, to Alch’s lasting impact on the lifestyle we all know and love—hip-hop.

Alan Maman has spent the better part of three decades leaving fingerprints on hip-hop’s most enduring records, all while keeping his name out of most people’s mouths. The depth of his roots—embedded in collaborations with a long list of hip-hop’s greats—gets overlooked more than it should.

A quiet force in hip-hop production, he has stayed in the shadows, crafting classics in his dimly-lit studio while keeping to himself.

The Mudfoot Era

It was the early 90’s—height of the Golden Age. The West Coast had G-funk and gangsta rap roaring, while the East Coast was consumed by boom bap. The genre was being refined and reinvented in real time, and the culture maintained a rebellious stigma within media.

During this time, Maman, a Beverly Hills native, would start to carve a path for himself. Never Hollywood-esque (aside from hosting his high school’s cable television show in 1992), he would align himself heavily with hip-hop culture, creating a duo in 1991 with local friend Scott Caan, calling themselves The Whooliganz. Scott would go by Mad Skillz, while Maman’s moniker of choice was Mudfoot.

B-Real of Cypress Hill recognized Maman freestyling at a house party, extending a hand in Maman’s career efforts, offering The Whooliganz entry into his friend DJ Muggs’ art collective, The Soul Assassins.

This dude [Maman] had bar work [able to spit nice] at 13, maybe 14.

Wildly successful with a self-titled double-platinum group album Cypress Hill, B-Real saw genuine potential—via his good friend and notorious music dot-connector behind the scenes, Amanda Demme. Maman accepted, and the duo was suddenly on a nationwide tour alongside the Soul Assassins. They weren’t just affiliated; they were friends.

Through that network, The Whooliganz landed a record deal with Tom Silverman at Tommy Boy Records, though the label shelved and dropped them after their debut single saw lackluster airplay; the album, Make Way for the W, never saw a proper release. Caan decided to follow his father’s footsteps in acting, while Maman gravitated towards DJ Muggs’ work for Funkdoobiest and started learning how to produce.

It was the mid-90’s, and Maman was putting in long hours learning the ropes. Nearly 30 years after the fact, he reflects with B-Real on the rise to fame and honing his craft:

I always say, you gotta put your 10,000 hours of work in.

You gotta master your craft, but it’s gonna be one unforeseen scenario of timing that’s going to line up, and that’s going to be the real thing to take you there.

You still need to put your 10,000 hours of work in. That’s all those years, [of] what I did.

Then, it was unforeseen scenarios, which are really based on timing.

He recollects taking B-Real’s GMC Typhoon in ‘94 to the airport before Woodstock, picking up a young and still relatively unknown Busta Rhymes.

Maman eventually found himself at a crossroads in life, and only one thing was certain: Mudfoot had to go. A reminder of an era gone by.

It’s speculated that after resonating heavily with Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, he adopted the book’s name as his alias, finding parallels with the book’s protagonist, Santiago. Others say it was from his name being Alan and him playing the role as some sort of beat chemist, combining the two words to land on Alchemist.

The new millennium was on the horizon, and The Alchemist had refined his production skills to a degree that raised the eyebrows of those around him.

The Cusp of Making It

The Alchemist was brewing heat at a degree few could match. He was mentored primarily by DJ Muggs early on, and absorbed the drum master knowledge as best he could.

DJ Lethal, a mutual of both, took Al to a local Guitar Center and pointed out the ASR-10. Al was initially more invested in a Roland SP-404, but Lethal told him to go with the Ensoniq ASR-10—same as the rest, except it had keyboards.

The young producer obliged. From that day forward, he developed his style around the ASR-10 as an instrumental part of his production artillery (no pun intended).

His first credit with a big name on it came in the form of a remix called Tequila Sunrise featuring Fat Joe, the Bronx boss.

That was a big deal for me.

This served as the entry point for a slew of remixes over the next couple of years. Within that time, Al continued to pick and choose inspiration from a wide variety of interactions and connections he had built within the industry.

Childhood friend and fellow artist Michael Perretta, better known to most as Evidence of Dilated Peoples, was one individual that opened doors in his career.

In 1997, the world would hear the first contribution to Dilated Peoples from The Alchemist in the form of Third Degree. Al’s first formally credited step with Evidence, and a stepping stone for a large amount of collaborations down the road. The beat was laid back and simple—you can hear the differences in the style he brought to the table back then, heavily influenced by more old school acts from the late 80’s.

A year later, he’d hop back into the studio with Evidence and do work on The Main Event, which he co-produced. Not technically a member of Dilated Peoples, Alchemist was still reppin’ Soul Assassins. On the vinyl itself, he is credited as Alchemist for Soul Assassins and it denotes that he was represented by ASCAP. Dilated Peoples would go on to be signed by Capitol Records, and release this song through them two years later in 2000.

Keep in mind this was exactly the same time Madlib was coming up with Tha Alkaholiks [Tha Liks] which Dilated Peoples had an affiliation with. The man behind Quasimoto himself speaks a bit on the experience of The Liks and what it was like living through those times in a rare French interview:

The underground smash album Likwidation, their third body of work by ‘97, was already making waves on the West Coast for its breakbeat and OG sound, harnessing what was considered to be among the most “wide and fat beats” EQ’d up to that point in time; a feat perhaps only matched by Dilla a few years later.

Coming back to The Platform, Tha Alkaholiks would end up featuring on a track titled Right On produced by Toledo, Ohio native Eric “E-Swift” Brooks.

The Alchemist crafted 5 beats for this album, becoming an established go-to for the Los Angeles crew led by childhood friend Evidence, and putting him on the radar of Madlib and The Liks early.

College was on the horizon, and it was time to pack the bags. New York was the next stop.

Lost In New York

Al made the decision to move to New York for college, which meant flying back and forth across the country to make things work on the music side. He needed to balance priorities in life while maintaining a high and positive reputation within the hip-hop scene. Otherwise, he would fall short.

A key figure who often goes unsung was the late Bigga B. A producer and A&R, closely affiliated with DJ Muggs and the Soul Assassins clique, Xzibit’s come up, and the deep underground of West Coast hip-hop. A master curator—many acts coming up in the mid-to-late 90’s owe much of their put-ons to Bigga B.

Before passing, Bigga B would link DJ Muggs with Queensbridge hip-hop group Infamous Mobb, close affiliates of Mobb Deep, consisting of Havoc and the late Prodigy. A tribute written by Eddie Huang for the New York Times details how much P cherished those close to him.

At the turn of the millennium, Mobb Deep was on a streak few in hip-hop could follow. Although active for nearly a decade at that point, they saw immense success with their second studio album, The Infamous, continuing their rise to fame with Hell on Earth.

Good news for the Beverly Hills native. More opportunities for connecting—business and friendship—on the other coast. As he focused more on remixes and came into his own while producing beats, he became more lost. A young kid attending college in New York, trying to make it as anyone else would, yet he had no real plan or direction. DJ Muggs was no longer by his side all day, and he was on his own.

After linking with Infamous Mobb and building strong bonds, he continued making beats. He linked up with DJ Premier and his crew as well. In a 2015 interview, DJ Premier recalls a studio session where the four of them hung out to finish up some beats, following Canibus rejecting a track.

And J. Dilla was there at the session.

Al was in the loop with the Dilla stage, so he could lamp with us and smoke for a lil’ bit.

We just hung out. I knew him for a long time as well.

Wandering the streets of Queens aimlessly searching for something tangible to grab onto for his future, Al was torn when it came to keeping the dream alive.

It would be Mobb Deep that found him and took him under their wing.

Prodigy initially thought he was a fed until he laid beats down on the pad. In his 2011 autobiography My Infamous Life: The Autobiography of Mobb Deep's Prodigy, P exclaims:

When Alchemist came around with those dope beats and I saw how serious he was about his career, I embraced him like a brother.

He was like a gift from the heavens.

That white boy’s got a lot of soul.

We made up nicknames for him like White Chocolate, the White Vulture, and the Rare White Bird.

In a rare interview with Pop Killer, Al appears visibly emotional while explaining how Havoc and Prodigy turned his life around:

They [Mobb Deep] just found me. I was lost, you know what I mean?

Walking the streets of Queens, just lost at the time. Walking around Queensbridge, in different alleyways, trying to find myself.

...

Mobb Deep took me in, they polished my style up, and I learned. I just learned, I sat back and learned.

That’s the first step—absorb.

That meeting took place in 1999, over two decades ago. The same year that The Realest beat would drop, according to Prodigy:

Must have been ‘99 at the Soundtrack Studio in Manhattan...

...

First tour, Family Values...

Mobb Deep recognized the young producer’s ability and granted him access to produce on their upcoming album already in production, Murda Muzik. He joined them on their 1999 tour, Family Values.

When asked by Prodigy in a very rare Rap City episode with Mobb Deep on the tour about Murda Muzik the movie, Alchemist said the following:

It’s Mobb Deep. If you know them, it’s their life. It’s how they live, like taking a piece of their life, and putting it into movie form.

If you know the records, it’s like a visual. Everything they speak on, you see it.

It’s the realness, you know?

He produced two tracks for the album, but he struck gold with The Realest, utilizing a soul sample via the 1974 classic Born To Lose You by Ecstasy, Passion & Pain. The track would go on to be a standout, and subsequently propel Al near the top tier of names to watch in New York production.

It was now 2000; a 22-year-old Alan Maman, within the span of a half decade, had pivoted from a startup rapping duo alongside Scott Caan into a full-fledged hip-hop producer, now working beats for the scene’s elite. He was known on the West Coast via Dilated Peoples, making shockwaves there, while also carving a name for himself at the very top of New York rap as an outsider. Consistently making remixes, producing for Prodigy on top of Mobb Deep.

He kept a low profile and seemingly intentional anonymous aesthetic to his presence, feeding into the buzz and mystery all around.

Who was this kid in his early 20’s, and where did he come from?

The New Millennium

Al was coming into his own. Establishing a brand, playing into the Alchemist aesthetic. One of the very first projects he dropped was entitled The Chemistry Files, an instrumental piece showcasing what he considered to be his most potent work. The 12-inch 33⅓ RPM vinyl was printed military green, with what appears to be a very smudged selfie (in 2001?!) on the cover.

It had both new and old beats, along with a unique Remarks column describing each beat’s vibe in Al’s own words. This could very well be considered the origin of his production journey—his first body of work crafted entirely by himself, as opposed to a remix or feature.

More portfolio piece than marketable product, he focused on continuous output.

With some luck on his side, exactly 1 year later to the day, he would appear in The Source, seemingly as an outlier, in a full two-page spread of the best producers in hip-hop.

He wasn’t up-and-coming anymore. He was at an elite level.

2001: A Hip-Hop Odyssey

Perhaps the most important year in Al’s career; one that would solidify his namesake and position among the largest names in hip-hop production.

By now, he was in with all the top New York names, but he was still fiending to make his portfolio more impressive. Flying back and forth endlessly between the coasts to maintain relationships and output, it was difficult to find a balance between Cypress Hill and Dilated Peoples in Los Angeles while Mobb Deep remained in New York.

Things started coming together in late 2000, and Al was rummaging through beats and samples, attempting to make magic happen. He would end up releasing two songs the next year which would define him through the early 00’s; undisputed classics, which have stood the test of time nearly two decades later.

The classic names who we often take for granted today were in their primes.

We Gon’ Make It

The release of We Gon’ Make It (stylized as We Gonna Make It) did not come without controversy. Accused by Ras Kass’ crew for double-dealing after a verbal agreement in late ‘99, Al fired back claiming it was his legal team’s fault. Since then, the two have made up their beef. In 2006, Al was featured on a track with Ras Kass on his Revenge of the Spit mixtape.

In retrospect, perhaps the ordeal was a blessing in disguise. New York heavyweight Jadakiss was working on an album set to release in August of 2001 titled Kiss tha Game Goodbye, a massive release that would include hip-hop’s largest names as features: Pharrell, Nas, Snoop Dogg, The Lox, Styles P, Swizz Beatz, Nate Dogg, DMX, among others.

Zoned in to his studio, The Alchemist put together a beat and sent it around his network; many showed interest, and it only made its way to Jadakiss after being passed on by both Nas and Jay Z by way of Nashawn Jones, Nas’ friend from QB who went by Millenium Thug.

First time Al would collaborate with Ruff Ryders. Still one of Jadakiss’ largest hits, We Gon’ Make It went on to be the lead-off single, resulting in first-week sales for the album passing 200,000 copies.

The album itself, despite its star-studded lineup on paper, would never make a massive impact on the game; overshadowed in part by In Search Of... by N*E*R*D a day prior, and The Blueprint by Jay Z hype, which would drop a month later and kick off the infamous Nas vs. Jay Z beef with Takeover, a track produced by a then-unknown talent who went by the name of Kanye West.

The Alchemist-produced single was the highlight of the album. Even though the album didn’t hit like Jadakiss may have hoped, Al was a known name now; if not by association, then by radio play.

Worst Comes to Worst

A month had gone by since the release of Jadakiss’ album, and Al was back in the hot seat producing beats left and right. Following Dilated Peoples’ debut album The Platform—which Alchemist produced just short of half a dozen tracks for—the group was set for success when they put together the initial tracks and feature lineup for their follow-up, Expansion Team.

A movement in and of itself, the album acted as a statement against current trends in hip-hop, straying away from gangsta rap and aligning more closely to traditional conscious. Alchemist speaks on how the sound of Dilated Peoples was influenced heavily by East Coast vibes:

That’s why, Dilated Peoples when you really listen to it? We were trying to be like Gang Starr.

On the best day, we could be half of how dope they [Gang Starr] are.

...

[DJ] Premier? Man. Evidence will tell you, I made fake Premier beats for YEARS. [laughs]

The old school traditional sound is where he shined the brightest. He sat in the studio while Gang Starr produced their magnum opus, Moment of Truth, back in 1998.

In charge of producing Expansion Team’s lead single, while being mentored by Havoc, Al tapped into one of Mobb Deep’s biggest records—Survival of the Fittest—for the vocal sample.

Somehow managing to find balance between Havoc’s hard-hitting drums and the sultry elegance of William Bell’s I Forgot to Be Your Lover, Al crafted something that would appeal to both hardcore hip-hop heads and more casual radio listeners.

Gold again. Elegant mid-70’s soul blended with gritty OG boom bap. And the late Guru, legendary MC, hopped on the track as a guest feature:

Gifted Unlimited with Dilated Peoples Babu, Evidence, Iriscience

And a shout out to my man Alchemist on the trizzack

Still, to this very day, Dilated Peoples’ most successful song.

Released October 23rd, its presence would grace hip-hop two days prior to Al’s 24th birthday.

1st Infantry and Hold You Down

When people hear the name The Alchemist, the usual go-to song is Hold You Down. Hypnotic and simple, the beat is familiar to anyone who has ever listened to hip-hop. Whether you know who Al is or not, chances are you’ve heard it. Somewhere, in some place, at some time.

2004 would be Al’s return to the pen and pad; he had been on a production wave for over a half-decade with almost no verses laid down. Hungry to try his hand at rhyming again, putting together a cohesive project with his newfound knowledge of hip-hop behind the curtain.

He got into production to get his name out there. Over time, he ended up sticking with it. After producing consistently for three years following an explosive 2001, he was ready to grip the mic once again. His production credits included hip-hop’s best.

So it was set, and Al went to work on his own rap album. The lead single would be Hold You Down, with Prodigy spitting the opening verse. Below, rare footage of the two chopping it up, sometime between 2003 and 2004:

Two versions of the music video exist: one mixed with movie clips featuring Prodigy in the hood spitting, the other a more “consumer friendly” version which aired on VH1 and MTV:

Directed by old friend Estevan Oriol, this song combined many things which led to its success. During the height of “chipmunk” production, it sampled Al Kooper’s The Landlord theme, sped up to be in line with current trends. Crafted with close to a decade of production experience at this point, the beat was both catchy and broad in its appeal—strategic and smart, as it broadened exposure for the now well-known producer.

This was also among the first instances where Al was breaking out of his shell; previously anonymous and hidden behind closed doors, no one really knew who The Alchemist was. Many believed he was a black producer out of QB, or otherwise, as he states himself when reflecting on that half-decade leading up to the release of 1st Infantry.

When you can match a face to the name, you start to get in touch with the identity of who and how I am.

It’s all about the music to me. Hold Me Down [sic] was instrumental to putting me out there.

The album acted as a reflection of his career up to that point, with rhymes dating back to ‘99.

A long list of guests made their appearance: Nas, Prodigy, The Game, Mobb Deep, Dilated Peoples, Twin—everyone who featured were people he had touched previously and linked up with.

He also credits his brother Neil Maman on the album, for production and management, although he says his brother Neil “doesn’t understand music on a technical level” thus implying he was credited for longevity’s sake regarding rights.

In a 2004 interview with Rap Reviews, Al states the following:

I think being able to just express myself—because I’m not rhyming on all of these beats—I still have to express to how I feel.

Even if I play some stuff on the keyboard, I keep to my formula.

I don’t really know how to play, but I’ll play stuff and I’ll sample what I play and chop it up like it was a record.

So I still keep my same formulas in how I do what I do.

That formula may change from record to record, but there’s something in it that makes people bob their head back and forth, letting them know who’s there. Not the tag nor signature loops, but the feeling you get when you hear an Alchemist beat. Singular, and rivals that of DJ Premier, Madlib, Pete Rock, and others’ styles where you know it will be a treat. Calculated and controlled.

He liked to share the magic when he could, too:

Alan Maman now had a decade under his belt; his debut solo album had dropped, and the new year was approaching.

A perfectionist at times, Al contemplated what would push his career along further. There was no other option than to go straight to the top.

So, he did just that.

Becoming Eminem’s DJ

Following the release of his debut solo album, Al linked up with Eminem, the largest name in hip-hop at that time, arguably all-time depending on who (or where) you ask.

Contrary to popular belief of Eminem magically “discovering” Al out of the blue, the two had been aware of each other since 1999. Al was managed by Goliath Management and Paul Rosenberg throughout the early 00’s, so he was naturally associated with the entire Shady camp.

In 2005, Em invited Al to DJ for him on the Anger Management 3 tour; from that tour forward, Al became his go-to in-house DJ. Not producer—up until 2020 with the Step Dad track, Em had never used an Alchemist-produced beat on one of his studio albums.

With one of the largest tours in the world came fame and notoriety, including Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who was riding off hit after radio hit, merely two years after being signed to Shady Records via Em. On top of genuine friendship, this was business opportunity for Alch; his network was overflowing, and he was all for it.

During the tour, Eminem’s tour bus crashed; Al suffered serious injuries, but everyone involved was treated appropriately and recovered.

Among those injured was Eminem’s DJ Alan Maman, also know [sic] as Alchemist; the 27-year-old from New York City was listed in good condition Thursday.

Over the next few years, Alchemist’s output was consistent but did not pop like it did prior. His priorities were with Eminem, and that was a double-edged sword.

Volume of Work

An observation you’ll notice while digging through The Alchemist’s discography is the sheer volume of work. Hundreds upon hundreds of credits, perhaps going past a thousand if you include compilations and songs we don’t know he helped out with, or ones which are uncredited.

It would be nearly impossible to break down each body of work in a piece like this. This is why we’ve focused mainly on larger projects, as his library of beat tapes exceeds dozens. Perhaps it would take a book with direct insight to adequately do a proper deep dive.

Following the 2005 Anger Management 3 tour, Al continued with the beats and planted the seed to follow up his debut solo album. Chemical Files with DJ mello dropped in 2005, a compilation of already-released tracks mixed into a tape. No Days Off dropped a few months later in 2006, designed by D-Day and mixed by Al himself; another quick joint with great features on paper.

During this era, we saw a collaboration with Linkin Park, a return to remix a Cypress Hill song, among several other beats. This also was when Al started work on Return of the Mac with Prodigy, a collaboration album which would be hailed across hip-hop as a return to form for the Mobb Deep legend.

An on-point performance by the man behind the beats, who at this point was becoming a household name in rap. Smooth like butter. He would also collaborate with Prodigy and Nina Sky once again, for a track called Key to the City:

2009 saw the release of The Alchemist’s second studio album, Chemical Warfare. Playing on the military theme of the first album, this one acted as a futuristic vision of that concept. The lineup was just as strong, if not stronger than the first.

Featuring Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Fabolous, Talib Kweli, Blu, Kid Cudi, Pusha, Jada, Kool G, and others along with a bonus track with Madlib’s brother Oh No, it was clear that Al was taking rap very seriously and teetered on the idea of production versus rhyming constantly. Here, we see Al speak on Em lobbing him a verse:

Although he was good at raps, he outdid himself on the beats. He may have been a rapper before a producer, but many viewed him more as a producer who tried his hand at rap.

At this point, Alan Maman was nearly 15 years into his career. He could be considered a household name in the hip-hop scene, albeit contrary to some reviewers, and put himself out there enough to be recognized. Although his raps would not gain the same exposure as his beats, he was still in the zone when it came to anything he touched.

Revered and respected by the elite, he was in a good place, but needed some spark. Songs would drop—Lose Your Life in 2008 with Snoop Dogg, for example—but they were more or less flash in the pans or flavor of the month type joints.

He would strive for more full-length collaborations in the coming years, focusing on the idea of sticking with a single artist and producing an entire body of work with them.

Heavily inspired by his 2007 release Return of the Mac with Prodigy and 2009’s The Antidote with Fashawn, Al would continue this trend going into 2010 and beyond.

He was after reverence, not fame.

Gutter Water

It was early 2010 when Alchemist threw around the idea of forming a group, for real, with Madlib’s younger brother and studio regular Oh No, someone introduced to him by Evidence.

The duo elected to be deemed Gangrene and would release Gutter Water following a short EP titled Sawblade just a few weeks prior. Perhaps one of the more strangely titled bodies of work Al has under his belt—albeit my favorite title to a project of his—the aesthetic followed suit.

A take on cinematic rap within the New York scene, the insight of street storytelling and an approach which Nas claims is a large part of his rhyme-writing process, it was a sect slowly fading in favor of more accessible sounds.

A complete 180 for Alchemist, and a slight shift for Oh No. Tom Breihan throws down some knowledge:

Alchemist is probably still best-known for crafting gutpunch street-rap anthems for guys like Mobb Deep and Jadakiss, but his early-decade aesthetic is almost entirely gone from Gutter Water.

That clash of styles, despite having a very similar approach to hip-hop as a whole, melded perfectly. Although Pitchfork threw it a 6.7, it was loved by fans on both sides, and cemented Gangrene in the annals of hip-hop as another duo that could make magic happen.

Perhaps the title acts as an allusion to that cinematic fragment of rap being slowly lost through decay.

They would go on and collaborate for five more albums before taking a hiatus in 2015.

Covert Coup

Following respectable success with Gangrene, Al continued to collaborate with artists who he considered to be both inspiring and friends; one thing he is staunch about is only collaborating if both sides agree.

That came in the form of 2011’s Covert Coup, a mixtape with Curren$y which Al reflects on as one of his favorite projects. The aesthetic of his collaboration albums up until this point had been consistent: post-apocalyptic and grim, seemingly out on the ends of society attempting to survive and weave through the obstacles that had come before them.

Pseudo-conceptual in a way, it was a new direction for both artists, which resulted in a solid project overall. Although it did not make a massive splash, it turned heads and made fans further appreciate the work.

This would also be one of the very first times Freddie Gibbs worked with Alchemist on a released project, featuring on the track Scottie Pippen, planting the seed for future collaborations. Al and Gibbs had crossed paths as early as 2003:

People don’t know that me and Freddie go back to 2003 or 2004. We was making music a long time ago. Nothing ever came out. It’s funny how we just reconnected.

The Action Bronson Era

Al always had his ear to the streets; trying to keep himself on top of what was hot, and what was burgeoning. Music itself is dynamic, and hip-hop as both a culture and genre is one of the best examples of this.

Around 2010, he found himself listening to Action Bronson, a then up-and-coming chef-turned-rapper out of Flushing, Queens. They would befriend each other, and Alch was now part of Bronson’s clique alongside Big Body and Meyhem Lauren.

A 2012 project titled Rare Chandeliers would be the result of their initial music collaboration, with many more to come following, which we’ll touch on later.

The Vortex of Russian Roulette

I’d be more than willing to die on the hill that Russian Roulette is one of the best conceptual albums ever made, perhaps only rivaled by A Grand Don’t Come For Free by Mike Skinner. Criminally slept on, the themes and approach to this cinematic masterpiece of music resulted in waves of influence still seen today.

It was the sonorous ayahuasca trip that sent The Alchemist into a vortex that he never came out of, in the best way possible. If you were to nail down a point in time where Al changed his entire sound and approach to music, this would trump even his style switch during Gutter Water. Al himself admits he still hasn’t come back:

The bars on the album were not the best in the game, nor were the beats the most radio friendly or hard that he had produced. That didn’t matter nor was it the focal point, despite critics smacking it for those exact things. Nobody saw the bigger picture of what was happening here.

A tried and true producer, a now-heavyweight of the rap game, was producing what would turn out to be more akin to an audible painting than a hip-hop album, any way you sliced the cake. Consisting of 30 tracks, it was a magnificent example of how Al could craft something cohesive, have it not be a traditional hip-hop album in any sense, and still knock it out of the park.

The samples are heavily Russian-influenced. Completely different than his usual style of nitty gritty boom bap or hard-hitting street vibes, Al expanded on what Oh No had been accustomed to via his older brother Madlib: crate digging. On this project more than any other, Al dug deep for obscure, strange, psychedelic samples that tested the listener’s ear.

He speaks on the creation:

It wasn’t made like an album – it is more a project of audio art. I just threw it together and really spent time out hoping it will be a project you play from beginning to end. I even envisioned parts of it like a fake movie to inspire me.

Whether it was a Russian mafia film being sampled, some old niche jazz of a bygone era, or something more familiar, it worked. Controlling the obscurity, finding the perfect balance.

Was it an instrumental tape? For a few tracks maybe, but then it’d turn into a rap album.

So was it a rap album? Not quite if you were a purist; it was filled with interludes and sample-heavy asides, much like we observe in Dilla’s early work.

How about a sonic gallery, was that too pretentious? Perhaps, but it leaned more heavily towards art than a traditional music album.

So what was it exactly? Whatever you wanted it to be.

A dynamic, ever-shifting piece of artwork. He was, finally, comfortable with his ability and it showed.

I definitely felt that with this project it was like throwing the dice and I am not worried anymore.

Much more than just another release from a producer who had given two decades of his life to the game; it was proof of how far he could push experimentation boundaries within his skillset.

Synths throughout the entire project; no longer the signature loops. Beats carried the dark and sinister vibe from Mobb Deep’s aesthetic, but refracted through a different lens. A culmination of his style blended into a Russian post-apocalyptic fever dream of sounds filing into a line with style.

A cult classic. A figurative light switch in his production. Following this project’s release in July of 2012, Al’s output was different. Collaborations tighter, bolder in the risks the sounds took, and received as better projects by consensus. He would one-up even his own self, and shock the hip-hop scene with project after project considered to be of high marks or classics among fans and producers alike.

Critics largely missed the mark, comparing it to his past work and the work existing within hip-hop at that time, when its main purpose was to experiment, not compete. This should have been evident by the large array of cinema samples and brooding ambience throughout. Some even said it was difficult to appreciate—sorely mistaken if you’re a head.

The same year saw work with Dave East, Meyhem Lauren, Domo and Hodgy from Odd Future, Prodigy, ScHoolboy Q, Gangrene with Oh No, among many others.

An EP titled Yacht Rock subsequently released the following year for free on Bandcamp. The sequel, Yacht Rock 2, would end up dropping 6 years later in 2019.

No longer a question of whether his projects would be good or flop; more a question of how good they would be.

Alchemist was on fire. What onlookers were unaware of: he was just getting started.

Contributions Abound

Contribution to hip-hop is a large part of why The Alchemist has a status few have reached when it comes to respect and people knowing how much work he puts in. A long lineage of elite output is a key variable in that equation.

By 2013, Al was cruising. He worked with his good friend Mac Miller on the late rapper’s second album Watching Movies with the Sound Off. The result: Red Dot Music. The psychedelic tones meshed well, as all three artists involved—Action Bronson, Mac Miller, and Al—had a track record of weaving such into their music.

At this same time, Odd Future was taking off alongside artists like Joey Bada$$; Al had credits in both camps, including Earl Sweatshirt’s debut album Doris. The contribution was a song titled Uncle Al, a quick ode to the potent concoctions Al had crafted over the years:

Killing who you sinning first, verse wintergreen spit it, show ‘em that I meant it

Ho, I’m rolling with my niggas, find a gold and call the chemist

Perhaps Al’s personal favorite project, though, was with one of his mentors, Prodigy of Mobb Deep, titled Albert Einstein. Their second collaboration in album form, it was a return to form for Prodigy, and a cataclysm of sound from Al.

One theme within any Alchemist project is the cinematic quality, and that holds true here; perhaps one of his strongest examples, beyond Russian Roulette.

Well-received and reviewed, high marks all around.

Al had one more thing up his sleeve for 2013, perhaps the largest reach his career ever had up to that point: the soundtrack for what would become the largest video game release in history—Grand Theft Auto V.

He was the maestro alongside Oh No, for the game’s score. 2014 was on the horizon.

Step Brothers

Step Brothers, a duo consisting of Al and his longtime friend Evidence, would finally release their long-awaited project, teased all the way back in 2009. The name comes from a realization they had, according to Rhymesayers:

When Dilated Peoples had its 2001, Alchemist-produced song “Live On Stage” licensed in the 2008 film Step Brothers movie starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, Dilated Peoples member Evidence and the Alchemist had a realization.

Features were plentiful, including artists they’d worked with in the past; named after a bar on Dark Shades, Lord Steppington would receive nods from the critics. Although selling only a few thousand copies first-week, it remains a favorite of fans who followed Al and Evidence throughout their careers.

A want album, not a need album, as Evidence explains in a 2013 Fuse interview:

It’s not an album we need to do; It’s an album we want to do, so if we want to do it, it needs to be right.

It’s stemming from a lot of our solo experiences and taking it back to a trio.

He lets collaborations happen naturally at their own will, if both parties are interested. Every release sounds genuinely well-made and naturally cohesive because of it.

Closer to the Present

The work output was nothing different: top-notch, frequent, and consistent as hell. 2015 saw Al work with Blu, Fashawn, Big Twins, Oh No for another Gangrene release and follow-up to GTA V’s score, as well as 50 Cent and Joey, but no single song made it as big as Terry, a track off Bronson’s Mr. Wonderful.

Not a chart-topping smash, but instantly a cult-classic within hip-hop, with people on the day of release searching left and right for the sample cut. How was he able to switch up his style so often? A question to this day, answered only with handwaving. A real alchemist, a wizard, maybe an alien.

Following a solid 2015 came an even stronger 2016; year after year, Al was improving both in skill set and output quality. He made an entire series of limited vinyls, collaborated with the burgeoning FLYGOD which established a connection to the Griselda camp, put together a collaboration project with Havoc, and became a staple part of Action Bronson’s hit series Fuck, That’s Delicious on top of other Viceland titles which he appeared on.

The world had never seen The Alchemist in situations like this, laid back and relaxed with friends who genuinely cared for him. Tough love at times—they’d poke fun at each other—but through it all, Al was opening up, becoming comfortable exposing a more vulnerable side of himself.

As fans watched the series over the years, they would at times become more interested in the bond the four guys shared than the music.

It humanized the figures and names which we had only seen on song titles and CD sleeve credits. It led the way and carved out a niche, showing by action (no pun intended) how successful such shows could be in the new age of media consumption.

It allowed newcomers from outside hip-hop to check out the artists—Al especially.

The Passing of Prodigy

Throughout 2017, Al remained somewhat quiet and kept a low profile. His dear friend Prodigy passed in June; it was clear that it hurt him bad. Understandably so.

Prodigy had helped Al from the very beginning of when he landed in New York to make a name for himself, for two decades, up until his sudden passing. An outpouring of well wishes and support ensued, but he continued to do what he knew P would tell him to do: keep making beats.

We saw a Mach Hommy collab, two tracks for Kendrick, an MF DOOM track for an Adult Swim promotion, and a few other projects including a unique French-only sample tape titled Paris, L.A., Bruxelles. The Paris mixtape was the result of a Red Bull pitch, pulling in upcoming and established French producers, artists, and creatives to work with Al on a cohesive body of work.

He kept it to Bandcamp, “officially” released January 2018, but previously available through Red Bull several months prior.

last year i linked up with Redbull France.
They brought me out to Paris for a week, paid for my records, and let me craft beats in their studio.
(I ended up moving the equipment to my hotel room due to smoking restrictions )
[sic]

Al’s fan base was growing faster than ever. The bodies of work he was putting out were hard to go unnoticed, and he was doing it more consistently than almost anyone else.

Everyone wanted more. He heard them loud and clear.

No Days Off in 2018

One of the most prolific years in his career. If you know hip-hop, you know about The Alchemist’s output during this time; every single project, no misses, was hard as hell.

The final part in Evidence’s The Weathermen series, Weather or Not had a handful of tracks with Al on the beats; features from Slug, Catero, Mach Hommy, Styles P, Rapsody, Khrysis, and more; that was just one project to start the year.

Next up: Lunch Meat, a fully-produced and mixed project from Al featuring familiar New York names—Benny, Roc, Gunn, Conway, Bronson. Released on streaming platforms including Bandcamp, with a very limited 100-issue vinyl print.

Conscious with Evidence, sinister and gritty with Lunch Meat. He could switch on command to cater to whoever he was collaborating with, or if he was seeking a certain aesthetic. True to form and name, he had become a literal beat alchemist, able to control the result with two decades of production experience.

He’d jump to collaborating with Gunn and Conway on Budz:

Then again just a few weeks later on Supreme Blientele, an ode to the classic Ghostface album, Supreme Clientele. The second studio album from Westside Gunn—an unreal release on paper.

9th, Fraud, Statik, Roc, Pete Rock, Daringer, and Al himself handled the production. Features list made it welcomed amongst hip-hop.

Following that, we saw loosies including more Craft Singles releases via Bandcamp for the crate diggers out there, some more work with Benny and Gunn, a solid small EP called Bread which dropped on Bandcamp along with yet another very limited vinyl pressing, but nothing in 2018 came close to the masterpiece that was Fetti.

Italian Situations

One of his career standout projects, Fetti served as the peak of Al’s work in 2018. Widely considered one of the best albums in hip-hop that year, it showed just how far the artists involved had come. Curren$y since the Covert Coup days, Gibbs since his mixtape days, and Al since he took the leap of faith and got taken in by Mobb Deep.

Coming in at just under 24 minutes, the 9 tracks are packed front to back with hard-hitting bars and production that accents it perfectly. The chemistry between all three artists was obvious.

Different than past projects—Alchemist was in the spotlight. A rare occurrence as the producer, he had built up such a reputation that he was on-par and just as hyped as those spitting bars over the beats. A class of his own, acting as a conductor for an orchestra of hip-hop, waving his baton to enhance each second.

This would widen eyes and ears as listeners looked on towards what else he had planned. The Alchemist would deliver again in 2020, creating an equivalently strong body of work titled Alfredo that played more into the Italian theme and got even higher marks—this time just Gibbs and Al. More on that soon.

Along with a Nas beat, Paak beat, working with Benny and Gunn again, contributing to Earl’s new album, and an entire project with Bronson called Lamb Over Rice, and an EP with Boldy James to close out the year, he made Yacht Rock 2.

Featuring his Fuck, That’s Delicious friends, the tape’s core aesthetic was cruising on the high seas, in a yacht, accented by Big Body’s street poetry. Only Al could pull this off. He had mastered different aesthetics and style switches to a degree that was hard to compare.

2020 was around the corner.

2020 Vision

Now a veteran of the game, some would say an OG, Alan Maman was 42 years of age. His output of projects in 2020 would arguably be his strongest year yet, with no misses or filler. Consistent in every aspect from merch to rollout to aesthetics and presence, it would be the year of panic and disaster where The Alchemist shined the brightest.

He kicked off 2020 in January, producing Stepdad for Eminem’s Music to Be Murdered By album, one of the first ever Alchemist-produced beats on an Eminem studio album. Previously, he had only done composition and production on compilation tapes aside from DJing for Em.

He followed this with an underground smash, a collaboration top to bottom with Boldy James titled The Price Of Tea In China, an artistic take touching on what sort of merchant work each artist has dipped their toes into.

Vince Staples, Benny The Butcher, Gibbs, and Evidence made appearances. Hailed early on as one of the strongest releases of the year, it received full treatment when it came to limited vinyl pressings and merch.

Followed up with a track for Roc on Marcilago titled Saw and another for Jay Electronica called The Neverending Story featuring Jay Z, it was barely March and Al’s output was causing jaws to drop. It wouldn’t be until he linked up with Conway for LULU, though, that’d make people lose their minds.

The Art of LULU

One thing Al kept close to his heart at all times was the concrete jungle of New York City; with that, upcoming and established artists that made his eyes get big. One of those artists was Conway the Machine. A keen ear to the streets at all times—no trend went unnoticed.

Griselda was one of the hottest acts in New York, and their product proved it. They were turning heads more than almost anyone in the game, and their bars were raw as hell. Brother of Westside Gunn and cousin of Benny The Butcher, Conway made a mark over the near-decade as having one of the sharpest pens in New York; not an easy achievement.

Recorded over several months, the album was bar after bar telling the story of Conway’s life. The cover was particularly interesting and overlooked. A great white shark portrayed off the coast of South Africa, a famous photograph shot by Brandon Cole, sent a clear message. Taking no prisoners.

Below, four photographs taken on the same day as the cover; little is known about the backstory, but variations can be seen with additional information for context. Believed to be a great white shark, RFID-tagged, off the Western coast of South Africa.

One of the first full-fledged projects where Conway did not enlist his Griselda family to lob a bar. Intentional—Conway’s style is calculated, and perhaps it was a showing of what he was capable of on Alchemist beats alone.

Hailed as one of the best releases of 2020 so far, alongside The Price Of Tea In China with Boldy James. A single month after his previous project had dropped, and despite the world falling apart with COVID-19, The Alchemist was coming out on top with two of the best albums in hip-hop.

It wasn’t even April yet.

In an interview with Rob Markman for Genius, Al comments on Conway's music and how he chooses who to work with:

I’m a fan first. I’m a fan of battle rap, I’m a fan of words. ... I always keep my ear open, tuned in.

The minute we [him and Conway] linked, it worked.

When Al expanded on Griselda’s work ethic, and how they recorded Griselda Ghost in a single 24-hour span, he went to confirm with Conway, exclaiming:

When they told me that, I said, ‘yo, get the fuck outta here, man,’ you know what I’m saying?

The quality didn’t sound like a microwaved meal. It sounded like they were putting their whole life into these records.

After producing two tracks for the widely-dapped Pray For Paris project by Gunn, he would drop arguably the most praised album of the year and a follow-up to 2018’s Fetti—Alfredo with Freddie Gibbs.

Alfredo

Released mid-2020, over 15 years since the two first crossed paths, roughly a year before Al released his solo debut. This album nailed down the mobster, post-noir, gangster, eerie aesthetic, blending past albums of both artists seamlessly into one another’s chemistry.

The audio embodiment of walking into an old italian ristorante with a tuxedo on. The listener was transported to another plane.

A fun collaboration and one that hip-hop heads had wanted to see for years. A large drop of merchandise appropriately themed after classic Italian diners and stereotypical pizza delivery services further enthused onlookers.

Receiving very high marks, Alfredo was a project for the ages. No question that both Gibbs and Al had cemented spots at the top of hip-hop, in quality and respect.

The one-on-one collaborative process Alchemist had preached from early on paid off heavily. He was no longer making songs people simply liked or bobbed their head to; he was generating some of the best music in hip-hop. Period.

Following Lamb Over Rice with Bronson, the two linked back up this year to do a track entitled Sergio for the Queens, New York native’s newest album, Only For Dolphins.

Most recently, he contributed a few tracks to Gunn’s newest project, Who Made the Sunshine, and took no time off to get to work on his upcoming project, The Food Villain.

The Food Villain

Chris Grosso, co-founder of Munchies and Viceland, knighted Al with the nickname due to his notoriously funny personality of being a very picky eater throughout the Fuck, That's Delicious episodes.

Despite experiencing multiple flavor breakthroughs, over time he had become an extremely villainous food critic when roaming with the usual crew around the world to taste test some of the finest food available, especially expensive cheese. Al also has been rumored to moonlight as a sommelier.

Initially believed to be a collaboration between the long-time producer and MF DOOM, it was revealed that this was not so. Following the release of LULU, Alchemist hopped onto Instagram Live and teased several tracks—one of which made waves throughout hip-hop, a remix of Action Bronson’s 2015 song Terry with an opening MF DOOM verse, as well as his previous DOOMSAYERS collaboration.

A food-centric album, even reminiscent of DOOM’s early concepts, it’s a fun album that perfects a niche aesthetic. Body and Bronson both make an appearance on the spacy album, featuring otherworldly synths and samples. Bronson, after all, was the individual who pushed Al to appear on the show and break out of his shell.

The dialogue shown below is sampled on Flavor Break-Thrus.

The album is filled throughout with samples of the crew speaking and cuts from old films, feeding into the evil villain archetype. Action Bronson clips, especially:

He’s just a villainous person.
...
The Alchemist is the most pickiest, tasteless human being when it comes to food.
...
He’ll eat things from 3 days ago with no regard for his own body!

A hilarious example of how a simple idea can turn into a full-fledged project. With a hint of genius production, it turns into an actually-good album. Everyone knows the clips are in good faith from those closest to him.

Although well-executed and crisp from front to back, it begs the question: does Al really hate cheese this much, or was he speaking from a hypothetical point of view? Say it ain’t so.

More interesting than the music was what it carried as a whole: an ode to the experiences he’s had around the world traveling with the crew on the shows he starred in. Not just a creative take on good-hearted jokes with friends—it was a painting of appreciation.

The friendships he made along the way. The whole process touched him as an artist and as a person.

2020 was showing this new, humanizing side of Al we had seldom seen, and we all want to see more of it going forward.

The Alchemist

Today is his birthday. Now 43 years of age, Alan Maman reflects on his time within the hip-hop scene. One of the most prolific producers to ever grace the pads and decks, he continues to strive for further continuing his legacy as one of the best to ever do it.

He has become more humbled over the years. He has made a name for himself on top of his art, as one of the most genuinely appreciative individuals within hip-hop. Top to bottom, figureheads and fans alike respect him all the same.

The Beverly Hills native is not after fame or fortune; he has stayed true to his words, crafting masterpieces for the sake of reverence, curating sounds carefully to make them timeless upon release.

Whether it was his unparalleled ability to make 2-bar loops sound identical to drums, his micro-chopping rivaling that of Dilla, or his beats making even the most snarky hip-hop connoisseur bob their head with glee, Maman had cemented his spot among the best in hip-hop, dead or alive.

His ability to maintain both quality and quantity, never sacrificing one for the other, is seen only with perhaps Madlib’s catalogue. Remaining humble by turning down a battle with the Beat Konducta himself, he laughs, but makes sure to pay homage:

Madlib would absolutely destroy me. Are you crazy?

Madlib is like my idol, that’s my brother too.

He’s on another planet of his own, he’s his own genre.

That respect Maman held with everyone in the game throughout his near 30-year career—it acted as muscle tissue, and he continues to uphold it.

For most of us, 2021 is right around the corner.

For The Alchemist, there’s still plenty of time left.

Special Thanks

With gratitude to the friends, mentors, and colleagues who contributed below:

• John Carmack

• Justin Kan

• Kevin Lin

• Sundance DiGiovanni

• Richard lewis

• Sean Plott

• Rachel Quirico

My most sincere thanks to Marcus, as my mentor since 2008 and a dear friend, for his trust with handling a piece like this.

Since its initial release, this work has been plagiarized and reproduced on multiple occasions without proper credit. If you incorporate any portion of this work into your content, please provide appropriate attribution and include a link to the original source (this page).

Since publishing this piece, Marcus has moved on from Twitch, and is now working as VP of Community Development at Fortis Games.

The Pitch

On October 13, 2017, two weeks to the day after I moved to Seoul, I was still chasing my own answer.

I emailed Marcus on a whim:

Hey Marcus,

I’m in Seoul. Right now, I’m in a McDonald’s so I can pick up WiFi.

Life’s really different here when you’re not visiting, for sure.

I’m getting back to writing soon, just wanted to get settled in. Saturday will be two weeks.

Seeking out opportunities still. Anywhere, everywhere, everything.

I’d like to still do a text interview with you. The usual.

Let me know if/when.

All the best.

A few hours later, he said he was down.

Part I: Forging Dreams

The computer that started it all, and the group that stuck with him for life.

Marcus Graham has had skin in the game for over two decades—at the core of esports and internet broadcasting since before either had a name.

Since childhood, Marcus has been fascinated with the idea of what a video game could be. At the time of this interview, he was Twitch’s Director of Creator Development.

Rather than having a limited interest, how did your passion for video games arise?

I distinctly remember my first experience with video games being in the late 70s, early 80s.

So, in a crazy way, they’re some of my longest memories. Some of the first memories that I have, which was playing the Atari, or at least trying. Hell, maybe even being “that kid” that has a controller in his hand, but maybe brother, or mom, or dad is playing. All I know is that I’m fixated on whatever this thing is on the television.

This was age 3-5 that I really remember this happening. The Atari was something that we got games for regularly. I guess what probably happened was, back in the day before there was Chuck-E-Cheese, there was Showbiz Pizza. Showbiz Pizza, and eventually Family Fun Center, would be my two big arcades. That is where I truly fell in love with video games.

The sights and sounds from this very chaotic and creative brain that I had growing up, that felt more like home than maybe even home did. Wasn’t into skiball or tickets; I just wanted to play every single game that was there [in the arcade] and always had a desire to just be good at that. I immediately recognized that the “score” was a measurement of in-game performance. It was all about getting a better score.

Admittedly, this is probably where my problem started, too. I’ll get more into that as I go on.

That’s when Nintendo was released; I remember Christmas Day, getting the Duck Hunt Gyro version of the Nintendo [NES], which came from grandma and grandpa, because mom and dad wouldn’t buy it. Who knows? All I knew at that point is that, I became a Nintendo kid at that point.

They [my family] would go golf or play basketball, and I would say ‘nah man, we’ve got all these games that we can play’, and those were the games that I wanted to play. From an early age, I was already conditioning myself. I don’t even know what the fascination was, man, like… I think part of it was, this was just an amazing new thing. It was a whole different world; there was a feeling of accomplishment that came with it. During this era, you also saw constant evolution of what was being played and made. It just became… every kid just gets a “thing” — there’s no doubt about it that video games was my “thing”.

I was the kid wearing Frogger hats, Pac-Man pajamas, and I wanted Donkey Kong sheets. I just couldn’t get enough.

A movement.

Yeah.

It’s hard for me to put myself back in the shoes of young Marcus, of young djWHEAT, because I don’t necessarily remember why I was so drawn to video games.

What I know is that I couldn’t. Fuckin’. Get. Enough.

I had a problem as a kid; I had the problem of choosing video games over responsibility. Choosing video games over eating. Choosing video games over doing whatever. There was always something new to play, there was always a kind of friendly competition.

“Hey, I got X score in Y game, see if you can beat it!”

I couldn’t get enough of that.

Give me some years.

The Atari came out in the late 70s. I was born in ’77, so the Atari was in our household already. The Nintendo was ’86. I would have been 9 years old when I got my Nintendo.

From ages 5-9, I played a lot of games at home, but I wanted to go to the arcade. When we went to the movie theater, or a pizza place, or anywhere, I wanted to play the arcade. If I got to choose where we’re going to dinner, then we were going to Showbiz Pizza, just so that I could play games.

I don’t want anyone to think that this is a bad thing, but there was no doubt about it: I was addicted to video games.

I’m pretty sure I probably took a 5 [$5 bill] too many from my mom’s purse. I would get grounded from video games, and my mom would have to call all of my friends’ parents, and tell them “Marcus is grounded from video games; he can’t play.” so I would scheme to play games. I would go to Shop Co., and they’d have a demo stand set up; anything to get the gaming fix.

At the same time, I would say that there’s no doubt about it: video games were my first creative muse. If I got grounded, I’d be like “…well then, fuck! I’m going to draw the video game I’m going to make, I want to create some concept for games,” right?

So I was just channeling any creative energy I could while I wasn’t playing games to try and do so. I thought “okay, this is what I want to do when I grow up, I want to be making these things, sharing my stories and ideas and thoughts with the world,” so from age about 3… that was the first time I was consciously aware “Ok, there’s an Atari here, we’re here, playing things” until now. It’s never stopped.

From 3 until probably… let’s just say 13, maybe 12, was my “arcade, NES, SNES, Sega Master System” days.

Were you aware during any time during those days of the gaming competitions happening, such as the Nintendo World Championships or names like Billy Mitchell, Steve Wiebe, or Todd Rogers?

I tried getting my hands on any gaming magazine they had out at the time. They’d be in there pretty regularly, since the magazines would post scores on certain games.

I wouldn’t claim that I was aware beyond that; this was a time where I saw Billy Mitchell’s name in, say, EGM or GamePro or… shit, maybe even in the Nintendo Powers of old, they would post “so and so beat this game in this time” with a picture of the guy taking a picture of his screen.

So, that kind of thing was definitely evident, but obviously not like it is now. I would definitely say that because of my friend circles, competitiveness was still a very [evident].

Dude, one of my favorite Atari games to this very day, is Combat. It’s one of the earliest form of death match I can remember myself playing. It’s tanks versus boats, ships versus planes, that was the beauty of it. It was such a simple game. Sometimes you were fighting against one another, sometimes it was almost PvE where you’d work together and see who can blow up the most ships or something.

This caused some fights in our house because of how competitive Combat got.

[laughs]

I would say that even on at the earliest, earliest, earliest phases of my life as far as gaming, scorechasing, which is what I call it, was interesting to me. When you had something that was truly head-to-head, competing against my brother or dad, that was it. That was where the fire started.

A Very Special Christmas

Then everything changed. Tell me about that.

At 12, that’s when my world changed, a lot.

All the video game stuff stayed the same, but that’s the age where I discovered PC gaming, and received my first PC. That was also when I discovered BBS (bulletin board systems). I was 12 years old, I remember it vividly, dude. I will never forget. Just one of those moments in your childhood that you’ll never forget.

I fucking begged my parents for a new computer. I begged them. I told them I didn’t want anything for Christmas except a computer.

“I’ll type up all your shit for you, anything. Please, please, please, mom and dad. I just want a computer!”

I remember it vividly. Omaha, Nebraska. Piedmont. I can remember exactly where I was sitting, and my mom turns to me, and she’s like, hey. I know you really wanted a computer, but… we couldn’t get you one this year.

And I was like you know, it’s all good, thank you, I appreciate that.

My mom said “…we really wanted to do it for you.”

“Nah, it’s all good.” I said.

Then, she said “Well, why don’t you go and grab the trash bag and lets clean up the mess here we’ve made from opening up presents?”

So, I go into what was our guest room at the time, and that night they had moved the bed, installed a desk, and there was a computer sitting there…

[takes a breather and becomes visibly emotional]

Take your time.

It gets me really emotional because, that single act of kindness completely changed my life.

I wouldn’t be where I am, right this moment, talking to you, or done any of these things, if my parents, my mom and dad, hadn’t seen that “…wow, this kid really wants a computer,” and you know, we can talk all day about the “…well, you probably would have ended up on that path, eventually!” and maybe I would have, but it was that moment that I feel like I truly feel like I can truly trace my career and every step, and mistake, and everything else I’ve made. It all came from that point.

It was very important as far as in the grand scheme of things in my career.

So as far as the PC went, it was another world to download Wolfenstein, download DOOM, play all the PC ports and games.

I was all up in it; then, I discovered BBS. That was just suddenly, just imagine, the internet. The asynchronous internet; I could send you a mail, but you couldn’t get it necessarily at the same time as I sent it. I would send you a message, log off, then you’d log in, send a message back. This became my secondary addiction, or maybe my second primary addiction, which was this idea that “….holy shit, I have the ability using this device, a modem, from my computer, to call other computers, so that I can find other people who are into gaming like I am, or into BBS like I am,” or whatever it may have been.

There was about a 2-year period from… hold on, let me check.

[mentally rechecks the dates]

Ok, so it was released in ’87, so I want to say it was ’89. I was 12.

Dude, I logged into a Spitfire BBS, I was like “…holy shit, this is amazing, I want to run one of these,” so I learned how to run a BBS, I learned how to start coding Doors, the scripting, the installation of the scripts, I couldn’t get enough. I just couldn’t get enough.

I think also at the same time, an underlying thing that was happening was that I was discovering community; I had a friend community, but this was the first time that I was discovering “…I can be a part of this community because I’m a sys-op,” or “…this community, because I really like Operation: Overkill, the BBS Door game,” because it was just a community that was built and eventually became a larger community.

It was the idea of creating a community, online.

Makes sense. You’re communicating with people around the world. That opens an entirely new realm of possibility, at a very young age.

Correct. In a weird way, this is where broadcasting kind of merges in.

I was loving video games, loving BBS, and loving this technology of being able to communicate with other people that shared similar interests. I was quickly becoming incredibly proficient with computers. Almost dangerously proficient; got really interested into hacking, the culture that surrounded it, trying to understand it. Historically learning about the history of computation. I’d go to these meetups and exchange information; I was a sponge. I wanted to learn.

At the same time, I was a real piece of shit when I was a kid, growing up. I got into trouble mostly because of video games or because of computers or whatever. I would lie a lot to try and get my parents to get off my back so I could play more games.

Often times, my punishments became containment.

[laughs]

What I mean by that is, my mom would say something like:

“Hey, the only way we can keep you is, after school, you have to walk to your dad’s office and spend time in his office until he’s ready to go home.”

That’s how they’d [parents] limit my time.

Believe it or not, what that did was that physically put me in the car with my father, who listened to a lot of AM radio. My father is very conservative; Republican to the core, and so, he would listen to the local Nebraska 1110 KFAB [radio station]. He wasn’t listening to a ton of political stuff; he would listen to this guy named Bruce that would talk finance. My dad had mortgages and rental houses; he loved that stuff. To me, the subject matter was fucking boring, man. I didn’t understand what they were talking about. Mature stuff, interest rates; I’m just this teenage kid, wanting to listen to music or something.

Eventually, what ended up happening was that by not paying as much attention to the content, I spent time paying attention to the other aspects of it [the radio broadcast].

I started paying attention to how this individual comes out of a break into the introduction of his show.

Observing Parallels in Sports

The technical aspects, sort of.

The technical aspects, yes, and maybe not in some cases.

I watch sports in the same way; I may not know what’s happening at all times, but I have a deep appreciation for the production. The way my brain worked was, if you don’t like that [dad’s radio], then find something you do like about it [the production].

I liked the way the radio host handled callers, and how he’d greet them, or the employment of a certain cadence. I admired the radio host’s ability to handle a conversation, and supply and keep the flow; if the caller started stumbling, how to get them back on their feet.

What I was doing, without realizing it, was studying the art of broadcasting, just due to the massive amount of time I was spending with my father in his car, being punished, because I was addicted to video games.

You can see how this is starting to stack up, a bit.

Mm-hmm.

My parents suggested to get more involved in things so I wouldn’t get in trouble continuously. I took up debate, and love it. Still one of my favorite things. After high school I stuck with debate, and I ended up coaching and judging debate for about 4 or 5 years. I did Policy debate; there’s two types of debate schools practice; Policy and Lincoln-Douglas. One is evidence-based, the other is more almost philosophical in nature.

Policy debate was almost like a public performance. Being able to state your case, obtain passion about your argument, and convince someone that what you’re saying is right, along with the evidence.

You’ve got public performance, broadcasting, this computer stuff… so, I’m almost to the part which bridges the gap.

There’s one other epiphany that happens, and that’s when I discovered the internet.

Yes, I had played DOOM and Quake, I was actively involved in no-modem LANs, but I discovered something called MUDs [multi-user dungeon games]. MUDs grew to popularity, for me, probably from ’92-’95, and well into even ’97. Most MUDs are fantasy-based; I played two, that were focused around deathmatch. One of them was called Rogue, the other was called Tron. Another called Genocide.

Imagine, hundreds of people, dropped into a virtual text arena, and then running around. Say I wanted to move 9 rooms to the east [E], I’d have to type, on my keyboard pressing these keys:

E
ENTER
E
ENTER
E
ENTER
E
ENTER
E
ENTER
E
ENTER
E
ENTER
E
ENTER
E
ENTER

…or if I wanted to pick something up, I’d have to create an alias, like:

pu GOLD

…or something, where you created your own efficiency. It was sort of like the Matrix. It was something where people would look over my shoulder while playing and think:

“What in the actual living fuck are you playing?”

[smiles]

To me, I was in this incredibly deadlock speed-based deathmatch that eventually ended up becoming Quake, these sort of games. I played the ever-living shit out of these games.

Again, reinforcing the idea, there’s something about competition against other people that there is nothing else like it. This was my calling.

From there I went to college and admittedly, put it on the back burner. I tell people that I majored in Tekken 2 in college. Loved Tekken 2. I was the room everyone went to, if you thought you were good at Tekken, and you wanted someone to show you that you were not. I love that game, played the shit out of it at home. I remember I had to have the Hong Kong version [1995] because the US version [1996] wasn’t out yet.

I continued to do a lot of internet-based stuff, around the same time the internet started becoming graphical. We were all playing more games, there were Quake 2 servers, and when I had my first house with 5 people.

Those 5 people in that house eventually became Clan 519, where my esports life was born.

He went by Styles519, a random nickname with the clan tag attached as homage. After qualifying for an international Quake tournament, the group anonymized themselves and broke off from their 519-based names—which is where djWHEAT came from.

A hobbyist disc jockey, growing up in the nation’s wheat production hub. It stuck.

519 is when Marcus realized there was something larger happening. He dropped out and took an IT job—perfect timing and dumb luck converging into what would become the first real stepping stone.

The College Experience

What did you major in?

I majored in computer engineering and computer science, but I also was taking courses in broadcasting because I was very interested in that aspect of it. I was less convinced that I would ever get a job on radio, and more convinced I’d do something career-wise that had to do with computers. Again, it was interesting, so I knew that the campus had a radio station, but I only stuck with it for a year. That same year, RealAudio came out. Let me confirm that…

[mentally rechecks date]

Yeah, 1995. The player was released a bit later, where you could physically go into the BestBuy and purchase an actual audio player. I discovered this and I think that’s where really I was like “hold the phone, dude… I still can only listen to the radio if I am within this range of where I live” and sure, there were a lot of things that were syndicated.

One of my favorite shows and radio hosts ever, Art Bell, did Coast to Coast, was syndicated nationwide. The number of shows syndicated versus locally, was even harder [to achieve].

It made me realize that radio was actually not as big of a pawn as the whole world, considering the internet was about to hit. At the time, the internet was in a phase where you’d turn on ABC and they’d be like:

[vintage announcer voice]

“The World Wide Web!
Are you on it?
Do you need an email address?
Would you shop online?”
…and people would be like “I’d never shop online, that’s crazy!”

Even that early on, and I’m not taking any credit there, but let me tell you that I was an evangelist for the internet. I was convinced the internet was going to change the world, and probably walked away from a lot of conversations where people were like “That guy is out of his fuckin’ mind!” because I would get passionate about it.

Broadcasting something to the entire world; that was voodoo magic back then.

RealAudio and RealNetworks were an epiphany moment. If I want to pursue broadcasting, why wouldn’t I pursue it on the internet? There will never be a larger audience.

Nothing gets bigger than the internet; nothing ever.

That lit a fire under my ass, and I decided that it was what I wanted to look into. I started doing my research, how to use RealAudio, and how to use this stuff. Sure enough there was a server SDK. I had a buddy named Brad during college, he works at Oculus now, and he was like:

“Hey, man, we can throw that onto a server, you can have a 25-slot server, otherwise you’ll have to pay per-slot for a server.”

So, I agreed after thinking to myself, “That’s huge, 25 people?”

Guess what? 25 people came no problem.

In the first broadcast, I realized that the skies are really the limit. Again, at one point, people thought, “Well, television is the largest thing in the world, you can’t get more exposure than television!”

Guess what? That’s not true anymore.

Someone can get worldwide exposure on the internet, and have reach that a television network even the largest ones, can’t. Very early on, it started to spider out.

I was reading books like Neuromancer, where these concepts were being discussed. Suddenly, the university’s intranets opened up and everything was shell-based and text-based. There was no doubt in my mind, when people have asked me about esports, and I was the crazy guy that said “No, you watch, one day esports will be fucking massive.”

It was the same stuff with the internet. They knew the internet was the future; I would have put my life on the line that we were never going to be able to reach a larger audience than through the internet.

The other side of it was that I was a poor college student, and I wasn’t able to buy myself a radio console or microphone. I could DIY some shit for $29 at RadioShack, and that was super appealing.

College Days

Even the grandest journeys start from something small. A tight-knit core, no different from family at this point, of friends in college coming together to play video games. Long before esports was a common term.

It was a different time. RuneScape was more than half a decade away, Neopets wouldn’t exist for four more years, Pokémon was still a few months from existing. Friends was the top sitcom, and Mariah Carey was on top of the music world with a Boyz II Men collab.

This era represented the adolescence of modern gaming. Developers cared more about whether the game felt right than whether the numbers worked out.

No rules yet. Just hunger and ego and dial-up.

Marcus saw an opportunity:

It was all great, and I thought, ”Ok, now I want to do this with esports.”

Part II: Nitty Gritty

Stuck at a crossroads, Marcus decides his future and establishes a second family of gaming buddies, dubbed 519.

Heading into the new millennium, Marcus hit a familiar fork in the road. Do the sensible thing after college, take the 9-to-5, let the years stack up. Or take the strange offer: real money for work that didn’t look like work to anyone who wasn’t paying attention.

He took the bank job. That’s where it clicked.

He’d come home, unwind, and do it again—over and over—until “unwinding” started to look a lot like training.

Committing to a craft he believed in before there was a clean path for it, before there were job titles that made it sound respectable. Fellow 519ers nudged him toward taking it seriously. He finally took the dive.

In time, that decision hardened into something real: his own show, built with a familiar face we all know and love.

So for someone coming out of college, reading this, they’re going to wonder which path to take; all-in on broadcasting and gaming [or whatever field their dream is in], or secure a 9-5.

I didn’t finish college. That is not a recommendation I would make to others. Let me explain how I approached and came to that situation.

I feel in life that I have gotten very lucky. My parents got me a computer, I had a family that introduced me to video games. You can say all these things were little cosmic pots of gold that kind of let me to be where I was at.

I believe this one might be the biggest one I’m about to tell you.

In 1997, during my second year at the university, I worked at the university computer store and took a job at a place called Computer Renaissance. It was at that point where I just didn’t feel like I was learning what I wanted to learn in college, and I ended up getting an offer because Y2K [the year 2000] was rapidly approaching, and suddenly all of these banking companies were looking for “sharp, young, and knowledgeable computer guys and gals” who could convert entire networks, and pull 10-base T, and set up legitimate Windows networks that would interface with the bank’s proprietary software, right?

Imagine, I’m two and a half years through school and this company comes to me and is like, “Hey, you want this $60,000/year job? You work 5 days a week and do some travel, and learn this stuff, and we’ll pay for your MCSE training also.”

I was like “Fuck. Yes.”

It’s like hitting the lottery.

It’s like hitting the lottery, and it was only because of Y2K, and we’re not going to have another one, so I just got lucky.

I loved this job, I was on the help desk for a year, then I ran that help desk because I loved it so much that I still worked on the help desk and joined the server team following that. We did deployments of entire networks at banks, and I worked with these 20 guys and gals that basically filled in all my knowledge gaps which I didn’t have filled, and they were helping me understand concepts of networking I wasn’t introduced to, and helped me set things up for testing I didn’t know how to. I was a sponge, and this was the perfect job.

This also allowed me, with a 9-5 job, to then use this now sort of injection of money I’d been getting, and I would buy computers and buy better equipment. I would pay for more DSL’s to my house so I could have more bandwidth, and broadcast at higher bit rates, so that’s how my route went.

What I say to everyone who hasn’t gotten to that point yet, or is in school right now, is, “No, man.” [don’t drop out]

College offers a really interesting opportunity for people to experiment. To not only focus on the school work, but to also find out what you truly are passionate about, and what you want to spend the rest of your life doing, and exploring different things. That should be something everyone does, because you’re less likely to come across that aforementioned cosmic pot of gold. The job I secured set me up to not need an education; I still have enough experience to this day, from that company, that I feel confident I could still go get an IT job today. I really, really do believe that.

I don’t regret not finishing school, but I do know that there was a period still in my life where I was still in that early esports phase, where I know it affected me. I know some people wouldn’t take me seriously because even though I had 7 years, reputable years, at this computer company. It’s my advice to many.

Making Bread with djWHEAT

Where does that bring you in your life? What’s your mental space like at this point in time? You have 7 years of experience so far.

I worked under a manager named Dayle, she taught me an awful lot about the corporate world and how to succeed in that environment. A great manager. I loved to work; there’s a certain sense of accomplishment that you get. It wasn’t hard to be a model employee a lot of times, but what ultimately made me leave, and this might be a real fast forward, but while all this was happening, that’s when I was still playing Quake 3 professionally.

I started just saying to myself, “I don’t have as much time to play Quake because of this job,” and I didn’t want to stop being involved with Quake and involved with 519, and involved with the community, and that’s when I decided that I’m going to start looking at all of this from the broadcasting side.

The original story was that I was recording commentary only for our team, to tell them when they fucked up. I would watch their demos and record over them.

[example cast]

You guys, quad is supposed to spawn in 20 seconds.
Gator spammed everything but no one was even close to where they were supposed to be even on DM6 when quad spawned.
Look, they grabbed it, they got 9 frags after it.
You’re all fuckin’ terrible!
God damn it, this better not happen next week!

It all evolved from there, until someone suggested that get a microphone and do it live.

Who was that someone?

I’ve narrowed it down to two people. I believe that it was either RDW519 or airdave519.

It was during our meetings on Roger Wilco [software], and dude… we were a nerdy group, because many of us were local. Not only did we have our team, but we had the clan groupies. Not in a female sexual way, but just literally people wanting to play with us, that were local and wanting to get better.

Which was cool, I love that.

The Group

Touch on how 519 [pronounced ‘five-nineteen’ not ‘five-one-nine’] came together. You’ve repped them religiously for two decades; that’s the group, right?

It is the group, yeah.

[laughs]

It started in that gamer house in college that I mentioned. It was 519 North 35th Street. 519 was just the house number, man. It was just that silly. We always talked about not wanting to be the “Dragonslayers” or something, so we just started going as 519. It started as the original 5 people in the house. We would all tag up, join a server, fuck some people up, and I’d like to think that we were pretty good.

Then people would say we were good, they wanted to join which led to tryouts, then we’d try to have people local. All 519 really represented was a bunch of guys that just wanted to have a good time, and happened to be pretty good at games. I think that, right now, in our ranks, some of the greatest Quake 3 players will still identify with 519.

That means a lot to me, right? They didn’t live in that house, but that number transcended the house. It represented a sense of brotherhood, and a sense of camaraderie, and a sense of striving to improve.

We did some things other teams hadn’t done; we won a trip to compete at LAN Arena [Paris, France], where we got our asses handed to us by the Europeans.

It’s a really special legacy to me, because not only is it the place where I did my first broadcast [at the house], or the place where I spent my Ultima Online years; what I’m most proud of is that I went, and did Quake Con this past year [2019], and John ‘zero4’ Hill, he was not on 519 first but he ended up 519, and still identifies with it.

Even two decades later, 20 years later, it’s kind of amazing that this little thing that started in a house in Lincoln, Nebraska, still has a part of history in esports. In other games, there’s still 519, you may see it as VXIX; if we couldn’t put numbers in, we’d replace it with Roman numerals.

519 would be the origin of this second-family mentality; something with more texture to it. Marcus became more adamant about following his dream, still unsure himself of what exactly that was, and letting nothing stop him.

Broadcasting was always on the back burner. Something he had a penchant for, but never invested time into past listening to a car radio—until a fellow 519er suggested taking the craft more seriously, and seeing where it could go.

Where’s that bring you broadcasting-wise? Let’s rewind.

Sure, so going back to my first broadcast, that’s when I was like, “Oh shit, people will listen, and this is where I can unleash my passion.”

So, that’s what I’d do.

I’d come home from my job, 8-5, broadcast Quake for 3 or 4 hours. We left RealAudio at this point for ShoutCast, and I’d just do that over and over and over again. What I realized, at that point, is that it was not very smart for me to do it on my own when there were other groups out there who were already kind of creating these networks to become the home of what this thing was.

What I started doing, was I started looking for a network where I could take my Quake commentary to. That ended up being TSN [Teams Sportscast Network]. One of the more famous stories about me and TSN is that…

[recollects]

I didn’t realize at that time that I didn’t have talent; I just thought I was a guy yelling into a microphone yelling about Quake.

People were telling me I had a knack; let me tell you, one of the most nervous times I was in my career was applying to TSN. They had a level of polish and professionalism that I was not necessarily putting myself up to those standards. I could say whatever the fuck I wanted, and do whatever the fuck I wanted, because there were no ToS strikes or whatever… but I needed to show these people that I can be a good contribution to the network.

[laughs]

Man. I fuckin’ lied out of my ass on this application.

I just wanted them to listen to my recording; if they listened in my mind, they’d be sold. Claims of going to local LANs, doing coverage there, and and then attaching samples claiming I had been doing it for a year or longer were my approach.

I would have done anything, because I needed to get to the next step.

A stepping stone, sort of.

At the time I didn’t know it, but it was a necessary step, for sure.

[reflects]

I got in.

I was their Quake person, and befriended a guy named Chad Bud, AKA Blanks. This guy would be integral to my growth within TSN. He had a lot of radio experience; he still to this day, has one of the most buttery radio voices I have ever heard. He was a muse, motivator, and inspiration. He helped me become better and find motivation. He pushed me to become the best commentator I could be, alongside others in TSN. He helped me develop some of the earliest talent. Trillian, Deeya, Syn, Lun, Quake 3 casters of old.

[recollects and shakes his head in thought of everything that’s happened throughout the years]

As I’m recounting this, it’s just so much.

The Birth of Inside The Game

It’s a rush, isn’t it?

[laughs]

I’m trying to get to the point where I left this job; I ended up leaving TSN and starting my own station because I didn’t necessarily agree with how they were running the station [TSN] and their own aspirations, and how they wanted to run it.

Everything that happened; I also attribute my success in esports to this time period; I tried to be a visionary, per se, but was blocked by someone with a different vision. I refused to let that dictate my ability to succeed or not. I left that network, I took about a third of their staff (those who agreed), and I essentially said that I believed that this was the best course of action and I wanted them to come along with me for the ride if they were willing to. Otherwise, I was going to do it regardless.

That’s when we started Inside The Game, radio ITG.

…and so, ITG was born. The first real chance to build something that belonged to him.

The migration toward ITG wasn’t just a logo and a URL. It meant bringing people with him: top-tier analysts, casters, and the kinds of scene fixtures who didn’t move unless they believed the floor was solid.

For Marcus, it was simpler than eras. It was leverage.

It also wasn’t easy. In the U.S., broadcast outfits were still sprouting and fighting for oxygen. In South Korea, the ecosystem was already alive, crowded, and moving at speed. If you wanted the upper hand, you didn’t learn it from the outside.

Marcus understood that. He needed proximity to the source. If the price of admission was sixteen hours in the air, cramped knees, bad coffee, and a stubborn kind of faith, he was more than willing to pay it.

Part III: Realization

A life-changing trip to Korea, hair drapes, the creation of ITG, and the worst (best) tournament no one remembers.

The Birth of ITG

Marcus took a trip to Daejeon, South Korea in 2002 for the World Cyber Games. This came before ITG existed.

It was the first large clash between him and TSN [Teams Sportscast Network]; he pushed back and wouldn’t take No. on attending. TSN became a driving force early in his career, despite the fallout.

The South Korean esports scene was opaque to the West during the early 2000’s, for two reasons: language barrier, and distance. Almost nobody stateside could speak Korean, and a 12-hour plane ride kept everyone else out. They held what was seemingly the secret formula to esports, though; a well-structured scene with tournament atmosphere far beyond what the West was familiar with.

He studied Korea’s esport culture, structure, and execution firsthand, then used what he learned as the blueprints for ITG two years later.

For everyone involved, Marcus especially, ITG was not merely a pivot from TSN—it was conviction made operational. An all-in decision; it was either going to be successful or dead on arrival.

ITG, that was late 2003, maybe early 2004?

It was 2003 or 2004, yeah.

Around that era, 2002, you went to South Korea during the World Cyber Games.

For sure; that was one of the problems with me and TSN.

Expand on that.

TSN was trying to build a network, not individual talent. They had a really large problem that I was growing as a talent beyond that network.

They wanted to contain you.

They wanted to contain me, and I went against them, at risk of being fired, because the World Cyber Games reached out to me after Quake Con 2002, and said they loved my Quake commentary. Would I be up for Unreal Tournament? And I was like “fuck yeah, 100%” and they flew me out to Korea. They didn’t pay me anything, but I was in.

Well, TSN didn’t like that. They thought it only made sense if they brought the whole network over, and covered the entire event. I won’t name drop, but I notified a certain person that I did not agree with them, and that I would not give up this opportunity to go to Korea. It was a dream come true; I can’t give it up. If that means that they had to fire me or get rid of me, so be it. I ended up doing a post-WCG wrap-up show that became very famous. I realized two things. First and foremost, I wasn’t going to let a company contain me if I did have talent, and number two, I wanted to foster talent like me.

If someone was on my network and just blew up and became the next big thing for this game or that game, then that’s success. That is fuckin’ crazy successful, and to be able to share that victory… I just didn’t agree with TSN’s philosophies of growing network versus talent. I ended up taking all of that talent.

I took Tosspot, I took Tasteless. All the people; I told them they all have talent, and we can build us all up.

It’s about us, it’s about the players, and what we’re doing to help shape this industry.

In 2002, WCG was the peak of all video game competition.

100%.

Would you say at that point, from TSN to WCG, you considered this to be a lifelong journey, something you could look at as a real long-term career?

Let me tell you something. That trip to Daejon, South Korea, was one of those life-changing moments.

The Trip to Korea

That was peak Brood War as well. BoxeR beat YellOw in the Grand Finals.

100%.

Imagine a white kid, from Omaha, Nebraska of all places, getting this opportunity to go to Daejon, South Korea, to provide live commentary.

That was fuckin’ amazing.

I knew of StarCraft, I knew of the culture, but I got to experience it first-hand.

I saw an auditorium full of 5,000 people, go ape shit, with BoxeR playing YellOw in the grand finals that year, too.

That was life changing, because when I was done [with commentary], I went and watched other games’ finals. I realized something while doing that, though.

I thought, “I am such a bitch,” because in gaming you are a Nintendo kid or a Sega kid, and up to that point, I was like “I’m Quake for life! I’m going to cast this game forever!”

Well, look at the status quo. Look at where I would be if Quake was going to be the game that I would have cast for the rest of my life.

[thinks for a second]

One of the hardest thing to deal with in the world of esports is the constant trolls and insults of, “Yeah, djWHEAT chases the dollar, he doesn’t care about the games,” it’s like, no, dude.

I care about them so much, I was willing to learn every game I possibly could. I went home and learned how to cast Counter-Strike; I embedded myself in that game. I learned everything I could about Warcraft III, because that was just released. I would cast every single mod people for Quake. No longer would I be a snooty Quake commentator; I wanted to be an esport commentator.

For anyone wanting to get into the world of esports, you better be keeping an eye on every game; I would never put all my money into one game again, ever.

It was there that Marcus stopped thinking about one game. The map was bigger than that.

This wasn’t just video games or esports. It was an untapped engine in the East, running at full speed, and the West barely had a doorway into it.

Would you consider yourself a broadcaster and commentator, that just so happens to cast esports? Or rather, someone from esports, that broadcasts and commentates. For instance, could you see yourself casting an NFL game? An NBA game?

At one point I was really into UFC, and thought I could commentate it, but at the end of the day when I thought about it… the reason I have been successful as a broadcaster, is because video games genuinely excite me.

You go back and watch every StarCraft match, every Quake match, every Counter-Strike match… that’s genuine excitement over what I am seeing. A lot of times people dismiss it as fake, but that’s really why I’ve been successful. When those games start, the world around me closes, and all I can think about is that someone is controlling this [the game mechanics] at a masterful level, and I am getting the opportunity to cast this, and I think about the importance of that to other people.

That was my adrenaline, my drug, for so many years.

I don’t know where that answer falls in what you asked me, because I was involved in esports for so many years where it wasn’t even called esports; it was just…

It was just gaming; they tried throwing labels and buzzwords at it for a few years there. Competitive gaming, cyber athletes, the lot.

Right, exactly.

So you come back from Korea, coming off of the WCG. Being a competitive person, are you wanting to keep pushing to a higher level or are you satisfied with what’s just taken place at that point?

At that point, it became more so of attaining that level, and questions arose immediately.

“How do we reach that level?”

“How do we become Korea [in terms of esports]?”

“How do we educate people and create awareness that this is a thing, and people should care about it?”

By 2001, South Korea’s game industry had traction: broadband buildout, PC bangs, and chaebol capital turning play into business.

Then the hits landed—Ragnarok Online (2002), MapleStory (2003)—and “gaming” stopped being a niche you had to explain. It was mainstream, and it moved fast.

Brood War was already filling arenas. Lim Yo-hwan (BoxeR) was becoming something esports rarely produces: a household name.

Two years later came a full-length DVD feature. The year after that, an autobiography: Crazy As Me.

In it, KeSPA president Kim Yungman puts it plainly:

E-Sports, with the representation of Starcraft, has increasingly expanded its territory and created at least 200,000 related occupations, completely rejuvenating the related industries.

Moreover, it has had extensive effects socially, economically, and culturally, enough for professional gaming to be the youth’s most desired occupation. The person who has played a crucial role in intensifying such love for Starcraft is the progamer Lim Yohwan [sic].

Championships multiplied. Top players drifted into near-mainstream celebrity on exposure alone. TV time, packed venues, a region built for it.

From the outside, the numbers looked implausible. By 2005, the game industry was worth multi-billions. This wasn’t “fun tech” anymore.

Marcus saw the angle: get close early, then translate that energy into coverage that treated esports like the real thing.

That’s where the GGL (Global Gaming League) era begins.

During all of this, the GGL era is happening, right?

Right, I was just about to get into that.

So following TSN and WCG, the GGL era was starting up.

GGL ended up hiring ITG to do a bunch of their events, and we met with them. We did Gravity Games. We met with them some more at ESWC, and I was sitting on a hill, literally, watching a concert after ESWC 2004, and Bret Hawkins from GGL was there. He came up to me and asked if I would move to Los Angeles and come work for him.

“Shit man, I’ll have to think about that one. What about ITG?”

He said he wanted to purchase ITG, as a whole, and make it so when we went to events, he’d be paying us. He wanted broadcast development. He wanted to keep the esports thing going.

What I saw in that was opportunity; up until that point, I kept asking how we could make this movement larger. The stuff aforementioned. This seemed to be the way to go about doing that.

I said yes in October of 2004, and in January of 2005, me, my wife, and our three cats were on our way to Los Angeles.

Who was on the active roster, of ITG?

• Blankz

• sin

• lune

• Allison “Trillian” Suttles

• Travis “trav” Carrero

• Stuart “TosspoT” Saw

• Paul “ReDeYe” Chaloner

• Jeff “smeagol” Dickinson

• Nick “Tasteless” Plott

• Christopher “MonteCristo” Mykles

• Tres “stunna” Saranthus

What year does this bring you to, with the acquisition? Where does Rod [Breslau] come into play?

I don’t even fuckin’ remember where I met Rod.

[grins and laughs]

When was it, dude? I mean, it had to be…

It was definitely at a Quake Con or something. During the GGL era, though, yes. I remember him leaving that era, in 2009.

Let’s touch on the gap between 2005, which is when you were in Los Angeles, and then leading into the disaster we all know as the CGS. Anything that hasn’t already been said?

So, CGS and GGL overlapped. I did a lot of stuff; HHGL, that’s when we were doing the Gravity Games in 2006.

Dude, I casted Quake 3, and this was in 2006, I casted Quake 3 in front of 50,000 people in Cleveland, right before Jane’s Addiction came on. How fuckin’ ridiculous is that?

That same night, I met Randy “Macho Man” Savage backstage; I was just sitting there wondering if it was real life.

It didn’t feel real.

100%.

It just really, really… a lot happened.

For me, GGL era was an experimental era. There was a lot of things which I did not agree with but they let me do whatever I wanted, including experiment with things like video broadcasting. We can’t forget that’s where I founded Epileptic Gaming.

I challenge anyone to find me another daily video game show that was live streamed over the internet at that time; I truly believe I was the first one, alongside Rance Costa, Hogan Carter, and Robert Summa to do it.

The EG Days!

Yes, I have a VOD somewhere talking about it all, but that’s basically the gist of it. We were doing audio a little while before the video broadcasts.

The Hip-Hop Gaming League

No one could predict what came next: a video game tournament hosted by Snoop Dogg, built to fuse hip-hop with gaming.

On paper, it read like two outcomes and nothing in between. Either it collapses under its own ambition, or it lands so hard it becomes myth.

The Hip-Hop Gaming League.

The best tournament to ever exist, and the one almost nobody remembers.

You hosted HHGL with Snoop Dogg, and you knew nothing about hip-hop.

Yeah, the only thing I knew about Snoop Dogg at that time was a few of his songs, and I knew that he liked to smoke a lot of weed, so we have a couple things in common, right on!

[laughs]

So, imagine this. I played a role at GGL similar to a role I play at Twitch today; they know that if they were to throw me into a situation, that I will handle it professionally, and with grace, and to the best of my ability. That’s what I did. I let those guys [the hip-hop artists] be the stars, I tee’d up the right questions, and you know I don’t even really know how I ended up with that role.

That was a really wild tournament, we need to bring that back in some form.

I know, I know.

It was wild and it was so incredibly ahead of its time.

It was seeing into the future, just the premise, it was hilarious.

Can you imagine, for 10 weeks on Twitch, starting next week, the largest hip-hop artists in the world are going to be playing games of their choice on their own Twitch channels, culminating in a huge finals with a hip-hop concert? That would be one of the most awesome and hilarious things to ever take place on Twitch.

I think it was just the interviews being so terrible along with the artists being sky high [on weed] the whole time, it just made it so good.

I was in a world where it was just great, I mean the people were so passionate about this, no doubt about it. At least that was common ground, you know? People are stoked about the video games, people were cheering, granted they were sports games, but that’s fine. It’s fine, because people got it. For that afternoon, people got it. For those 9 weeks, they got it.

I got to spend a fair amount of time with Snoop Dogg, and believe it or not, I learned a lot from that guy. So, Snoop Dogg was the commissioner. He didn’t actually play; he had two jobs. The first was to visit the studio, and shoot two hours of footage for the HHGL. The second job was to show up at the finals and be a part of it. Well, he was really into it. I think it was one of those cases where he signed the deal and agreed to be a part of it, then realized “oh shit, this is fuckin’ dope, I want to be part of this more” so he was integrated more than what was required, which was awesome.

Watching Snoop Dogg basically improv a bunch of promos for two hours, was fascinating. He made people laugh, he’d take breaks and get people involved, and there was a lot that I took away from that day.

When I’m around people I admire, I try to take away everything that I possibly can. That’s truly how we can improve in our own passions and just as humans.

It was an amazing experience, plus how many people can say they shared a stage with Snoop Dogg?

Sure, but did you share a blunt with Snoop?

[grinning with a short pause, laughing quietly]

Yes.

So we have that on record now.

[grinning]

Basically what happened was, Snoop and the about 9 folks that Snoop rolled with, they had a room that was quite small.

Well, the time came where I had to notify them that I was the host, and let them know the run down of how it was going to happen live. Of course, I go into the room, and I have to like, do one of these [motions with hands as if he’s swimming through water, alluding to the room being hotboxed] and the first thing I hear is:

“You smoke?”

[looks left and right, then leans in]

“Well, this is going to be a much better meeting now!”

I did, right? No big deal, I can handle my blunts. So, I got a chance. Puff, puff, pass, thank you so much, cool, didn’t ask again.

That is a situation where you are offered, but do not ask.

A lifetime achievement.

It kind of is, it kind of is…

[recollects while vaping]

Then the internet sped up again.

Part IV: Leap of Faith

Marcus takes the leap and goes all in on esports, betting that this thing can be a real career. The only question left is whether it holds, or breaks him first.

The Championship Gaming Series failed fast.

If it has a silver lining, it’s this: when it collapsed, it left behind rubble that people could climb.

That brings us back to CGS, with HHGL wrapping up. Perhaps the worst crumbling of a large scale video game tournament ever.

CGS had a history in and of itself; it was piloted originally as the Championship Gaming Invitational, not Series. What that taught a very intelligent team, is that just because it’s a video game and just because you can put it to tape, doesn’t mean it’s any easier for workload.

The early philosophy at CGS was, taping three weekends with 20 shows, but failed to realize that it was done best live. Some games, easy to demonstrate that, while others more difficult, but it didn’t take long for Mike Burks, who had experience with the Super Bowl, with the Olympics, with Thursday Night Football. He was one of the first people to say that we couldn’t do it pre-recorded; it had to be live.

CGI happened twice; two pilots. That was a way to figure out how to make it a live league, that happened twice a week, for 8-10 weeks.

I had a very important phone call with Jason Lake, you know who he is; he was part of CGS at that time, and he ran that one team named LA Complexity for the CGS.

I spoke to Jason and he just asked me what I was going to do, and I told him I was unsure, but I was going to do the one thing I knew I had to do, which was leave Los Angeles because I couldn’t afford it.

No one was hiring game commentators, right? It wasn’t like esports was blowing up.

I spoke to G4, they weren’t looking for anyone. I was exhausted, and remembering that being an extremely stressful 2 months on my mental psyche; I was hustlin’, man. It was a ticking time bomb.

Find something, or move back to Nebraska, because you can’t support your 4-year-old kid or wife out here, or yourself [himself], right?

I’m really glad that it didn’t. I went back to Nebraska, and luckily my wife and I had bought a house back in 2003, and we just happened to still own it, because if you remember the housing market was really shitty during that game, so yet another lucky thing to happen. If I had sold that house, I don’t know where I would have moved back to. Being able to move back into an affordable place, there was comfort in that.

I’m going to tell you a couple of things I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone.

I had to take unemployment, no shame in that. I had to support my family; my wife went to work at the family restaurant, and she actually enjoyed that, and that was right next to the daycare, so it gave me kind of time to figure out what the hell I was going to do. I was looking for jobs, and I had reached out to some of my old contacts.

“Hey, I’m back in town, if anything comes up, let me know.”

I was unemployed from January until March [2009]. What that allowed me to do, was in February of 2009, I went to my community and I said to them, “Hey, I know you love EG [Epileptic Gaming], I know you love the other shows we used to do, and I really, really really, want to do this. I really would like to try and make this what I do full-time. Things are changing, CGS failed, yeah no more GGL.”

I don’t think Justin was public with it [Justin.tv’s rebrand] quite yet, not completely embracing the gaming part yet. So, I basically was like hey, if I can raise this much money, I’m going to start up all these shows, I’m going to create djWHEAT.tv, and from the community which I had been creating through esports and EG, I raised almost $5,000.

A lot of money.

For 2009? Hell yeah, man. That’s a lot of money.

That’s like a large prize pool at an esports tournament back then. Even more, probably.

I remember being incredibly humbled at that moment, and honestly, I remember saying to myself “I won’t let these people down” right? I’m going to do this.

That’s when I started EG again. That’s when LiveOnThree became a thing. That’s when Weapon of Choice restarted. That’s also when Call and Brawl came back. I was doing 4 shows, obviously the flagship show was definitely EG, but as esports was starting to grow, LO3 was kicking up. I started interviewing all of the exit contestants from Ultimate Gamer. SyFy even advertised it a couple of times.

In May of 2009, I got approached by my former boss at the bank and she was spinning up a new team which was deploying cloud backups for all of the banks for the company, and they wanted me to lead the team.

I was in 100%; I needed the job, I had to support my family. That was 2009, about May.

How do you deal with hitting your peak within esports, then being forced to pick up a 9-5 yet again. Does that mess with your mental?

It’s great to be in the gaming celebrity limelight and that level of recognition, but it’s also great to have the ability to take care of your family, and still chase your dreams and support your hobbies without having to sacrifice a bunch of other stuff.

It was kind of funny, because I came back to the bank as a semi-celebrity in a way. I didn’t feel like people were looking at me as if I failed. I was still very much involved with esports and it was just another part of the narrative.

“I did this, I did that, I was on television, and it was great, but it [large success] hasn’t happened yet, so I won’t give up, but I’ll still need to leave work at 4:00 on Fridays to do EG” and it was accepted.

People I worked with knew me enough already that they knew I had gone to Korea, that I had traveled to all these different places.

A certain level of respect.

Perhaps, yeah.

How to Rebound

For those who have experienced a similar situation while attempting to achieve their dreams, what would you say? To those who deem themselves as having failed.

Well, there’s two ways to handle that.

You can either shrivel up and stop chasing your dreams, or you can reset and you can get right back to where you were. If you’ve done it once, you can do it again.

That was my philosophy. We were entering into a new era; we had Justin.tv, we had UStream, I didn’t have to pay for additional bandwidth. We have all these creatives and new ideas.

That eventually led to the creation of OneMoreGame.

OneMoreGame was more or less the same; my idea behind it was very simple. I was such an idiot I called it “djWHEAT.tv” because it made the most sense at the time, because it was just me hosting all of the shows, but then I thought… you know, I want to create something larger than me, and I can’t ever ask someone to broadcast on my network.

Imagine, “hey, come broadcast on my network, djWHEAT.tv” that was pretty fuckin’ stupid. If I had one regret in my time, it’s that.

Sure, for branding.

Right, to brand it differently.

So I created OneMoreGame.tv with SirScoots, GotShedosha, JustinMeter, Erin Hassle. It was the same stuff I was doing, but we had a regular schedule, we had someone to help us book guests, we did social [media], and eventually it got bought by Good Game Agency, which was the company that owned Evil Geniuses and Alliance as well as other esports teams, and whatever else around it.

How did you and Sean [Plott] meet each other?

I met Sean in Singapore WCG 2005, my son was just born so I was not able to go to the WCG USA Finals that year. Sean had qualified, and Tasteless was on my commentary team. I had heard stories of his brother, the legend that was Day[9].

Then I got a chance to meet him, and my first impression was “Oh my god, this guy is a real life muppet; full of energy, silly, goofy” and it didn’t take much to be like “I love this guy, he’s great” — now it wasn’t really until 2009 that we reconnected. Partially through the content he was creating through Day[9] dailies and that we were doing similar things, and with StarCraft.

I would consider him a very, very good friend at this point. 10 years later.

During that time too, yes, I had fallen back in love with StarCraft.

Hail Mary

Let’s talk about that for a second.

How I got involved with StarCraft, actually, is a funny story. I knew Day[9], and wanted to get more involved. I remember watching MLG DC, the first MLG that had StarCraft II, and I just thought about how much I missed it.

I remember emailing Ben Balboa and Sundance DiGiovanni. Before I touch on the actual email, let me preface by explaining why I thought I could send this email. As I was leaving GGL, I had two options in front of me. Work for CGS full-time, or go work for MLG in New York, and that was a hard decision. I would have loved to have worked for MLG, but I was sure that my story would be a lot different if I did.

Sundance commented on why he gave Marcus that shot:

When Marcus first reached out to us, he had already established himself as one of the most notable voices in esports. Live on 3 was the gold standard for in-depth discussion around esports, and his work with other esports entities was well known.

Having Marcus join our broadcast was essential to help us establish credibility and trust with the StarCraft 2 community as we worked to build an audience. His passion and commitment to esports was infectious and having that energy in the room made for a better event both for the viewers at home as well as for the live audience.

Things finally started to click. People noticed. MLG handed Marcus a rare shot to prove himself, and it came on one of the biggest stages esports had to offer.

A decade of experience was cashing out. Marcus wanted to walk through what the email said, and what followed after he hit Send:

I felt like I handled that situation really well, where I thanked them, and I explained to them why I made the decision that I did, and I always made a point to make sure they knew how much I respected what they were doing in the space.

I emailed them, both. Verbatim, I said:

“I love what you’re doing for StarCraft. I feel like I could bring a lot to MLG if you brought me to a competition. If you fly me out to the next event, I will work for free. I will be your commentary bitch, and I will do 15 hours of games if I have to, just to show you how serious I am about wanting to commentate at MLG.”

And there was a plane ticket waiting for me to go out.

I always tell people, sometimes you just need to take the initiative and go for it. I wouldn’t suggest giving up your hard earned time, but this was a period where you had to do that to get noticed.

Was that MLG Dallas?

I want to say it was MLG Raleigh. I think.

So, I sent that email, and that’s how I got into MLG. I owe it to MLG for giving me a shot.

That leap is what pulled Marcus out of the rut. He’d already learned to go against the grain when the grain led nowhere useful. This time, the risk stuck. The switch flipped.

In the months after MLG Dallas, the connections stopped being transactional and started becoming real. The kind that last. Sundance DiGiovanni, MLG’s founder. Justin Kan, who was still early in the long arc that began with JTV.

He also linked up with Sean “Day[9]” Plott, already a revered voice in StarCraft. They became fixtures at MLG events, their chemistry obvious and unforced. Crowds responded to it. You could feel it in the room.

Sean would later talk about the impact Marcus had on him:

Marcus is someone who I admire so much.

He’s deeply passionate and cares so much about what he’s doing. Fearless, in a calm way. A lot of times when you think of someone as fearless, it’s almost that they’re full of fervor and determination. Marcus is like “yeah, we’re gonna do it,” and he’s always very calm and poised. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him get nervous or anxious, ever. He seems absolutely unflappable. There’s this sort of fear that you think about when you have a piano recital, and you gotta stand up and play a piece.

“Ooh, I don’t want to mess up!” There’s that sort of fear, but then there’s a more basic one, which is… “Ugh, I don’t want to do this thing, this is going to be a pain in the ass.” Marcus was doing broadcasting long before there was a concept of live broadcasting. Long before a concept of it. The way he was able to do that was just say, “let’s do it and figure it out,” and how did he figure it out? Endless failure, which totally seemed not to bug him at all.

He just managed to make it all work. There were a lot of shows that he worked on which were a complete disasters, and he literally kept plowing forward, plowing ahead… and it’s one of those things where, when I first started talking to Marcus about 2009 and 2010, when I was starting my own broadcasts and it was starting to get big, I’d go to him.

What came next was the hardest assignment of his life.

Justin Kan and Kevin Lin pulled him aside and handed him something confidential. A project with a placeholder name, Zarth, built around a single, dangerous idea: pivot Justin.tv entirely toward video games.

By the numbers, it was absurd.

Gaming made up roughly 3% of JTV’s traffic. A rounding error. The kind of thing you kill quietly in a meeting. But it was also the bet no one else wanted to make, and somehow everyone in that room believed in it.

Kevin would later talk about what it took to offer Marcus the role in the first place:

He was on Ustream and I believe the biggest change to the business that happened during Twitch’s development was the number of customers we were talking to and reaching out to. Marcus was not super excited to hear from us in the beginning, I don’t think.

Understandably, because he didn’t know us; we were not good at customer-facing stuff for a super long time. Our brand was this generic brand, with little-to-no marketing around JTV. Eventually we got him [Marcus] on the phone and explained what we were trying to.

Why Marcus? Simple. In a world full of commentators, promoters, and guys with opinions, he was one of the few who’d already paid the price. He’d lived inside the ugly, unglamorous reality of broadcasting games live on the internet, back when it barely worked and nobody respectable admitted they cared.

So he said yes.

Now came the part that mattered.

Part V: Era of Twitch

By this point, he wasn’t auditioning. The climb had a price, though.

By late summer 2010, bleeding into 2011, the whispers were everywhere. Twitch was the word moving through back channels and hotel lobbies, traded between insiders who thought they understood where this thing was headed. People argued about structure, about moderation, about how it would run. Everyone had a theory.

StarCraft II had just landed, and the scene cracked open. New blood, real money, real obsession. You could feel the temperature rising.

What no one could grasp was scale. Not even close. Twitch, still hiding behind the codename Zarth, was bigger than any of the conversations circling it. The real question wasn’t whether the pivot from Justin.tv would work, but what survived the transition intact.

Kevin Lin knew one thing for sure. When he picked up the phone and called Scott Smith at an MLG event, this thing wasn’t going to be called Zarth:

I actually told him that it was going to be Zarth, which was Twitch’s project name that almost became the final name. Scott just paused on the phone and was like ‘you’re out of your f-… you’re out of your mind’ and I said I was kidding and it was going to be Twitch.

Justin and Kevin reached out to an esports personality who had become a crowd favorite during the early Starcraft II days: Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham.

Without Marcus, who knows where we [Twitch] would be. Marcus brought everything from product ideas to ultimately policy on how we handle the site. The community.

At the moment of the switch, Justin.tv had roughly one million users scattered around the world. The quiet fear wasn’t growth. It was loss. How many of those people would follow when the lights changed and the sign on the door meant something else?

That question hung over everything.

Justin would later talk about the pivot, the lull before the jump, and what it meant to go all in on video games when there was no safety net left:

I don’t even think Emmett knew that it would blow up as it did; I think it was just content that he enjoyed watching. StarCraft II had just come out and he really liked the StarCraft content. I was pro-pivoting towards it [gaming], while our other co-founders were pretty skeptical. I don’t think any of us knew this would be huge, you know? It was a learning experience for all of us. Thinking that we just built something people really liked.

Now, back to Marcus.

We arrive at 2010 when StarCraft [II] is released, you begin casting MLG tournaments, and we head into 2011. You then join Twitch at the end of 2011.

Yes, I did join in 2011, I’m actually about to celebrate my 8 years, and I was the 19th employee at Twitch.

I was not even on JTV [Justin.tv] yet. I was still on Ustream.

The beginning.

Yeah, man.

Me, Sean [Plott], Justin [Ignacio, widely-known as Gunrun], and a few others were still over there and at the time, Ustream was not hyper-focused on gaming. They said like they were going to support us and be there for us, but then they went the route of a lot of the livestream platforms at that time, which was the need to get celebrities on the platform.

Gamers ended up taking a backseat and that was an opportunity for JTV. Michael Seibel, Kevin Lin, and Emmett Shear basically did everything they could to bring myself, Sean, and Gunrun over.

They ended up hiring Justin Ignacio. That was an easy one.

I think I was the last one to come over and it wasn’t because I didn’t believe in JTV or didn’t like what they were doing. I think the act of moving everything that I was doing without knowing the certainty of the future was a little daunting to me. At the time it was myself and Scott Smith [SirScoots] and we had conversations with Kevin; we made it really clear like “Hey if we’re going to come over, you know, we’re going to have to redo graphics and do all that stuff, it’s just going to be a lot of work on us,” and he’s like “yeah, I got that, I totally understand that. However, I can help out.”

I went hard on JTV. At the time there were some issues with Zuffa and Justin TV because of some unauthorized stream rebroadcasts that were happening. One of the things I was scared about was wondering, what happens if Zuffa wins? What if I switch over, or and we all switch over, then suddenly there’s not a platform anymore? Emmett, Kevin, and even Jacob at the time, they made it clear that it wasn’t going to happen. We understood and they mentioned they had other things in the works, which would benefit the gaming community and broadcasting community as a whole.

At the time they were also starting to talk about the partnership program. That was one of the big things that everyone was looking for at the time. It’s like are we turning this hobby into something that we can sustain ourselves on.

We finally made the switch.Everything was done from audio work to graphical work and whatnot. Probably one of my favorite stories about this era was a few months later. They made the announcement that “Justin.tv” was changing to “Twitch” [rebranding].

I remember calling Kevin and being like: “Dude… You fucked us!”

[laughs and recollects]

We just spent a month changing all of our graphics and redoing all of our audio.

[recounting his sentiments, running through the conversation verbatim]

“You didn’t even tell us about this, and now we have to do it all over again? This is exactly what we didn’t want to have happened. You said that you were going to communicate with us and that you were going to look out for us.”

We were genuinely upset and and you know, I think Scoots had his conversation with Kevin, and I had my conversation with Kevin. This was also the time where I probably earned some points with JTV, and I mentioned that this wasn’t the way you handled partnerships/partners. They’d split like this.

I brought a lot of awareness to it that, making them realize it’s just more than providing some bandwidth to these gamers. Right? They wanted to create a community. They want to have a personal touch. Kevin said “I will pay for everything. I will like pay for you guys to redo your graphics and the redo everything. We will make this right.”

It was really that point where I was thinking “Holy shit. Kevin Lin, Emmett Shear, Jacob Woodward… they all really do care.”

I realized that they genuinely do care about gaming. I never got those types of phone calls from Ustream or or any other platform that I might have streamed on previously. That was a big deal that the CEO, COO, and company president were calling and having these discussions with me. It was two and a half months after Twitch became Twitch that then I joined full-time. I originally joined full time to focus on bringing as many esports teams and organizations to the platform as humanly possible.

The Revival

This is right at the peak of esports being revived, right? Perhaps a year into it where you have these games coming full force with tournaments and you see a shift.

The revival, right.

You had StarCraft [II]. It was League of Legends. It was Street Fighter 4. Those three games the games in my opinion were the triad that brought esports back in 2009, but for me personally, it was also the triad that gave me content for Live On Three. It allowed me to do a lot of hosting with Riot that probably I wouldn’t have done otherwise.

Scoots [Scott Smith], myself, and a few other folks from OneMoreGame including A.J. Papa and FishStix and Gunrun did a fighting game community [FGC] event called Devastation 2009, because we wanted the fighting game scene to be seen in the same vein as other esports events as well.

Sure, we didn’t realize some of the difficulties that there would be in that as we were kind of outsiders coming into it, but I think they’re also people were understood what we were trying to do and realized we that there needed to be more of that.

I mean, the FGC has done an amazing job from a streaming perspective. For us there were all of these opportunities to get OneMoreGame up, and to turn that into at least from our perspective, a revival of esports and the part that we played in that.

I remember meeting so many people there from the FGC; Aris Bakhtanians, Alex Valle, Robb Chiarini. There were a great deal of fighting game legends even at that event.

CGS collapses, you rebound, and now you’re at Twitch. In 2011, are you more confident? Still growing as a broadcaster? Do you feel like you’ve got it, and you’re climbing fast?

At that point, I had 10 years of broadcast experience. Let’s break that down.

That was almost five years of doing audio/radio style casting, starting up Epileptic Gaming started up, all of that aforementioned hosting work, getting up in front of a camera and whatnot. That also included three years of live television with CGS. That was my training ground right there, that 10 years.

I felt really comfortable in my role at Twitch and my ability, as a professional. I also had all that IT experience like I felt like I was bringing a lot to the company. Not only my background of esports in my background as a broadcaster, but also I’d managed teams before, managed budgets, and dealt with contracts as well as legal [documents]. I would say that I had a leg up on a lot of folks because I had some additional skill sets going into that.

Then, of course, I had, like, the esports Rolodex.

That was a perfect job for me. It was a different time back then, man. I remember having conversation with esports people to be like, “so you’re telling me that I should practice and stream my practice but then everyone will know how I play and the types of strategies that I use?”

It was harder than you might think, right? Getting the organizations on different esports broadcasting. That was a solid 2-3 year project.

This was also when Valve started to drip-feed insiders information about CS:GO. Pros being “secretly” flown out to Valve HQ to balance the game. Given Valve’s track record at the time, were you anticipating the tidal wave that would be CS:GO to overtake esports the way it did?

I don’t think anyone was. I still think CSGO is one of the most amazing rebounds of all time. Think about [the transition of] 1.6 to Source, that was rough? People were all:

“Fuck this game. This isn’t 1.6. It’s like the Fisher-Price version.”

So we already knew it had an uphill battle, right? People already had a pretty bad taste in their mouth with Source. What was going to be the solution to that? Bringing the pros and listening to them wasn’t an overnight change. CSGO was out and had pretty negative sentiment for a while, but doesn’t mean people didn’t play it. They had to buckle down and make it the game people wanted to play. Look at where it’s at now. Counter-Strike now has a legacy that is just completely bonkers.

[laughs and reflects briefly on its arc]

There’s not a whole lot of esports titles that can even come close to having the history or legacy that Counter-Strike has, and I do not believe that anyone was thinking, “You know what? They’re going to turn this around.”

Even at the time, Alex Garfield was developing the 1.6 ProMod for Counter-Strike was going to make it. Thank you to all the pros that finally yelled enough to actually make it happen. It’s going to be really hard to beat the rebound that was Counter-Strike it when it came [transitioned] to Global Offensive.

CSGO is an esport which is easy to spectate and understand. Other games, such as SC2, are much more complex. Do you think this contributed to the success of the revival at all?

I actually don’t think that has anything to do with it, in my opinion. There’s enough Counter-Strike fans. As long as the game was there along with competition… right?

So, I would say that the true reason for the rebound is a [the] community that has been built over 16 years that love Counter-Strike that was playing in college or playing in high school, and just needed that next version.

They got everything right from the crates to the skins to the competitions.

I don’t think it has anything to do with the ease of viewing. I think it has everything to do with the fact that you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people who had watched competitive Counter-Strike up to that point and were just ready for the next era.

Let’s talk about the acquisition of Twitch by Amazon in 2014, and what ensued between 2012 and that day.

That period was kind of where I think I started to put a bow on like my first well, I don’t even know if I’d caught the first era but… I call it the Third Era of esports, because I was casting SC2 pretty regularly, but then WCS started and, I think Blizzard was looking for individuals who wanted to make that their full-time job and that was not me. I was at Twitch. I was very happy and frankly that was fine with me because there were a lot of other casters who only focused on Starcraft who basically needed that work to support themselves.

I got a lot of flack for it because people were like, “Oh, he’s turning his back on SC2,” when the fact is that I still watch an enormous amount of SC2 esports. I had an amazing 3/4 years casting SC2. I want to continue to do other things and frankly, there are individuals who are much more suited than I am because they have a lot more time, right? My availability to travel was lessening as I was taking a larger role within Twitch.

Honestly, the bow was Amazon purchasing Twitch. Eventually right after that came GoodGame acquiring OneMoreGame, which meant OneMoreGame was owned. I had to put the shows on hiatus due to conflict of interest.

I couldn’t do those shows under the Twitch umbrella.

It was a strange spot, I remember that.

If Live On Three comes back, it’s because Wheat, Scoots, and Slasher own it and bring it back. Not because Twitch, who employs Marcus, brings it back, you know? Like that’s not what that show is.

I’ve never truly left esports.

If I’m not there front and center hosting or doing interviews or desk whatever, I’m watching. I am reading, I am following the news. I am talking to people within the industry. I am still doing a lot of interviews; I did the Netflix: Explained series and whatnot. Even in 2014 when I stepped back, I was still there.

Marcus had done it. The dream. The mission. Building something that made people feel less alone in front of a screen.

Even decades later, underneath the titles and the travel and the quiet credibility, he was still the same kid who would do just about anything for a computer. The hunger didn’t leave. It just got better fed. The only real change was scale.

By now, he wasn’t just part of esports. He was one of its faces. His decisions and his voice were landing with millions.

What it took to get here, what it cost, and what it did to him once there was nowhere left to climb but inward.

Part VI: Journey Before Destination

He didn’t get here clean. He got here the hard way: eyes open, no shortcuts. This is how it came together, and what it took out of him.

Passion. It runs deep.

It runs so deep.

I want to touch on the stigma of it being “weird” to watch someone play video games to outsiders.

Although improving, the stigma is still present. It’s all becoming mainstream, though.

[nods in understanding]

I never found it weird. The thought of someone else finding it weird is hard for me. I know people did find it weird, because I got plenty of that shit from people. What that did is it made me blind to the exact moment when it went from totally weird to accepted.

Streaming hypothetically was still way ahead of its time. Yeah, there was YouTube. Yeah, there were some livestreaming [happening], but it wasn’t really as prevalent until video game streaming started, putting forth hundreds and hundreds and thousands and eventually millions of hours of broadcasting. Netflix had a huge part to play in it, as well as Hulu, in the sort of larger culture war happening.

For example the eagles stream, when that got really popular. It eventually got parodied and ended up in an episode of Silicon Valley. There was there was a shift in culture, and that during that shift is when I think it just became so natural.

Was it weird I was buying video game magazines back in the day? I definitely didn’t think so. It’s like, a new medium becomes accepted and available for people to share and showcase gaming, and also find other people who have those similar passions. The chat as well, it just put it front and center. You and I could both love the ukulele, and we could both go on YouTube and watch a million videos of the ukulele, but there’s never an opportunity for you and I to interact; suddenly, there is.

The chat created an ability for all of us to connect with one another, where that’s our passions, the games we love, the esports we follow, a favorite player, whatever it may be. From there, bonds grow, and the idea of community comes to fruition.

You’ve mentioned in the past that it may not be such a far-fetched idea for kids to come home and turn on Twitch, versus a television, in coming years. I think you said this to Sundance in a conversation a while back?

It’s here. If I said that, it was a while ago because I take a look at my own son…

You know, I look at miniWHEAT [James], my 14-year-old son, and I have watched him grow up in this generational shift that we’re talking about where kids don’t watch television much anymore. If they do, they’re typically watching it on-demand and not on the schedule that the television dictates but where they are dictating schedules, perhaps via a friend recommendation. A friend of his might tell him to check this out on Crunchyroll, or sit down and watch Good Place with us [Marcus and his wife], but usually he’s only watching something if we tell him he needs to check it out.

The way that the new generations are consuming media and even the way that existing generations are consuming media, is completely changing. This is historically something that has happened since radio and has seen the peak of popularity, and then television came out and television saw the peak of popularity. Then the internet came out in the internet is seeing its peak of popularity right now and then evolving from there because now there are new ways via the internet to get your content.

Disney Plus, Peacock, Shutter, and all of these other things that are kind of like branching off to be their own thing; to me that’s creating sort of the new foundation for the question of, “Will it be toppled?”

I don’t know, I think the next innovation that hasn’t been made by anyone else but Twitch it is to combine viewing, community-building, chatting. Whatever that might be.

I would say in 2015 when you guys streamed the World Series of Poker, that was one of the first times where the idea of Twitch shifting away from gaming came up. That pulled in over a million concurrent viewers. Huge.

Yeah, that was definitely a time.

I have a lot of thoughts about this because television was fucking huge. We all agree, that television is still massive but television still has limited audience whether that is a local station or a nationwide network like ABC or Fox or CBS. Technically many of those audiences are limited to the United States, and sure maybe some syndication goes out to your up or other countries and some of that stuff comes back in, but there is an accessibility problem with television. Subscriptions, as well as not being able to watch anything on your phone.

Suddenly, the internet. Then, Twitch comes in and lets everyone know it doesn’t matter; you just need internet, and you have access to content from around the world.

That is drastically changing everything.

If I’m a company like PokerStars or the World Series of Poker and I have a worldwide audience, ESPN is actually the smallest slice of what I could accomplish if I had the ability to globally distribute my content. It makes sense that even as gaming begins to grow or other disciplines, whether that’s Magic the Gathering or chess at that are relative in and make sense in this space begin to use Twitch as a way to globally get their content into the hands of anyone who loves that thing.

The doors were opening pretty early, it was just that in this particular scenario, Twitch was very sensitive about going from Justin TV then to gaming and then you know?

There was a long time where an IRL stream or a travel stream wouldn’t have been allowed on Twitch. But again, I think like as that culture shifted and as it became a more accepted form of distribution in the way people are watching. Not necessarily accepted, but perhaps more aware that engagement was growing.

Everything has changed.

I know there’s still a lot of money and television and there’s obviously money and rights and that will always be there. But, if you are in a situation where you are seeking that global audience level; look at all the wrestling organizations, right? They are getting so much reach because someone from Poland can admire it and now watch it whereas before, they wouldn’t have been able to, however now it’s on Twitch and it doesn’t matter where this is taking place, as an example. I can still watch it and still enjoy it. So I would expect that. There’s going to be more and more of that in the future.

Twitch’s Core Audience

Will Twitch’s core always remain gaming, even if it becomes popular in other things, such as chatting or real life streaming? That’s the foundation.

Right. I mean… you’re talkin’ and as it stands right now…

[brings up Twitch’s directory]

There are 119,000 watching the Just Chatting category. That’s amazing. However, there’s 521,000 watching Fortnite due to an event, 109,000 watching Fifa, 105,000 watching League of Legends, and that’s just the Top 4, so you can see where I’m going with this. That type of ratio would have to shift over several years; it can’t happen overnight.

So, could it happen? Maybe.

Do I think it will [now]? I think it’s pretty doubtful, because you’ve seen gaming grow exponentially over the last 10 years. I see it as very friendly adjacent content to one another similar to things like

Why do you think other platforms have failed to overtake Twitch? For instance, Vine Gaming, Own3D, and AzubuTV to name a few.

It has a lot to do with timing. You’ve heard the phrase lightning in a bottle.

JTV and how that grew with what Justin Kan originally did and how it became an open broadcasting platform. It wasn’t the first one but, I think that it was one of the more recognized first one Stickam was kind of on its way down. Ustream was taking some interesting business directions.

JTV at the time felt a little bit more for the people. Obviously growing from that, Twitch because of the rise of gaming content which again makes a lot of sense. That’s one of the easiest things to start a broadcast for extended periods of time over to audience of potentially millions.

There’s just so much. Timing, a little bit of luck, the emoticons, the dawn of memes, there was a new lexicon that was being created. Kappa was kind of the first memes on Twitch, but you think of the millions of memes that have gone through the Twitch pipelines over the last 8 years.

Why could no one overtake YouTube, right? Fundamentally there becomes a time in which a service become so ingrained that any new player to the market is going to have to innovate reinvent or bring something completely different if they are going to want to overtake it right?

I also believe it has a lot to do with how the original founders of JTV. They wanted to build a global network to support; they were looking many years in the future and I think created something that was sustainable. The people that Twitch hired from the very beginning as well, very reputable individuals with great histories in gaming. There are so many reasons. That helped create really solid relationships in the industry that it that helped give guidance and Direction and all of it. To me, it’s more technology.

It’s a lot of then what happened on the people side. And who did they meet with and how did we connect with the community? Like I don’t even know the answer to some of these things.

What I can tell you is that one of the reasons I’m still at Twitch 8 years later is because this place is fucking special, man. There’s something about it and… if any one of us could actually put our finger on it or bottle it, we would all be bazillionaires, but then again it’s just one of those great mysteries of Twitch, you know?

If you asked a hundred people why they loved which so much you’d get a lot of the same answers, but then the third and fourth and fifth answer they’d all be completely different.

I know in my heart of hearts that it has a lot more to do then with something tangible. No amount of money can recreate the network and expect to compete with Twitch. It just takes more than that. It’s community, technology, the language which people use to speak with one another, it is all of those things. I get that it would be incredibly difficult for anyone.

Esports Today

From its genesis to what it is now, are you satisfied with what esports became?

[laughs]

I mean it’s a super loaded question, and I know not intentionally, just because there’s so many different ways to.

[audibly grinning]

This was one of those questions we both knew was loaded, which is why he reacted the way he did. By this point I’d known Marcus for over a decade, and we’d watched esports mutate in real time, from infancy into whatever people insist on calling it now.

Talk long enough with the people who were there early and you’ll hear the same fork in the road, said a hundred different ways.

One camp believes esports was better when it was small and underground, when it belonged to the obsessives. That it lost itself the moment money showed up, when passion got replaced by business and the edges got sanded down for sponsors.

The other camp says that’s the tax you pay for growth. That every good thing either evolves or dies. That hierarchy, structure, and corporate gravity were inevitable, and the nostalgia people cling to is just a warm story they tell themselves so they don’t have to accept what time does to anything that gets big.

Marcus’ take sits where it always has: unfiltered.

First of all, yeah.

People should be fucking proud of where esports has gotten in the 20 years, right?

Imagine those 10 years that people are grinding out like we didn’t see much growth. It was like trying to watch a plant grow. Then suddenly, esports was kind of like watching a kid grow where it’s like it’s still happening slowly over time, but you’re noticing those changes, you’re seeing it. You’re noticing this is different than three months ago, this is different from last month, so on and so forth.

I still believe that esports is a crawling baby. For that reason, I think we’re going to make mistakes. I think people are going to fuck up. I think people are going to do amazing things. I think that we have to realistically know this is the stage that we’re in and we have to like try to not go into the toddler stage, and doing the “but, I want to be a teenager now,” because that’s what I feel like that’s what is happening right now, that esports is probably trying to grow up a little bit too fast.

That’s why we’re seeing millions of dollars go towards franchise spots and I mean like great, you know, like more power to the people that want to do that but for everyone else these are going to be intense learning moments because not every single one of these things is going to be successful and not everyone is going to have any sort of multi-year legacy that will come from it. Teams will both fall, and rise from the ashes, right?

It’s just like right now I think esports is in a really volatile position, but also in a position where I don’t think that if the bubble word a burst the proverbial bubble word a burst that esports would be in trouble because esports is so well-established now and does have so many big players and does have you no more fans and it’s ever had and even if an OverWatch League disappeared or the Cod League disappeared or you know, right there’s going to be other leagues.

There’s going to be other games I worry about I worry about like sponsorship Skip and like sort of brand involvement because of that right because of hey, if you spent a lot of money, it doesn’t work out. Do you think you’re going to spend a lot of money again? No, probably not.

I mean to that point, Mountain Dew was a big sponsor of CGS, they got burned and think about how long it was before you saw Mountain Dew again in esports. I think that was a direct result. I can’t speak for certain. I don’t work for Pepsi or Mountain Dew but I believe that result of like feeling very burnt. Touching the stove, getting burnt, and not doing that again.

They could also consider being burnt, but consider the positivity happening and recognize that as well; this is yet to be seen but I’m very happy with the growth of esports. I mean, it’s been an unbelievable growth over the last, what? 20 years? I think that in the last five years we’ve had exponential growth where we hit that first esports event in a stadium and suddenly like that’s a normal thing.

More structure as well, all around. You were even inducted into the esports Hall of Fame, that was a milestone.

Not only an amazing moment for me, but a very eye-opening one as well; it means the world to me. I never set out to do esports with the hope of like one day making it into some hall of fame. It’s absolutely surreal to me that that is something that would happen. Just based off the fact that I was just I was just a kid who loved competitive gaming and I followed my dream and had an addiction to it. I love to be able to say that was a small part of it. That means a ton to me.

I feel like I finally was able to say that I cemented my legacy and esports and I’m not done yet. Don’t get me wrong, but that era and being recognized for that not only as a commentator but also just as an evangelist right? That’s what I’m most proud of, and Michal Blicharz [Carmack] might be another great one; I remember we’d have conversations thinking how fucking huge esports would be one day. There’s not a bone in my body that doesn’t believe that to be true.

I remember going to events and talking to Carmack and I would leave and I’d be like, “fuck, yeah man, I’m going to cast twice the amount of games now this week, and I’m going to do this, and this, and I’m going to join,” you know? Lots of motivation from incredibly motivating people keeping that dream alive.

All the passionate people, be them individual players, team owners, broadcasters, or otherwise that I got to work with.

At the start, it was his parents who kept the lights on and the doubt out. Later, as the stakes grew heavier, it became his wife and his child.

For all the scale and noise that came with success, Marcus never did this alone. Behind everything he built was a small, immovable unit that mattered more than any title.

The question worth asking now isn’t what he achieved, but who stood with him while he did it.

Part VII: Family

A quarter century in, Marcus looks back and understands the truth of it: without family, none of this ever happens.

Family is Marcus’ north star. In an industry built on volatility and bravado, it was his support system that made the chaos feel navigable. Nothing mattered more than Jennifer and James, his wife and son.

Before that, it was almost a game. Bachelor life, no guardrails. No real safety net. Decisions made fast, on instinct, because the only person taking the hit was him.

Marriage changed the math. A child changed it again. Suddenly every risk had a shadow. Every late night and last-minute flight had a name attached to it.

Now Marcus has eclipsed two decades in the industry, taking leaps that look obvious only after they work.

So where did all of that take his family?

Jen and James have been with you for as long as you can remember as a support system, and in the end, it all worked out. That isn’t the case with everyone.

Right.

If there is one piece of advice that I give everyone, it is to ensure you have a support system in place to help you achieve your goals and chase your dreams. I simply cannot imagine a world where I didn’t have Jen and James with me on this journey. On bad days, I have them to turn to. On days of success, I have someone to celebrate with. Doing anything alone is going to be tougher than having a support system… and I cannot stress enough just how much of a factor this has been in my own career and success.

It comes at a cost, though. There have been many times where I have turned something down, or decided to go a different route because I always factor in my family as a variable for my decision. There have been many jobs/companies/offers that I have turned down over the years. Maybe the job or project fit into what I was hoping to accomplish, but required moving to a city or state that I wasn’t comfortable living in. So while having a support structure is key to success (regardless of whether it is family or friends), it will ultimately change the way you think about the opportunities and risk that you may have in front of you.

Our family most certainly has had a wild set of adventures together which has run parallel with my career path… but what is life if it’s not meant to be lived? This philosophy has helped my wife and I get through some of the toughest times, and I hope that rubs off on James as he continues to grow and mature.

It should also be noted that while we’ve had our fair share of difficulties over 20 years, I’ve never once heard my family complain. Sure they would prefer if I did less traveling, but I’ve never felt like I was being a burden on my family or our day to day lives. They are a part of this journey just as much as I am, and I think that’s obvious when you look back at some of the choices that we made together over the course of my career.

The Graham family is most certainly one of the key factors to my success. We have learned and grown from the risks that we have taken, the challenges we’ve put before us… and it’s comforting knowing that they are there during the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

Jen’s your rock.

There is an episode of Lost called The Constant. It’s regarded as one of the best episodes of Lost and some have said that it’s one of the best episodes of TV ever made. The episode centers around the idea of time travel. As you can imagine, time travel (even in fantasy) is complex. This episode centered less around the complexity of time travel itself and more on the effects it can have on us as humans.

One of the major themes throughout is that the only way we can mentally guide ourselves through time travel is by identifying a “constant”. That’s someone who is there in both the past and present who serves as an anchor for your mental stability.

Jen is my constant. She’s been there through every single step of my career and she has grounded me and kept me mentally stable through the entire journey. Yeah… it’s not time travel… but this episode speaks to my heart because it tells us that with our constant we can get through the universe’s most difficult challenges. Jen has been that level of deep support since day 1.

She’s never given me shit for playing games, or filling the house with talk shows/commentary. She’s never complained about moving. She has always been supportive in helping me talk through options, opportunities, and career. And I should make it clear. Jen doesn’t act as a secretary or assistant to me in anyway… she is a partner.

My decisions, my work, my dreams and aspirations… she is a 50/50 partner in all of it, and I feel like that has allowed us to exceed even our own expectations and work as a unit and team through thick and thin.

James acts as a rock for both you and Jen. You’ve said he’s been the most supportive member of the family, talk to me about that.

Speaking of working as a unit and team… I would say that my career and the crazy journey we’ve been on has allowed us to teach some very valuable life lessons to James over the years. One of the things that we consistently message is that we, as a family, are a team. And as a team we tackle the toughest challenges, we support one another, and celebrate together, and we pick one another up if we happen to fall or fail. When one member of the team doesn’t work with the team… the whole team suffers.

Given these lessons, James has been most supportive because he has been a team player. In fact, he’s been such a good team player that we will often bring James into our discussions and decisions around our bigger plans. Sound crazy? Letting an 8, 10, or 13-year-old be a part of your decision-making process? I’ll give you an example. Summer of 2018 my wife and I had begun discussions about moving back to Nebraska. There were many reasons for this, one was because we wanted to put James back into public school after homeschooling him for 4 years. Another reason is because our larger friends and family network was in Nebraska.

We had the opportunity to move back, build our “forever house”, and continue to follow our dreams from a more comfortable location. We went back and forth about whether or not we should plan to move back in 2019 or wait until 2020 (which would have been James’ first year of High School). For months we discussed the pros and cons of both times, evaluated what would be easiest for us as a family and for work. Ultimately, we decided to basically give James the final say. We simply laid out our thoughts, presented the options, and said, “Would you prefer to go back in 2019 so you can do a year of Middle School before your first year of High School? Or would you be fine waiting one more year, and then moving back in 2020?

He said, “I want to move back to Nebraska in 2019 and attend a year of Middle School before High School.” And that was that. James has been supportive of us because we’re his parents, but I think he has contributed to this family just as much as Jen and I in what he has endured and the decisions he has helped us make.

As a side note, we could have never actually expected it, but that decision put us in a very good place given the status of the world in COVID19. Had we waited until 2020, we may not have had the opportunity to move at all, because our house would have likely not finished, we wouldn’t have been able to hire cross country movers. During this quarantine we’ve actually talked quite a bit about how James (unknowingly) helped us avoid one of the biggest challenges we would have ever had to face.

You’ve taken immense risks, which we’ve spoken about thus far. What fuels your belief in these leaps of faith? Do you speak it into existence, something else?

I took risks because I have always been a believer. Whether it was Esports, Livestreaming, Video Games, the internet, or building communities… I’ve always believed that these things would be something that would be important parts of our lives. I WANTED to be a part of those things. I let that belief fuel my passion.

“Everything happens for a reason”. Some may think that’s an easy way to justify the things that happen in life, but I embrace this saying to the fullest. Sometimes you’re going to get dealt a shitty hand. It is easy to get frustrated, angry, and upset when you’re dealt this hand, but it has always seemed more productive to figure out if there was a way to turn that shit hand into a winning hand.

Examples of this:

During Q3, Clan519 won a NA Online Tournament in which we won travel to the EU to play against the best EU teams in the world. The timeline though was so rough, that I wasn’t able to get a passport so I could attend with the team. I gave my spot up. That really sucked. However, that ended up being the first time that I gave commentary and online coverage a shot, and instead of crying over not being able to attend, I stayed up all night to commentate and cover Clan519 to support them in the best way possible. After an incredibly successful broadcast, I essentially created a pathway for my future career off of a “shitty hand”. Championship Gaming Series 2009. When it shut down, it was devastating. I told the story earlier but we decided to move back to Nebraska. I could have just conceded at that point, but that was also the time when livestreaming was picking back up. By being put back into a “reset” position, I was able to explore the world of streaming all over and, and that made me fall back in love and realize that

I didn’t need a multimillion dollar company to chase my dreams. I did it back in 2002, so let’s do it again.

Taking the risk isn’t the hard part… dealing with the ripple effects of those risks is where the difficulty lies. Taking any risk means you have to be willing and able to fail. And because we’re defined by our failures as much as we are defined by our successes, these ripples are oftentimes our best moments to learn, reassess, and rebound. You simply cannot prepare for everything, and I think success is also measured by our ability to pivot and acclimate to our current situation.

So yes… I would say Self-belief and confidence were a big part of why I was willing to take risks. I always had a plan B and a plan C… and even if those blew up, I would be determined to find a plan D. Being able to plan is a huge skillset to have, but being able to react is just as important.

Let me also make something very clear. Success takes time. Sometimes YEARS! And even when you have reached your goals, you’ll want to keep going and strive to accomplish more. There have been so many individuals who I’ve worked with who are frustrated because they haven’t found success despite grinding for years. My story spans over 20 years, and I can confidently say that 12 of those years were grinding, sacrificing, and hard work with very little in return.

However, I call back to “Journey before Destination”. How you carried yourself on the path to success will be far more important to the world than what you ultimately accomplished.

Jennifer Graham

The ebb and flow of Marcus’ career isn’t optional once you have a family. You don’t get to pretend the swings won’t land somewhere. It’s part of the deal, and Marcus learned to live with it, to adjust, to keep moving without pretending it was easy.

I wanted to make the support structure real, not implied. So I reached out to Jen and James for first-hand insight, something they’d never offered before. It mattered to hear it from the people who absorbed the late nights, the pivots, the uncertainty. To get both sides of the story, and let everyone in that house have a voice.

Jen, you and Marcus have been together for two decades. Could you offer some insight regarding how his motivation to achieve dreams has changed, if it has?

I wouldn’t say that Marcus’ motivation to achieve his dreams have changed over time. He’s always been extremely motivated and passionate about the things that he cares about whether it was Quake, shoutcasting, Twitch, the content creators. As his dreams have evolved, his focus has changed perhaps, but he has always been someone who gives 100% x10 to whatever challenge he chooses to tackle.

You’ve had to move often, and Marcus has had low job security in the past while being in that space of trying to make his dreams a reality. How did this affect you and your family?

As someone who was raised by a single dad most of my childhood and spent a lot of time moving around often, neither of those things really bothered me and instead made me very adaptable to whatever situation was placed in front of me. While at times, moving away from familiar things - family and friends especially - was hard, we’ve always just made the best of things. It’s not like we were not aware of any of the challenges a move or job change could bring. We take a lot of time and discussion before coming to any major life decisions, but if it feels right, we’ll usually take the leap. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but without taking some risks, there also would not be any rewards.

As far as how it has affected James, we have always tried to make things as normal and easily adaptable for him. We keep communication lines open, keep him informed, ask his opinions and feelings, and if a problem comes up, we come together as a family to solve it. He has had a fairly unconventional childhood, but we have always tried to keep it as well rounded as possible and James seems to appreciate all the different experiences he has had through his life so far.

Our greatest lesson as a couple and family has been communication. As long as we effectively communicate with each other, I feel we can do and tackle anything in our path.

James came into the picture, and suddenly there were 3 mouths to feed, not 2. How did this change Marcus’ drive? Was he more cautious versus the mindset of a fearless couple out to conquer the world?

We found out we were pregnant about six weeks after our move to Los Angeles in 2005. I don’t think either Marcus or I were ready for that news right then. We had been married for less than a year, had just moved to Los Angeles, and while we had been preparing to start on expanding our family, we hadn’t been expecting it to happen quite that fast!

We had to quickly settle into our new roles of expectant parents while juggling trying to find our feet in a new city and, for Marcus, his new job at GGL. Those years in Los Angeles were pretty rough on both of us, but it taught us a lot about how strong we can be together as a unit working together.

I think becoming parents made us more determined to build and provide a secure base for our son, but we also wanted to continue to lead him by example to not be scared to take those chances to reach for your dreams.

[pauses to reflect a bit]

I honestly don’t know what is in our future, but as long as we confront it as we always have, together, then I’m sure we will conquer whatever Life throws our way. Beyond the knowledge that the only person I would want to travel this journey with is Marcus, not much in our life has gone according to any sort of a plan. It has been an incredible roller coaster of an adventure so far, but I do not regret any of it at all.

Out of all those ups and downs, which part tested your strength the most?

We’ve definitely had our ups and downs over the past couple decades, but I would have to say the toughest situation was probably the year of 2008 through 2009, as a whole. James was two, going on three then, that was also the year Marcus left GGL and went to work for CGS full-time, and then everything came crashing down at the end of the year with the financial crisis and CGS closing its doors.

As parents of a toddler and on unemployment, living in one of the costlier cities in the US, it was really rough for us. We tried sticking it out for a couple months while Marcus tried to find another job in the Los Angeles area, but we finally had to make the decision that it would be more cost effective for us to move back to Nebraska, where we still owned a house and the cost of living was a lot lower, and we both had potential job prospects and family there to help us out.

While making that choice was a huge blow, ultimately, it was the right decision for us as a family and a couple. We learned so much about ourselves, us as a couple, and as parents that year. It made us so much stronger as a unit having gone through that together.

The happiest moment?

I’m always so proud of my husband’s career achievements. I don’t know if I can name the happiest situation because every time he is recognized for his contributions, whether it’s the Lifetime Achievement in Esports or being inducted in the ESI Hall of Fame or an article or interview highlighting his career…

My heart blooms with so much pride and happiness that all of his hard work, heart and passion that he puts in is being acknowledged.

Then, a long pause. Jen wanted to take a moment to speak on what Marcus means to her.

He’s my very best friend and partner, an incredible father and husband. I have always been very impressed with Marcus’ work ethic and passion when it comes to the things he cares about. I know he will continue to champion those causes, and to help and support those around him to achieve their dreams, too.

I’ve never met anyone with as much heart as Marcus, and I hope that we’ve raised our son to have that same heart, empathy, and passion for Life.

James Graham

Your dad’s a large figurehead within the gaming industry. He’s an established name across the entire esports landscape; what do you think of that?

I personally believe it’s fantastic. It’s quite inspiring to see my dad become a great figure in the esports community, and I do aspire to be like him in the future. I’ve always enjoyed gaming, and the community surrounding it, especially because of the connections people have with others.

I’ve heard his story, and honestly, it’s impressive how much time and effort he puts into his work, he’s always super motivated, and he never gives up. I always thought that he’s also just a great leader overall, especially when working with his team.

You’ve grown up surrounded by gaming, even esports, your whole life. What’s your earliest memory of that?

I usually have a terrible memory, but some of the earliest memories I have was when I first played StarCraft 2. I knew I watched my dad play a lot, and I wanted to try it, so I started with Zerg, and it was fun.

I’ve always been enthralled by gaming, and a lot of it is because of its presence today. Since I first played StarCraft, it’s captured a lot of what I enjoy in games, especially now when I can go back and watch videos of my dad’s old streams and casts.

Replaying memories has been a big part of my life because of this.

What’s your current dream, right now? What path do you want to take?

I don’t really have much of a current ambition in life I guess. I’ve always wanted to get into something either in Esports, engineering, or something of the sort.

Engineering just fascinates me, along with science, it’s great being able to discover things about this world. I’ve always thought that being able to understand just about everything was cool. Science just as a topic is fascinating though because we don’t know everything, and our goal is to pretty much learn what we can.

Over the years I’ve been just trying to find something that fully interests me though, and although I’ve not exactly become invested in much to the point of I want to do it for the rest of my life, I think I’m becoming more comfortable with my options.

Talk to me about moving to California. What were the pros and cons of that?

I really enjoyed the food. There’s a lot that was great there, and some of the people, especially ones from my dad’s workplace were fantastic. It’s definitely not my style, and I’ve never been that much of a city person. Cities are usually so busy and bustling, and it really rubs me the wrong way, I guess.

I will say that cities do have their benefits, as mentioned before, the food is just fantastic. I also just didn’t go out a whole lot in the city, mainly because sometimes, it could get very dirty.

Summers also kind of sucked, but overall, I don’t think I’d trade it away for another experience.

Then, you moved back to Nebraska.

I for sure prefer Nebraska. It’s just my home at this point, a lot of family friends are here, and family is nearby. It’s also where I’ve just met a lot of my friends.

Everything’s all so spread out too, and it’s been nice to not have to think about a whole lot. Nebraska is just easier to navigate as well, at least in my opinion.

Things are a lot more organized, and there’s also just a lot more space in Nebraska, both in where we live and just the general area. I also think it’s just more relaxed too.

You have the whole world as your stage and you’re given an opportunity to praise your parents. What do you say?

If I had to praise my parents? I really wouldn’t know what to say. I love them both, and they’ve been great at giving me that push I need to move. It’s just amazing how great they’ve been, and I really wouldn’t change anything about them.

They’ve just been really good at supporting me, and themselves, and I think they’re just great mentors. I really love them.

It was then time to pose final question to Marcus. What did this all really mean to him?

The Legacy

Years from now, when you’re no longer in the room and your name still comes up, what do you hope it means to the people saying it?

This shouldn’t be such a difficult question to answer… but it is.

I think we all want to leave behind a worthwhile and substantial legacy, but we often don’t get a chance to choose what that legacy may be. So I think it boils down to what I think people will remember me by.

And that’s for having an unbridled passion and belief when it came to things like esports and livestreaming. These are two things that I’ve put a better part of half of my life into, and two things that I hope people reference as a party of my legacy. I want to know that I’ve made a difference in helping Eesports and livestreaming get to where they are today. I want people to know about the sacrifices I’ve made because I had a stonewalled belief that every minute of work was worth it.

I mostly want people to look back and use me as an example to say, “If you have a dream, just keep going for it… even if it means falling down and getting back up over and over again”. What we achieve while chasing that dream is often times more rewarding than the dream itself. One of my favorite book series of all time, The Stormlight Archive (by Nebraska native Brandon Sanderson) has drastically driven my perspective on this.

Journey before Destination

By this fantasy book’s definition [Way of Kings], the saying “Journey before Destination” means there are always several ways to achieve a goal, failure is preferable to winning through unjust means, and protecting ten innocents is not worth killing one. In the end, all men die, and how you lived will be far more important to the world than what you accomplished.

It might seem odd that I use the basis for a fantasy book to help shape my life and direction, but it just resonates with me so much. I look back on my journey and I confidently feel that people will remember how I lived and carried myself versus what I accomplished… and that’s the best feeling in the world. Knowing I’ve been able to touch the lives of people in this world is one of the best legacies that one can leave behind.

When I’m gone, I hope people fondly remember my passion, excitement, dedication, and sacrifice throughout my career, and then say, “Oh, yeah, he was one of the first commentators/livestreamers/etc.”

I reached out to Brandon Sanderson himself, author of The Stormlight Archive, to find out what the phrase’s inspiration was:

The words Journey before Destination became my mantra while writing the book [Way of Kings]. I had begun to focus too much on results—on getting the novel finished—and not on making certain each step along the way was worth reading. I turned it into the story’s own theme, because the more I’ve found myself focusing on it, the better my life became.

I hope it will help readers keep their attention on making each day of life worthy in some way, and not abandon who they should be right now in order to achieve some distant goal that may, or may not, be worth such sacrifice.

Only the Beginning

Twenty-five years in, he’s still working like it can all disappear.

All of it traces back to a small act of faith on a cold Christmas morning in 1989. His parents gave him room to explore, to follow a curiosity that didn’t come with instructions or guarantees.

As the project winds down, Marcus and I both feel the weight of time. We started this in 2017. Different cities. Different lives. The years in between left their marks on both of us.

I ask if there’s anything he wants to fix before we call it done.

He grins, takes a sip of his coffee, and nods as his mind drifts somewhere else.

A pause—long enough to mean something.

Then he looks back up, focused again, and says:

I’m realizing what this really should be, is a book. I’m not even 5% in.

Special Thanks

My thanks to Seba Jun’s family, family, and contributors for their trust and support in bringing this piece to life.

• Marcus D

• Substantial

• Shing02

• Nao Tokui

• Funky DL

• DJ Ryow

A very special thanks to Pase Rock, whose invaluable commentary appears throughout.

First published in May 2019, this project grew into a long-form biographical study of one of music’s most distinctive, cult-like followings. Written over the course of two years and countless revisions, it is intended to present an objective, rigorously fact-checked, source-driven account of the career arc of the artist we know and love as Nujabes.

Since its initial release, the work has been plagiarized and reproduced on multiple occasions without proper credit. If you incorporate any portion of this work into your content, please provide appropriate attribution and include a link to the original source (this page).

This piece is published with no intention of monetization. It is offered as an evergreen archive, in respect and gratitude to the family and friends who made it possible.

Guinness Records and Sweet Sticky Thing

There is a record shop in Shibuya that no longer exists.

Its owner pressed bootleg remixes of Nas and slipped them into the bins next to the originals. People would dig through the Nas section, stumble on this strange record, and think—who is Nujabes? They didn’t know it was the guy behind the counter.

The man behind that name was Seba Jun. Record store owner, producer, and a student of hip-hop before either of those.

Jun grew up in eastern Tokyo, Japan. Drawn to music from a young age, he went on to own Guinness Records in Shibuya, investing himself in the business side of music. The shop was closed in 2011, a year after Jun’s passing.

Pase Rock, one of Jun’s closest friends, on the ecosystem of Tokyo record shops at the time:

So, as you may know, each record shop in Japan has [had] its own sort of style and flavor.

They’re all gone now, but back then it was an identity for each store, and you went to each store for whatever sort of music they had. Jun’s shop was, for lack of a better term, the underground hip-hop spot.

His store leaned more towards stuff you’d sample, and underground hip-hop. Soul, jazz, lots of stuff like that. 60% underground hip-hop, 40% other.

Jun didn’t really like the commercial hip-hop, so if it wasn’t like DJ Premier, Pete Rock, or Five Deez, he wasn’t with it.

While working at his record shop, Jun eventually dove into the world of production, making his own beats. Learning the ropes of how they were crafted, Jun went on to remix Nas’ One Love off Illmatic, pressing it on wax through Top Graphicers in 1998, and mixing it in with the popular records at the time to gain traction for his moniker (Dimention [sic] Ball at the time)—a technique heralded as a ‘crazy hustle’ by Pase:

I think he [Nujabes] did a Nas bootleg of One Love, that’s what his brother told me.

He would then take that, press it onto vinyl, then throw it in with the Nas bin, so people would be looking for Nas, who was one of the top artists at the time, and they would stumble upon this strange record and think “Who is Nujabes?” not knowing it was the actual owner of the store.

Crazy hustle. Tokyo is tens of millions of people, so lots of customers moving through the shop, and he did really well. I learned the hustle from him.

That same year, a 36-track mixtape—18 A-side, 18 B-side—called Sweet Sticky Thing ~Reload All Good Music From Old To The New~ came out through Hyde Out Recordings (now Hydeout Productions, a sister company). The title nods to Ohio Players’ track of the same name off their classic album Honey.

The cassette is a grail among underground hip-hop collectors; limited-run copies surface on Discogs and Yahoo Japan once or twice a year at most, and the prices confirm the scarcity. Cassette-only, local-only. It was the first full-length release under the name Nujabes.

Around this same period, Jun began collaborating with L-Universe, known today as Verbal, and affiliated with his wife Yoon through their AMBUSH line. Marcus D on the connection:

L-Universe is Verbal. Verbal is a ridiculously huge pop star.

A lot of people don’t know this.

I actually didn’t know this myself until I flew back to Seattle and met up with my friend, and showed him a picture and said ‘I got a picture with L-Universe, he collaborated with Jun’ and my friend was like ‘Yo, that’s Verbal!’

Creating To This Union A Sun Was Born with Substantial

Stanley "Substantial" Robinson is a musician, activist, community organizer, and one half of Bop Alloy. He has been a student of hip-hop for over two decades. The connection started with a phone call that Stan almost hung up on:

I met Jun through a friend in college. That friend later went on to become a rapper that people would come to know later as Sphere Of Influence. When my friend went back home to Japan, he got a gig at Jun’s record store. This was before anyone knew who “Nujabes” was.

Jun hit up my friend and asked him if there’s any rappers in New York at the time worth checking out, and my homeboy told Jun to listen to me.

My friend went on to play a mixtape that was made in school, called Disc 1, which happened to have me on it. Next thing you know, Jun calls me up out of the blue.

I thought it was a prank call. The man on the other end of the phone had a really thick accent, and I’ve got a bunch of friends which are clowns [pranksters], so I just thought it was one of my friends.

Luckily, I didn’t hang up, and I took him seriously. He requested I send him more stuff, and I sent him more of my material. After he heard it, he sent me some beats back. This was ’99. Ended up signing a contract with him shortly after, and in ’00 he flew me out to Japan for a month. That was the first time meeting him in-person. That’s when we started working on To This Union a Sun Was Born.

That trip was the foundation. They made music together for years after. Stan eventually returned to Tokyo to record Blessing It, the opening track on Metaphorical Music.

That session came later. The initial stuff with my debut album was recorded in, I want to say January of 2000? Then when I went back out there [Tokyo] to record Blessing It, I also recorded a few other tracks that were unreleased, as well as Eclipse.

The volume of material between them sits somewhere between 30 and 40 tracks, with roughly half intended to stay unreleased. They argued. They came back. That was the shape of it.

Yeah, man; there’s basically enough for an album and an EP. I think it’s safe to say we made between 30 and 40 songs.

…

It is easy for us to remember the positive, or the easy times; the smiles and laughs. I shed tears in front of that man [Jun]. We had fallouts, real fallouts, raising our voices at each other, but we made sure to come back around and break bread after.

I feel like that’s a full relationship; the good and bad. The people who I love the most, am the closest to, and have had the most powerful experiences with, it wasn’t just one-sided, or one way all the time. It was a spectrum of emotions, and I’m glad I had all the experiences with him. From the good, to the not-so-good.

The music mattered. What kept them coming back to each other was simpler. Jun folded Stan into his daily life in Tokyo, and Stan let him. Over time, Stan noticed something in the culture around him:

I liked how humble folks were about things they knew they could do well, but there wasn’t much bragging. If someone said they could do something, that meant they could do it very well.

…

That was a major takeaway for me. You can be great and humble at the same time.

Jun loved to eat. Curry especially. When he found a spot he liked, he brought his people there until it became ritual. Stan:

Jun was a huge foodie; anytime he’d find a good spot to eat at—he loved curry—there was this place, this restaurant that we’d always go, and it was called Bowery Kitchen. We loved that spot; think we hit it up twice a week.

In 2002, Jun released Ristorante Nujabes / Good Music Cuisine: Makin’ Good Beats Like Cookin’ Good Foods, a mixtape dressed in Italian culinary aesthetics, layered with smooth instrumentals. The title tells you everything about where his head was at. The kitchen and the studio were the same room.

Stan:

When you hear his music, you hear parts of the man himself, in all different places. There are certain beats where you can hear the happiness, the sadness, others just relaxing, some chaotic.

He was a curator long before he was a producer, and he never stopped being one. The record shop trained the instinct: sift through everything, keep only what holds up, sequence it so the room has a feel. That instinct traveled from the bins at Guinness Records to the MPC, from the MPC to the collaborators he chose, from the collaborators to the final tracklist. Every stage was curation. Production came last, not first. Academics have names for this. Jun would have called it Tuesday.

Stan, on what Jun’s passing still feels like—not as a fan discovering an artist through a YouTube algorithm, but as someone who sat across from him at Bowery Kitchen:

I guess for me, it’s not this dream thing. It’s still a very real thing. My wife, which Eclipse is about, who I’ve been with for 20 years, she got to meet him in my second trip.

When someone close to you—because obviously I don’t see Pase or Funky DL or Shingo often—to have somebody next to me, on a regular basis in my life, someone who has seen the challenges we faced and how we overcame those challenges together, it makes it that much more real for me.

Tracking Down Funky DL

Somewhere in the late 90’s, a record shop in Shibuya kept placing orders for the same UK artist’s vinyl. Over and over. A year and a half of consistent imports. The artist was Funky DL, a preservationist of jazz-hop who had been releasing records out of the British underground for years, pressing vinyl and shipping it globally through UK exporters.

The shop doing the importing was Guinness Records. Its owner kept reordering.

He was buying my stuff for about a year and a half, and it just so happened that I decided to include my cell number on one of my releases.

He called me, this was in ’99, he called me and explained who he was, what his idea was, and how he just started producing and really liked my style. He actually had just been trying to reach out to me way before that, he said.

I was doing releases with Utmost Records, and every time that he would get a hold of someone, apparently they said they would forward the information to me, the detail and whatnot, but they never did, so it took a while to connect the two of us. He called me in ’99 as I mentioned, and we contacted each other just like that, on my cell phone.

No label introductions. No email threads with publicists. Jun found a cell number printed on a vinyl sleeve and called it. That was how he connected with artists overseas: hear something worth hearing, find the person who made it, call them. The two cut 10 songs together, 5 on the first trip to Tokyo, 5 the following year. Among them: Tuesday Evening, a collaboration with Verbal, a then-unknown Japanese MC. Two decades later, it remains unreleased.

The last time I heard that song, it was played by Verbal at a Nujabes tribute show in a club. The thing about Nujabes was that he was very selective in what would be released, even though he’d record a lot of songs.

Just about how he felt about the recording at the time, that’s what dictated the recordings being released, or shelved.

Beyond the music, what DL learned from Jun was the business. How the Japanese music market worked from the inside. Jun ran a shop. He watched what moved and what sat on the shelf. He understood presentation as product.

As an owner of a vinyl shop, Jun knew how to move music very well, and kept up with trends daily to stay ahead of competitors, researching what was hot or not.

That instinct extended into how he advised other artists. Naming, packaging, positioning. Jun saw the full picture; the same eye that sequenced a record bin sequenced an album rollout. DL, on advice he has carried for two decades:

He taught me more about presentation, and food for thought about album aesthetics. … For example, we did an album called the Latin Love Story. … So, I did that album, and followed it up with Latin Love Story: Volume 2.

Jun said something like: “DL, it’s not the best idea to name things in succession, such as Volume 1, Volume 2, or Remix. These are songs you’ve already recorded, so put a new spin onto it. Instead of calling it Latin Love Story: Volume 2, why not call it Music from Naphta?”

Naphta is my first name. He mentioned this would intrigue the Japanese market, as they would be unaware of what “Naphta” was. A place, a person, a thing? It would spark interest. Those were kinds of things he would give me advice and insight on.

This is not production advice. This is brand strategy delivered over a phone call in 1999, years before anyone in independent hip-hop was thinking about naming conventions as market positioning. MF DOOM ran the same playbook with Mm..Food and Born Like This—titles that rewarded the initiated and intrigued everyone else—but Jun was applying that logic from inside a Shibuya record shop half a decade earlier, in a market where the bin your album landed in mattered more than a review.

The best shops in Tokyo didn't explain themselves; their curation was the brand. Jun understood that mystery generates pull, and specificity generates identity, and the two together generate the kind of curiosity that makes someone reach into a record bin and pick up something they have never heard of. The Nas bootleg hustle and the "Music from Naphta" advice are the same instinct at different altitudes.

Jun also thought carefully about how music traveled across languages. What connected when the words themselves didn’t land. DL, recounting a conversation with Takumi Koizumi, Jun's tour manager and Hydeout's label manager:

Speaking with Jun and his manager Takumi, I recall a time where we were talking about Slick Rick’s album, Children Story. He said DL, the audience in Japan may not know what you’re rhyming about, but they may enjoy the sound.

…

Even someone in Japan who doesn’t speak English would probably know the word “children” or “child” and know the word “story” and have a sort of idea for what the album would be speaking on or talking about.

After Jun’s passing, DL was close to the process of finishing Spiritual State, the posthumous release that came out in December 2011. He saw firsthand what happens when the only person who knew the intended sounds is gone.

DL still makes jazz-hop. The lessons travel with him. About naming. About framing. About never forgetting that someone is on the other side of the counter, deciding in three seconds whether to pick up what you made or keep walking.

Shing02 and the Luv(sic) Hexalogy

The beat that became one of the most recognized in Jun’s catalog was turned down by the first person who heard it.

The Luv(sic) hexalogy is a six-part series spanning nearly 15 years. There is nothing else quite like it; not in Japanese hip-hop, not in hip-hop period. Shingo “Shing02” Annen rapped on every installment. The original beat, though, was pitched to Pase first.

The original Luv(sic) beat which people know Shing02 for rapping over, was originally for me, I started to record a song for it but I just didn’t really like it so I turned it down and he offered it to Shingo.

Years later, I asked Pase whether he still felt the same way about it.

Yeah for the most part. There is a different appreciation for it now though. I understand Shing02 doing Luv Sic and what Jun was going for. After I heard that song the beat made more sense to me. I think Shingo just did it justice. I wouldn’t have made the song come to life the same way he did. My biggest beef with Jun were his drums, they were so dry at the time. I didn’t like his drum sounds back then. That, and him making beats perfectly on time.

They were exactly perfect, there was no swing in his hi-hats. And for Fat Jon and I, we were very rigid about our “rules” for beats. Stiff hi hats with no swing was like a cardinal sin. But I was young, naive and not very open minded. Jun kinda helped get me out of that. He expanded my horizons a lot to say the least.

Jun’s stubbornness about drum programming became a feature once the right voice landed on it. Shingo heard what the beat was asking for, which wasn’t swing but stillness. Jun knew the beat was right. He just needed the right person to prove it.

When the hexalogy was finally pressed to vinyl, Shingo wrote the liner notes himself. The full arc, what each part meant, and what love does to a person who takes it seriously:

We all know that love can be sickening. That true love, it turns your world upside down, a feeling that can transform your constitution and render you helpless.

…

Love defies formula, it borders on insanity and spirituality, No matter how slim the chances, once you meet the love of your life, you might just end up creating something that may outlast your lifetime…

If you have listened to any part of Luv(sic), you know the scratching. Dense, layered, riding on top of the beat like a second voice. DJ friends including SPIN MASTER A-1 contributed across the series. Shingo, on why it was non-negotiable:

The importance of the scratch DJ to the entire Luv(sic) series cannot be overstated.

It was ingrained on me from early on that having a good scratch to a rap song is key, so I took the time to select the samples from various sources.

Of course we only used vinyl records without exceptions, which enhances the analog aesthetic that Nujabes adhered to.

I reached out to Shingo for additional comment. He declined, respectfully. Everything he needed to say, he said through the music.

He hopes people keep listening.

Exploring Music and Self with Nao Tokui

Summer, 2001. A five-day intensive on algorithms and techniques for signal and sound processing, built around Max/MSP. The Digital Signal Processing Workshop of Japan. Nao Tokui took an empty seat next to a stranger.

If I remember correctly, it was the last lecture session in the morning of the first day of the workshop. I knew very few people then, so I took a random empty seat.

Right next to me, there was a quiet/self-possessed guy, who looked like a few years older than me. After the lecture, we started chatting somehow and introducing ourselves to each other.

He said, “I make hip-hop tracks.”

That was the whole introduction. Most producers would have opened with credits, a discography, a pitch. Jun announced himself the way a cook announces himself: by what he makes, not what he has made. After a few sessions, Nao invited Jun to talk music. Jun heard snippets of Nao’s upcoming album Mind The Gap, wanted in, and ended up credited on the record for programming support. What came out of their studio time together was Rotary Park, the most experimental track in Jun’s catalog. Not particularly close.

They returned to Tokyo after the workshop and kept going. The sessions drifted away from songs and toward something closer to research. Sampling, sequencing, granular synthesis, bending sounds until they broke. Nao:

During our studio time, we tested many different ideas on mainly sampling, sequencing and complex sound effects using granular synthesis and such.

Those snippets of ideas/half-made drum patterns/sound effects must be somewhere in his hard drives, but I believe Rotary Park was the only track we managed to finish.

I think we spent too much time on the exploration of new ideas, rather than composing actual music, which I sincerely regret…

A computer scientist and a record store owner, pulling sound apart in the same room to see what was inside it. One song finished. Dozens of fragments on hard drives. Nao’s regret says everything about who Jun was in the studio: he didn’t want to finish things; he wanted to find things. The destination was never the track. It was the moment inside the process where something sounded like nothing he had heard before.

The friendship outlasted the session. The ideas they explored together would quietly inform everything Jun made after.

Bliss, to some.

The Methodology Behind Metaphorical Music

Everything up to this point—every record shop hustle and overseas phone call and collaboration stitched together across time zones—was preamble.

Metaphorical Music arrived in August 2003, a few months after Hydeout Productions FIRST COLLECTION, dropping in the middle of a seismic shift in hip-hop. Gangsta rap was losing its grip. Kanye West’s The College Dropout was months away from redrawing the entire landscape; producers were about to become as famous as the artists rapping over their beats. In the middle of all that, Jun quietly released a 62-minute jazz-hop album that almost nobody outside of Tokyo heard on arrival. International recognition came later. Carried on the back of an anime that hadn’t yet aired.

Recorded and mixed primarily at Park Avenue Studio, nearly every track carries its own following now, many of them propelled into wider consciousness by Samurai Champloo.

Marcus D, on a misconception that persists to this day:

Beat Laments the World is always mistaken for the Samurai Champloo ending. They’re essentially the same, but the beat was reworked/interpolated for the anime. Uyama played the piano riff on the original.

If you listen to Beat Laments the World, it sounds similar to how the original record sounds, and also has a part of Pase’s acappella in it from Blessin’ It.

On the other hand, Shiki no Uta is smoother. The drums are toned down, the filtered/synth bass was cleaned up and changed etc., and it’s just overall more accommodating for a vocalist.

Less raw.

Something changed after Jun worked alongside Fat Jon on the Samurai Champloo soundtrack. You can hear it in the mixes, the arrangements, the way the air moves around the drums. Pase:

I would say that four people specifically: Nao Tokui, Uyama Hiroto, Fat Jon and Monorisick [DJ Deckstream], contributed a lot to shaping Nujabes’ sound.

Among heads, Metaphorical Music earned the rarest designation: a record that made its own bin. It locked a vibe that other producers would spend years chasing and never quite reach. Marcus, on how it was built:

From what I know he used an MPC2000XL, and other hardware. He also used Pro Tools

…

He sampled strictly from vinyl as far as I know, and had/still has an expansive collection. I was lucky enough to inherit one of his turntables from Guinness Records. It’s an old Technics SL-1200MK3 that’s on its last legs, but I still use it every day when I make music.

Jun himself cited Steinberg Cubase VST as his sequencer in a 2003 interview with Sound & Recording Magazine. The hardware was consistent regardless: MPC2000XL for sampling, SL-1200MK3 turntables for digging. The same way a game’s visual identity is inseparable from its engine—GoldSrc gave Half-Life that specific feeling of weight no other shooter could replicate—Jun’s sound was inseparable from the specific chain of machines he pushed audio through. Change the MPC and you change the music.

Three pages from that same magazine give a rare look at the literal setup used to craft both this album and portions of the Samurai Champloo OSTs.

On the second page, two SL-1200MK3 turntables are visible. Marcus owns one of them now. Passed down.

The first Hydeout Collection, a 14-track project with Monorisick (DJ Deckstream) and L-Universe, alongside Metaphorical Music, was the inflection point. The cult formed here. What carried Jun’s name across oceans wasn’t a marketing campaign or a label push.

It was an anime about three wanderers looking for a man called the Sunflower Samurai.

Samurai Champloo: Mixing Ancient Japanese Traditions with Hip-Hop

Samurai Champloo took Japan's Edo period (1603-1868) and scored it with hip-hop.

An anachronistic gamble from Shinichiro Watanabe, the Kyoto-born director who had already wired jazz into a space opera with Cowboy Bebop. Hip-hop was new territory for him. From the director:

The show is set during the Edo era some 60 years after the confusion of civil war lifted. But forget the historical details. Think of it basically like some period in time 60 years after the end of a war.

Watanabe wasn’t a hip-hop head. He didn’t need to be. What he understood was that music could completely redefine a setting; he had already proved it with Bebop. The gamble with Champloo was whether the collision between Edo-period Japan and 90’s hip-hop would feel inevitable or forced. It felt inevitable.

Coming roughly six years after Bebop, Samurai Champloo became the entry point for an entire generation of listeners who didn’t yet know they were looking for this sound.

The show’s influence on what the internet now calls “lo-fi” is real, if frequently misread.

The term has become shorthand for a hyperbolic revival of traditional low-fidelity ideals: downtempo instrumental beats, often with a Japanese aesthetic for samples or accompanying visuals lifted from anime or Japan during the 80’s and 90’s.

Marcus:

Well, there’s lo-fi and then there’s “lo-fi”… [laughs]

The people who say Nujabes influenced the current wave of lo-fi definitely aren’t wrong, but I think there’s some misinterpretation.

I obviously can’t speak for him, but I think Nujabes would have been making something entirely different if he were still alive. Most of his close friends say that he was transitioning into house music, which you can hear in “World’s End Rhapsody” on Modal Soul and a number of other experimental tracks…so I don’t really see the connect between his music and finger drumming over YouTube rips of old jazz songs, which I’m not saying all lo-fi is, but yeah.

On the other hand, music is self-expression, and I know for a fact that’s something he stood for. Expression and creativity are things the lo-fi scene actively cultivates and nurtures from what I’ve seen.

It’s allowed for people to break out of the box of traditional hip hop beats and ignore a lot of the rules that hip hop purists elitists put on them.

When I was coming up, there was always some old head telling me I wasn’t doing it right because of an unwritten set of rules I had to adhere to. I haven’t seen any of that with lo-fi, which is a positive thing. I dig that aspect of it.

Pase, who was there when Jun was making the music that would eventually be called "lo-fi" by people who weren’t, on what the term actually meant before anyone romanticized it:

An SP-1200, MPC, they each have a specific sound to the machine. Combine that with sampling from vinyl and no proper mix on the song, Voila! You get “lo-fi.” Record crackle and whatnot. So, it wasn’t necessarily the artists trying to make their stuff sound dirty, grimy, lo-fi. At the time, that’s what was available and learning how to mix you probably had to go to school for. These were complete do it yourself times. If you don’t have a proper engineer to mix your songs then it’s going to sound lo-fi, or rather, what they call lo-fi now.

…

But in the hip-hop sense, I think you’d have to look at the Anticon movement and a whole lot of west coast hip hop movements and instrumental hip hop that would probably be considered “lo-fi” now.

…

Early Diplo, Jel, Odd Nosdam and RJD2 come to mind. DJ Shadow’s albums were all great and probably a better example of well mixed “Nujabes style” music, for lack of a better term. Ninja Tune and Mo Wax records etc. DJ Krush was the king of this style of music especially from a Japanese standpoint. I say all that to say there are a lot of great examples of where “lo-fi” came from than just Nujabes or Dilla.

…

It’s like putting an Instagram filter on a photo or something but just with audio, I get it. It’s nostalgia of a time gone by. I think it probably feels romantic in a way if you weren’t alive in 1994 or 1997 and I realize that’s just the way life is, things go in cycles. But it’s not 1997 anymore and I’m not big on nostalgia. I lived through it, I was there. I don’t want to go backwards so to speak (musically).

It doesn’t serve me or my life in any way. So “lo-fi” is probably just not for me. That being said, I haven’t listened at all so maybe I’m just ignorant and am missing out!

Jun's sound was lo-fi because the tools were lo-fi; the texture was a byproduct of the process, not the point. When the texture becomes the point—when you sample the aesthetic without the methodology underneath it—you get the filter without the photo. It happens everywhere. E

sports broadcasts that copy OGN's production template without understanding why the Korean format worked. Discord servers that replicate the channel architecture of a successful community without knowing what made people stay. Bedroom producers who approximate a dead man's surface because the surface is all that survived the compression algorithm.

The pattern is always the same: the infrastructure gets mistaken for the ornament, and what gets reproduced is everything except the thing that mattered.

Rising up a few years before SoundCloud rap got on its feet, the lo-fi movement produced a generation of bedroom producers who latched onto the aesthetic, often attributing their interest to Samurai Champloo and its soundtrack. The sound branched into sub-genres with their own names and audiences: chill-hop, chillwave, study beats, and more, each drifting further from the trunk.

Most of the background music heard between sequences, though, was produced by Shinji “Tsutchie” Tsuchida, not Nujabes. The assumption that Jun scored the majority of the anime is widespread and wrong.

The complete Samurai Champloo soundtrack spans four releases—Departure, Impression, Masta, and Playlist—not just the two collaborative projects between Nujabes and Fat Jon. Several tracks from the anime don’t appear on any of them.

Tsutchie, on how the whole thing started. A phone call from Watanabe that set off a chain reaction, eventually reaching Jun through Takumi Koizumi, who then brought Fat Jon into the fold:

One day, I received an unexpected call from anime director Shinichiro Watanabe. He told me he was working on the production of a crossover historical anime series set in Edo period, which combined Samurai and Hip-hop. Then he added “I need someone to take care of the soundtrack.”

The show worked because Watanabe’s direction was precise enough to make two fundamentally different things feel like they had always belonged together. Themes of race acceptance and determination through common interest gave the story a personal dimension that most anime in this lane never reaches for.

Mladen over at The Find Mag captured the tension around the show’s legacy:

The influence of these four mostly unknown artists on the the new batch of young beat-makers is palpable, many of whom will admit that Samurai Champloo was their first memorable interaction with hip hop. In this case for anyone who has watched the influx from the outside, it’s clear that the series has led to an over-inflation of the importance of the four acts mentioned, to the point where the music itself is perhaps no longer judged on its own merits but through a lens of devotion and nostalgia.

Whether or not they’re ‘real’ hip hop fans is a ridiculous point to argue, as we’ve all had our different entry-points to this music, but the influx of an enthusiastic and international youngsters into the scene has been nothing but positive for hip hop overall.

The show is 15 years old and still pulls people in.

More often than not, the thing that keeps them there—the thing they search for after the credits roll—is the music.

The Era of Modal Soul

If Metaphorical Music was the announcement, Modal Soul was the proof.

The dividing line is audible. Something shifted in how Jun approached production after working alongside Fat Jon for the Champloo soundtrack; cleaner mixes, smoother currents, more air in the rooms. People close to him have consistently pointed to this period as the hinge.

Early Jun and late Jun. Two eras, same person.

Pase:

The Samurai Champloo deal came in around the same time; I’m not 100% sure about the details regarding that, I would have to check with Fat Jon, but I think that [the trip and time in the studio] is why that ended up happening. They were doing that project together, so they ended up in the studio together for a little while.

You get a different Nujabes after that, in my opinion.

…

To me, it’s like night and day. After that period, his [Nujabes’] music got way better in my opinion.

…

His music got a lot more musical especially when he started to collaborate with Uyama Hiroto. Hiroto worked very closely with Jun for years. A lot of Modal Soul is Nujabes and Hiroto.

A lot of the later stuff is also if you pay attention. I love that era of his music when he started to incorporate Hiroto’s playing into his tracks. I’m a big Uyama Hiroto fan. The later trips I had with Jun he was starting to play more instruments, trumpet and flute, a lot of flute. Another Fat Jon influence I think.

The influence ran in both directions every time. Stan:

Jun was always digging for new music, and was a huge Dilla fan. He was also a big fan of Fat Jon. He started to play flute because he found out that Fat Jon played flute.

It’s that friendly competition. I would say that the greatest artists usually keep great company, and almost always are influenced by those they work closely with. … Both ways.

You can hear a difference in Jun’s music prior to working with me, and after. Same thing with when him and Funky DL collaborated.

Same thing with his collaboration with Fat Jon, especially—you can hear a lot of dance music feelings in his work, something Fat Jon was already doing before Nujabes had technically put something out. There is always an exchange, and even if we’re not talking Nujabes.

“Both ways.” Stan says it plainly. Jun’s version was different in scale. He didn’t absorb one collaborator and settle. He absorbed everyone’s, serially, over years, and each absorption changed the output in ways his collaborators could hear and name afterward. Pase heard it after Fat Jon. Stan heard it after himself. DL heard it after the naming conversations. Nao heard it after the Max/MSP experiments.

You can literally hear the before and after on the records. Most artists absorb influence invisibly; you have to take their word for it. Jun’s catalog is the receipt.

A show in Seoul, right after the release of Modal Soul, where Jun himself is playing a flute. A Japanese producer on a Korean stage, calling himself ordinary, in a country where the cultural exchange between those two nations carries weight that no Western journalist would think to name. Jun told the crowd:

If anybody knows, I came to Korea one time to DJ, but at that time you probably did not know me, and at that time I was maybe just with my first band with two or three people; [we were] mainly tourists.

I had one-two-three 12-inch released six years ago or something, so I was just… I am just an ordinary guy. [sic]

An ordinary guy doesn’t find the samples Jun found. The depth, the rarity, the sheer obscurity of what he dug up and flipped—this is the work of someone who spent more hours in crates than most producers spend in the studio. The most recognized sample in his catalog is I Miss You by Noriko Kose, tucked inside Reflection Eternal. Another, Tens (Calmaria) by Nana Caymmi, became a deep cut that heads across the globe spent collective hours tracing back to its source.

Modal Soul remains the crowd favorite. On the surface, it can sound like a continuation of Metaphorical Music. Lean in closer. The architecture is different. The rooms are bigger. The air moves differently.

Jun’s Last Album: Hydeout Productions 2nd Collections

By 2007, every album Jun released had been better than the one before it. Each one tighter, more open, more deliberate than the last. In November of that year, he put out what would be—though no one knew it yet—his final album.

Fourteen tracks. Eleven produced and mixed by Jun. The remaining three: Uyama Hiroto’s Waltz for Life Will Born and Windspeaks, alongside Emancipator’s With Rainy Eyes.

For years, the sixth track, Counting Stars, held the title of most viewed Nujabes song on YouTube. It was one of the earliest uploads of his music in the West, arriving on the tail end of the Samurai Champloo wave, and it stuck. People found it and stayed.

The sound had moved again. More serene. More atmospheric. Warmer than anything before it. It is also the project that confuses listeners most; depending on the track and the person hearing it, it evokes sadness, peace, guilt, or confidence. All four at once isn’t an uncommon answer.

The cover is unlike anything in his catalog. Not the work of an in-house or local artist; abstract, its warm tones shifting back and forth, painted by Cheryl McClure, an obscure artist out of Texas whose sole album art credit is this one. How Hydeout found her remains unknown.

After the release, Jun stepped away.

No public explanation. No announced return.

Then silence.

Jun’s Lasting Legacy

Twenty days after the fact, it was confirmed publicly that Jun Seba, the musician from Tokyo whom a global audience knew as Nujabes, had passed away. Attempts to resuscitate him at a hospital in Shibuya had failed.

The hip-hop world had already buried James “J Dilla” Yancey four years earlier. Now this.

Shingo wrote the following:

It has been announced that Jun Seba, aka Nujabes, Japanese hip-hop producer extraordinaire, passed away late February.

We deeply regret the loss of a unique talent and a close friend.

…

Even last week, I passed by his house and called him thinking he was still home.

…

Jun Seba will be dearly missed by his family, friends, colleagues, and fans worldwide.

Jun died at 36. His catalog is frozen at three albums, each better than the last. There is no decline to point to, no late-career pivot, no album that makes fans argue about when he lost it. Death does that. It seals a reputation in place. Dilla’s catalog got the same treatment. So did Big L’s, and Big Pun’s, and every artist whose work stopped before the dropoff could set in.

The question is whether the music earns its reputation or just benefits from the timing.

Listen to Metaphorical Music, then Modal Soul, then 2nd Collection in sequence. The answer is in the progression. The mixes tighten. The arrangements open up. The collaborations stop being guest features and start being the architecture itself. This isn’t a catalog frozen at a peak. It is a catalog that ends while still climbing, and the difference between those two things is the difference between myth and evidence.

The closer you look at Jun’s career, the more you see a network. Remove Fat Jon, the mixes never clean up. Remove Hiroto, the piano phrasing disappears. Remove Shing02, the hexalogy doesn’t exist. Remove Nao Tokui, Rotary Park and the experimental impulse behind it vanish. Jun was the filter at the center. He chose the people, absorbed their inputs, and produced something none of them would have made alone. They know this. They say so, on the record, in this piece.

His people did what you do when someone leaves unfinished work behind. You pick it up. Shingo went to the studio. Friends gathered to piece together the project Jun had been building before he was gone.

DL, a producer who builds from scratch and knows what it means to match sounds to intention, on the process of completing Spiritual State:

In regards to the posthumous project Spiritual State, as you may know, as a producer it’s very difficult to infer or assume things that another musician intended to do with the music. Matching sounds and instrumentation up was incredibly hard to do for that album. Takumi was telling me it’d be released soon and I was loving it, it was just the sounds that were being matched up were very difficult to make sound correct.

You may have different versions of the song. Perhaps you used this MIDI sound, or that one, or when the song is loaded up you want a different version, or you may know what sounds to record that no one else does.

When Nujabes passed away, no one knew what sounds he was using or what his final intentions were regarding that album’s overall sound. It took a really long time to figure everything out. Even something as simple as what you hear as a piano, it would have to be matched. Music programs these days, you can open a window and there’s 50 piano sounds, so which one is it? A hard sound, soft sound, a more sustained or subtle sound.

That’s something which I think is interesting about his last project.

Spiritual State came out in December 2011. Jun's third album, assembled by the people who loved him. It didn’t have the polish of what came before; by nature, it couldn’t. The weight was there.

Nao Tokui said it best, when asked about what he thinks Jun would say to him today:

“Nao, don’t waste your time by just testing new ideas. Make music!”

Jun started with confidence that outpaced his ability. That gap closed fast. The record shop trained the ear; the collaborators expanded it; the filter was his alone.

His Spotify monthly listener count still sits in the millions; eight years after his last release, no new material, no label push, no algorithm gaming. The producers from Jun’s generation whose catalogs will still be searched for in another 20 years are the ones who built exchange networks like his: Dilla and the Soulquarians, Madlib and the Stones Throw orbit, DJ Krush and the Mo Wax axis. The ones who produced in isolation, no matter how talented, will fade at a faster rate. Jun’s numbers are the early evidence.

He wouldn’t have cared about any of that.

What Jun cared about was the work. Making it better. Digging deeper. Finding a song inside a record that nobody else had heard yet and flipping it into something new. Bringing a friend to a curry spot he loved and watching them try it for the first time. Calling a rapper in New York on a landline because he heard something worth hearing.

Enjoying life.

This was Seba “Nujabes” Jun’s immortal legacy.

This piece lived in Notepad between 2016 and 2018. Somewhere along the way, it brought me to New York, and to Chi.

He became the most important photography mentor I’ve ever had—not through lectures or theory, but through the way he saw things. The way he’d notice what most people walk right past.

I still shoot my own version of what he taught me. Street corners, dinner tables (lots of food), the ordinary stuff that doesn’t feel like anything until years later when it feels like everything.

You point the camera at life—the memorable and the forgettable—because you won’t always know which is which until you’re older, flipping through it all, grateful you were paying attention.

To the Modu family: Thank you for the kindness and inspiration. I carry it with me daily.

To Chi: I’m still keeping the focus.

@chimodu

C H I M O D U on Instagram: "Our hearts are broken... We conti…

World-renowned photographer Chi Modu, most known for his iconic hip-hop snaps, continues to convey incredible stories, documenting diverse lifestyles around the world, all through the lens of a camera.

Photography and hip-hop have always been deep passions of mine, and two things I’ve always gravitated towards since childhood.

The idea of telling a story through a carefully-captured single moment in time was mind-blowing. Equally interesting was the ability to bend the rules of grammar and tell story through rhythm and poetry.

A pillar in the documentation of hip-hop history, Chi Modu comes from humble beginnings. Chi is someone who documented the hip-hop movement, nearly three decades ago, and captured iconic moments and pictures of larger-than-life personas. The legends of the game. He now continues to travel the world and document other movements and stories.

His name may not ring a bell, but his work has left a massive hand-print in the concrete of hip-hop history. A history that continues to grow and evolve daily.

In the same way hip-hop can transport the listener into a world of thought they may not have lived through or have first-hand experience of, photography is able to expose and share insight of a moment in the same way, where the viewer can appreciate the art.

Being a hip-hop head for many years, it always shocked me : the amount of people who knew of Chi Modu’s photographs, but had no idea who took them. It’s often the case, with many aspects of hip-hop and beyond, that the most important figures are often found outside of the picture.

The opportunity to interview Chi Modu came up. In a quest to delve into his thoughts about photography, hip-hop, and life in general.

I took it.

Getting Down to Business

Coming up on three decades in the game, you’re considered by many to be the most iconic hip-hop documentary photographer of all-time . A pioneer in your lane. What’s the most gratifying aspect of your success, aside from being able to convey a message or tell a story through your art?

I found that the camera has been an incredible tool for me to help spread the message of hip-hop. Photographers have a responsibility with this skill that we have to use it to educate others and take them into a world that they might not know that much about looking at it from a distance. I find a camera takes you little bit closer and once people get a little closer to things, they tend to get a better understanding for them.

I think that brings the world together. Exposing, documenting, sharing, and showing your world opens it up to others to understand it a little better without having to live in it. I think it pushes back on some of the judgment that often comes from a distance once you get a look inside.

Along with bringing the world together, you really love to embrace new technology. How has that changed the way you work?

Well, photography is still photography. That’s what the people get a little bit confused today. Although we now have digital photography and people have camera phones in their pocket, it’s still the concept of using light to illustrate things. Photography is referred to as the art and science of painting with light. The light hasn’t changed in over a million years.

Photography still has the same core concepts behind it. Composition is still the same as it ever was. I think what technology has done for me, it’s allowed me to spread my work farther and wider and made a lot more people aware of what I’ve done.

I mean, it’s gone as far as Southeast Asia, South America, and has allowed me to reach six continents around the globe. The win is when you can use technology to expand the reach of one’s photography. Social media, especially Instagram, has made this possible at a scale never before seen.

Definitely; technology’s reach is something that has exponentially grown year over year. Social media  has completely changed the world of hip-hop. Any individual is now able to have an opportunity to “make it” using a cell phone in the palm of their hand. This wasn’t possible two decades ago. What are your thoughts on hip-hop’s increased accessibility? Pros and cons?

Well, I want to push back a little bit on the concept of “make it.”

I think people sometimes think being able to be seen means you’ve arrived. Or, being in a place where there are a lot of celebrities means you’ve arrived. I don’t think you are really judged whether you’ve arrived or not until you look at it through the rear-view mirror of history.

Everybody has a pen; very few can write like Ernest Hemingway or James Baldwin.

What I mean by that is that it takes time for you to actually “make it.” 

 Just because you get a snapshot or a lucky image along the way, doesn’t mean that you’ve arrived. I think that’s where people sometimes get confused. Yes, everybody has the technology in their hand, but having the tools doesn’t make everyone a storyteller.

Everybody has a pen; very few can write like Ernest Hemingway or James Baldwin.

To be able to tell good visual stories, you have to take the technology at hand and use it to express what you saw and what you want others to see. That’s really what the skill is which has little to do with equipment.

So, yes, I think equipment has expanded and it’s made photography reach further and wider. Many more people can access a camera, but it doesn’t really change the results in the end.

You get a lot more quantity with the pervasiveness of cameras but you also get a lot more bad photography as well. I can’t really say that the ratio of good imagery has increased. I think it’s the same ratio of good that we’ve always had.

Sure, exposures may get better, but just a good exposure does not make a photograph or else we wouldn’t still be looking at pictures from the 1920’s and marveling at them. There was no digital then or matrix metering at that point, but the imagery is still of a high standard.

What’s your photography gear looking like for 2018?

I find that now I tend to go a little bit lighter these days. For years and years, I was a camera guy carrying camera bags all the time. I prefer it to be light these days because I found the more discreet I could be, the easier it is for me to get closer.

I tend to shoot shorter lenses, so that requires me being closer to my subjects rather than long lenses where I can be 10, 20 or 30 feet away. I actually like to be two, three feet away from my subject, so short lenses and light rangefinder cameras are my preference.

Right now, I currently have a Leica M7 film camera in my bag, a Leica M 240 digital and a Leica Q as well. That’s my current camera bag but throughout my career, I’ve shot Nikon, Mamiya and Sinar among others.

Many of the more popular Tupac images were taken on a Nikon, some of the portraits were on a large format Sinar 4×5 or on a Mamiya RZ 6×7. I go small format 35, medium format Mamiya 6×7, large format Sinar 4×5. That’s kind of my range in equipment.

How do you go about picking the final photograph for a publication? For example, the photo shoot with Biggie with the World Trade Center in the background, there’s maybe a few dozen different shots you took, but only one is known.

When you look at a photo shoot, there tend to be a lot of other photographs from it that also have value. Sometimes the one that’s selected is selected because it fits the particular design of the magazine cover that day or the message a magazine is trying to express.

When you go back and look at a photo shoot from 20 years ago today, you look at it with a different set of eyes. The image that is published in a magazine is usually the one that people embrace in the short term. I’ve found that I can introduce an alternate photograph 20 years later, from the same shoot, and then that one can become the new “known picture.”

It’s really just taking the public where they haven’t been, sharing what you think will achieve your message on the cover of the magazine, but what you put on the cover of a magazine is a little bit different from what runs in a museum or what actually stays forever. They’re not always the same image.

I did Method Man’s “Tical” album cover with Def Jam.

On that cover, they did a bit of an illustration play with my imagery. The picture that they actually distorted a little bit in the corner is a very, very strong picture when it stands by itself.

That picture actually ended up living longer than the album artwork interpretation of it.

Sometimes the things that are put forth in the beginning aren’t always the things that’ll live and stay historically.

That’s why I tell people, “Never throw out your photographs because you never know. 1999 eyes are very different from 2009 eyes, which are very different from 2019 eyes. So, hold onto your imagery.

Who’s to credit for inspiring you to get into photography? How did landing a spot at The Source during its prime go down?

For me, photography, I wasn’t really inspired by a particular photographer. I was inspired by the ability to take photographs. The minute I touched the camera and saw that I could record what I saw and share it with others, it blew my mind. That had me dive as deep as I could go into it. My initial training is really as a documentarian photojournalist.

I saw myself doing newspaper work, magazine work, kind of like a beat photographer in a way. Those doors weren’t really opened to me back in 1990 and The Source was. It was starting to bubble up. I heard that this magazine was happening when I was doing some freelance work at The Amsterdam News in New York.

I found out about The Source and I went down there and talked to them. They weren’t extremely organized at that point, but they had a lot of energy and they were ready to go. I was fortunate I had good camera skills, so I’d come there and be at the ready. I had a beeper. I remember people would call me on my beeper.

When called, I’d go out on assignment and eventually, all the artists saw me as the guy. They would stop for my camera to show up in the magazine, so it became a direct relationship with me, the magazine, and their fame. That’s pretty much how it went down. Over the years, I got close to a lot of them. Not so close where we were hanging out, but close enough where we could take good photographs.

I emphasize that point because they were my friends, but that’s not what I was there to do. I was there to take photographs. I didn’t have to be their friends to do that. My feeling was I’ll get them comfortable, but there is a distinct difference between what I was there to do and what they do.

They do music. I do visuals.

Bring the visuals and the music together, that’s the winning formula. I always knew that was my goal and that was my focus.

Those two aspects are definitely important to interlace to ensure interest. You’ve taken hundreds of thousands of photographs. Are there any that stand out more than others outside of hip-hop you’d like to share?

I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of photographs. Absolutely. I’m still impressed with the pictures that I have to take, not just the ones that I’ve already taken.

That’s the beauty of photography. There’s always this pursuit for the next one.

I enjoy photographing people, any version of them, be they just regular people in their house cooking living their normal lives or a celebrity who is still a regular person I try to show them as they are . That’s my goal as a documentarian.

I find that the photographs that move me the most are the ones that are as simple as it can get, but through simplicity, you really learn a lot about the complexity of the subject.

Photography for you. Is it a mission that turned into an art, or art that turned into your personal mission?

Photography is my life mission.

Along the way, we run into certain tools and things we bring along that help us achieve our goals. My goal with a camera was to use a camera to show the viewer another perspective on things. Was it my mission first? Yes. It was my mission, which then other people started to call it art because I don’t really think you call your own work art.

To me, it’s like someone else calling themselves beautiful. You leave that to others to decide. As you see on my Instagram and all my accounts, I let my work speak for me. I kind of keep myself out of picture because I think you’re only there to see the photographs, so I can sort of stay out of the way. It’s probably better if I do.

You‘ve said that artists these days are more controlled and less honest. This is a popular opinion that will compare to the hard-core in-your-face aesthetic of hip-hop two decades ago.

No. I think there’s a little bit of confusion.

The point I’m trying to make here with artists today compared to artists in the past is that, artists in the past let you a little bit closer to who they were. Their brand, even though now it seems like everybody’s a brand today, back then, they weren’t really brands , they were artists.

Now, there’s a downside to being just an artist because you don’t always make the best business decisions, but one thing about it, your art stays pure. What I find today is many of the artists are so focused on how they look, they actually don’t give you a real feel of who they are.

I’ve seen a lot of photography around artists today, not a whole lot of it is storytelling documentary style. A lot of it tends to be snapshot moments, a nice picture on stage, a nice picture at the bar, at the club. But you don’t really get to know that much about the person.

I mean, look at Drake as an example. A very public figure and you see him a decent amount. But we really don’t know that much about him because the photographers aren’t allowed to go much deeper.

I think for him, as well as a lot of artists, for your longevity, you have to let people in a little bit closer. The more human they think you are, then the loyalty doesn’t fade once you gain a little bit of weight and you’re not putting out hit records anymore.

I think people have to think a little bit beyond the moment.

Who are you listening to these days?

Rapper wise? I mean, I listen to a lot of different rappers.

I still appreciate Kanye, Vince Staples is in pretty heavy rotation, Kendrick Lamar I like a lot. ASAP’s first album, not sure what he’s going to come with now, but I did like his first album. I even like some of Drakes songs as well.

I like music and I like the music that they’re doing today. I don’t like this comparison between real hip-hop and mumble rap. It’s all nonsense to me. I mean, let people express themselves musically ; how they choose history will decide whether they’re relevant or not. You don’t have to shoot it down. History will tell you the truth.

I do listen to some rappers today, but all genres evolve.

What are your thoughts on the spread of hip-hop culture? Do you feel as if some people sometimes take it the wrong way and fail to recognize the roots?

Well, first of all, I don’t like hip-hop being called a culture. I mean, what’s a culture, really? You know what I’m saying?

I think if you want to call it a lifestyle, okay, that’s one thing. But even that’s a little superficial. I look at hip-hop as an art form. It was a voice of the people. You can go wherever you want but if you leave the roots, and to me the roots are the voice of the people, you lose your soul.

If you’re going to become the voice of Nike, and Louis Vuitton, and Supreme, that’s not hip-hop. It doesn’t mean that we didn’t flash. Rappers are known for being flashy, but the flash was secondary to the message. It seems like the flash has come in front of the message now. That may be a sign of the times.

I don’t like hip-hop being called a culture. I mean, what’s a culture, really? You know what I’m saying?

It may be a Snapchat, Instagram generation, but that too will pass because when I look at an artist, and I see them take down their whole Instagram account because they’re going to release a new album, so they want a fresh start.

They’ve got like five million followers, but a clean Instagram account. I think I saw, Future [sic] or someone do that recently. I looked at that and went, wow. That means that you don’t really have anything on your page that you value because if you can take it all down, that means you don’t really value any of it.

I think folks are getting a little bit confused with this living in the moment and forgetting that although we’re in the moment, we still have to lay down roots that will actually grow into a tree down the road.

That’s kind of crazy because if something were to happen in between when you took all that work down and his new album came out, he’d have no legacy there, visually.

I think folks are getting a little bit confused with this living in the moment and forgetting that although we’re in the moment, we still have to lay down roots that will actually grow into a tree down the road.

Be careful deleting everything about your past because it’s still there, you’re just not showing it. And if you don’t show it and people will forget you and you can’t bring it back after.

Transitioning into your humanitarian work and more personal photography outside of hip-hop, give us some background on that, the non-hip-hop work.

My style of photography is I’m a documentarian. That’s at the root of it.

When the hip-hop movement was bubbling up in the late 80s and early 90s, it was a movement. I set out to document this movement. I still do the same thing when I travel all over the world.

I’ve been to Bangladesh, Southeast Asia, South America and everywhere in between with my camera. I get the same joy going to these unique places like Yemen and Syria, with a camera, that I did photographing hip-hop because I’m getting a similar glimpse into the lives of real people. I’m able to bring those photographs out and share them with the world.

By bringing pictures out, you change people’s thinking and enhance their understanding of other people.

By bringing pictures out, you change people’s thinking and enhance their understanding of other people. Same thing I did with hip-hop, I humanized the people that some folks thought was just young bad youth that were in trouble all the time. You can look in their eyes and see they are human beings. That’s what the camera can do.

I do believe that photography, especially documentary photographer, is humanitarian work.

What message do you want to convey to individuals who appreciate or follow your work?

Well, I mean, for all the fans of my imagery, for me, it’s really an honor, to be honest. I get a decent amount of feedback from people that send me messages all the time. It’s an honor because I feel like folks have been able to appreciate what I set out to do.It’s an honor because I feel like folks have been able to appreciate what I set out to do.

Even if they didn’t know it in 1997 or 98, but they now know it someway in a small form, but I don’t think most people realized what I did until 20 years later. That’s kind of where we are now. Because of that, I’m very grateful that this has happened while I was still alive. People have been able to see how I documented the generation’s movement. Many artists don’t don’t get experience while they’re living.

Social media and the beauty of technology has allowed my work to not be pushed to the side in favor of the young current imagery but it has placed my quality right back into the middle of it. I’m not extremely nostalgic. I don’t really like to dwell in the past. I think the past is still important to understand your present and future, but it doesn’t shape it it guides it.

Let’s be clear . What I mean by “It doesn’t shape it” is that, people need to have a bit of an independent future. They have to figure it out on their own, but there are some things that those in the past put down that you reference, and you can always see but new generations must evolve and adapt.

A lot of the imagery you see in hip-hop today, you can go back to some of my pictures and see many of the references in it that many photographers are drawing from. That’s how it’s supposed to happen. That’s sort of the point. I’m not there running around photographing Migos, the photographers of today are. They have their people for that, but somewhere in those photographs my

That’s what I call passing it down.

Do you see yourself getting back into the hip-hop scene as a photographer full time or would you prefer it to remain a hobby, as having done enough in years past?

One thing I never was, was a hobbyist. Photography is life for me. I’ll always take pictures.

As far as rappers go and the hip-hop scene, I’m not that interested in photographing the scene because just by calling it a scene, to me, it’s superficial because I never thought about what I did in the past as I was documenting a scene. Maybe that’s the challenge I have with it today is that people look at it as a scene. Even the photographers have agents and publicists. Nonsense.

Photographers are there to document and record it for later enjoyment. We’re not supposed to be enjoying and flossing in the middle of it. That’s not how our world goes because if you want to be in front of the camera, then take the full risk and go in front of the camera. Don’t do a half-behind and half-in-front of the camera.

Respect those that put their lives on the line and put their work out to be judged and chewed apart. Respect those artists. Photographers don’t have to do that. That’s why we should kind of stay behind the camera until your body of work and reputation is big enough to draw you in front of the camera, let your body of work pull you in front of the camera, not your desire to be in front of the camera.

That’s my issue with it, but when an artist wants someone to photograph them and they actually want to stay forever, they call me.

When they just need a snapshot or someone to document them well on a Canon 5D, I say, there are plenty of people around that can do that shoot.

Don’t call me for that. You call me when you want someone that can actually make a difference. Then, I’ll come.

No, I haven’t retired. I am just very picky about where I bring my camera skills because as you see, if I bring my camera, I’m probably going to capture you… properly.

After hearing the insight, it’s clear that Chi has an extremely deep passion for hip-hop and documentation of life around the globe, alike. It’s his life mission, and something he will never cease.

It’s also incredible and entertaining to think about how a single photograph can convey such a strong message without a single word involved. That’s the power of photography in its purest form and, as aforementioned by Chi, the documentation aspect of hip-hop and its aesthetic as well as sound is evolving rapidly. This is something we should embrace, so that it may continue to grow.

There are a handful of photos that define different eras in the rap game, and Chi was fortunate enough to be at the source of it all (no pun intended) throughout the late 80’s and early 90’s.

For now, he’ll continue to do humanitarian work and spread the stories of those unknown souls in the world, those with no voice, in hopes of shedding light on their life, and allowing them to have a voice. That’s the core of it.

It will be extremely interesting, personally, to see how hip-hop changes, and to observe it with what’s been said here in mind regarding how artists and techniques have changed.

One thing is for certain—Chi Modu’s era-defining snaps of hip-hop are here to stay.

Forever.

After 30 years, the world is starting to take notice of South Korea’s hip-hop scene—and the timing isn’t accidental. A phenomenon within the Korean Wave sweeping the West, Korean hip-hop has won over millions in recent years, riding the same cultural infrastructure that turned K-pop into a global export.

Where K-pop was engineered top-down by entertainment agencies running on trainee systems and managed fandom, Korean hip-hop grew from the opposite direction: online communities, basement open-mics, and a generation of kids who discovered rap through imported American CDs. Those roots are starting to bear fruit internationally.

The Western influence is obvious in content and aesthetic, but Korea is building something of its own—by itself, of itself.

Telephone Lines and Basements

T.K. has documented the origins well. Stories told through rhymes, the same way hip-hop out of North America did in the 80’s, just in a different language. The topics were similar in spirit—social and political commentary reflecting Korean life at the time—but distinct in their own right.

Hong Seo-beom is widely credited as the first well-known artist making hip-hop music in South Korea.

The origins are more traceable than they are stateside; the scene was small and tight-knit in the early days, with fewer players and a clearer record of who showed up first. That doesn’t mean it was simple—debates about who laid the foundation have run for decades, and the further back you go, the more the lines between hip-hop, dance music, and pop blur together. The early Korean hip-hop community coalesced in online spaces, through PC communication boards and internet forums where kids shared ripped MP3s, argued about flow, and organized the first offline meetups.

Seo Taiji and Boys had a stronger influence on Korean hip-hop culture—and the Korean music scene broadly—than anyone else historically, despite not sticking to hip-hop alone. What they did was crack the market open. Before Seo Taiji, Korean pop music had been running on the same formula for decades—trot ballads, variety-show crooners, a scene that moved slow and rewarded compliance. “Nan Arayo” in 1992 changed the temperature overnight. The establishment hated it; the kids didn’t care. Within weeks, the song was inescapable, and every assumption about what Korean pop music could sound like was suddenly negotiable.

Seo Taiji and Boys were to Korea in the early 90’s what Dipset was to Harlem in the early 00’s—bigger than life itself. They owned the scene—hip-hop or otherwise. Their dominance of Korean media during their run was total, and their split after four years left a hole that took years to fill. Yang Hyun-suk, one of the three members, went on to found YG Entertainment. The group that sparked Korean hip-hop also planted the seed for one of the three agencies that would dominate K-pop—two industries from the same root, splitting in opposite directions.

Everything Between

Both sides of the Pacific argue constantly about what hip-hop is and what “real” hip-hop represents.

The culture was born in the South Bronx, built by Black and Latino communities. The distance between that origin and a studio in Gangnam is not something you cross without leaving footprints.

What qualifies as real in Korean hip-hop? The answer is in the rhymes. Spitting about a harsh ghetto or a crime-ridden block may not apply to South Korea the way it does stateside, but there are other topics that cut just as deep. Mandatory military service that pulls every young man out of his life for nearly two years. The pressure-cooker education system that runs kids through 16-hour days from middle school onward. The weight of family expectations in a culture where your parents’ sacrifices are a debt you carry whether you agreed to it or not. These aren’t borrowed struggles. They’re Korean.

In the 90’s, Korean rappers located their authenticity across the Pacific—to be “real” was to look and sound American. English lyrics, American fashion, music videos shot in settings that evoked inner-city America. The scene has moved past that, slowly. The rappers who matter now are the ones rapping in Korean about Korean things, and the technical groundwork that made Korean-language rap feel natural—not just translated American cadences, but schemes built for the way Korean syllables actually land—was laid quietly in the early 2000’s by artists most Western listeners have never heard of.

The audience for Korean rap—inside Korea and outside it—is larger now than at any point in the genre’s history, and the window is still opening.

Straight From Seoul

Korean rappers rarely get to speak for themselves in Western media. Most coverage runs through large outlets that filter translations for their own purposes. I wanted to step away from that.

Due to tight schedules, I asked all my guys the following:

• The hip-hop scene in South Korea is constantly shifting; what are your thoughts?

• What inspired you to start rapping and taking it as a serious career?

• Hip-hop—what does it mean to you?

• Your legacy—does it matter? What’s yours?

RYNO:

I started listening to the first album of Dynamic Duo in 2004. Gaeko had a huge influence on me, and I thought from that point forward it would be cool to become a hip-hop artist. It's a dream of mine. I'm a lonely person, and have a lot on my plate, swirling with emotions. Through rap, I was able to mature more—become more alert, control my behavior, and take back my life.

I was born into an unhealthy and broken home. My mom lived her life through me, and the constant feeling of being inferior loomed over my head. To me, hip-hop is the most mundane, raw, emotional, honest type of music. It's a device in and of itself, a friend to play with, if you will. I want to become a historic rapper, one that conveys the story of my life through rhymes, while expressing the positive, more fun aspects of it along the way. I want to just pave my own road, and be remembered for my efforts.

The purpose of rapping was broad to me. While I release my emotions, life, and imagination to the world, I feel both satisfaction and stress. It satiates the listeners' ears, but it also puts me under constant pressure to improve and become more appealing. Korean hip-hop is a lot better now than I thought it ever would be.

There are different styles. Lots and lots of different styles, and in a lot of cases, you can't compare two artists together (think: underground vs. mainstream).

I want to just pave my own road, and be remembered for my efforts.

HU57LA:

The hip-hop scene in South Korea is getting bigger and bigger every year.

There has been a wave coming through Korea with help from this audition program called Show Me The Money—this show helps people who do not understand or listen to hip-hop often to become familiar with it. The show also narrows listeners' ears to believe rappers that the product which you see on the television are the nicest [talented, best] rappers Korea has to offer. For Koreans, what shows up on a television screen is reality. I wish they could listen to more music from YouTube or SoundCloud, rather than looking at the Top 100 Melon charts [Korea's Billboard]—I feel like some diversity and drawing on smaller talent could be beneficial to Korea's hip-hop scene. Too many talents in South Korea that are coming up, but I've been listening to Changmo lately.

Hip-hop is way of life you know? Being free at all times. That's hip-hop to me. My introduction to rap was as a battle rapper. It felt great to out-rap someone or make other rapper seem less talented. It was my way of feeling free. Many artists inspired me but Lil Wayne was my largest inspiration. Hip-hop is way of life you know? Being free at all times. That's hip-hop to me. No boundaries. Thinking outside of the box. No norms when it comes down to hip-Hop. That's why we all love it right?

My legacy? I just want people to remember me as a rapper who truly rapped from his heart.

JON:

Current Korean hip-hop is trending more towards alternative R&B than anything, where auto-tuned R&B is mixed with rap. This is good, however, as a lot of underground artists started and were exposed to this type of music first. On the other hand, this is a negative, as everyone is attempting to bandwagon off this trend, and not having a true genuine deep-seated passion or feeling about the music they are creating.

The reason why I started to rap back in the 5th grade was Nas' debut album, Illmatic. It just blew my mind. I could agree with and relate to some of the lyrics, and that's why I got into the tape so much—that's when I started to take writing seriously, too. I wasn't the best; it was a start.

To me, hip-hop is something I do to express myself. I'm an extremely quiet person who doesn't speak much. Friends say they can't read emotions when we talk, but when I rap, it's different. I can express myself better, through a different medium, and that's why I love it. I want people to search up my name instead of my songs' names, I want to be known. In other words, there's a difference—if they search for a song name, it means the song was good, but the artist wasn't memorable.

I want people to remember me. You feel me?

Borrowed Sound, Borrowed Style

Modern American culture has a heavy influence on the sound of Korean hip-hop. The United States has had an outsized influence on South Korea’s culture since the Korean War—decades of American military presence meant American music was in the air, literally and figuratively, long before the internet made it searchable. That pipeline ran for decades before anyone called it “influence.” Korean hip-hop’s relationship with American sound isn’t a recent import; it’s generational.

The influence shows up in the modern mix of R&B and trap elements being integrated into traditional rap sounds—boom-bap, conscious-leaning beats—though the old school sound is fading fast. People gravitate toward catchy sounds and hooks over dust; there are even different takes on what formulas make a song stick. An old school underground beat almost never makes it into Korea’s mainstream radio.

On the surface: clothes emulating old school hip-hop tones, chains, hypebeast name brand fits, strong shoe game, and visual nods to R&B in music videos—intertwined with modern braggadocio energy. The class is there to make it smooth and elegant; the confidence and flexing make it just vague enough to be considered hip-hop in certain cases (see: Zion T).

Crush’s “Oasis” with ZICO, pictured below, did exactly this—played relentlessly in clubs and through the streets of Seoul for nearly two years.

That’s a positive example among many negative ones. Bite off more than you can chew, and your jaw gets tired.

Biting is an issue—subjective, but serious. It shows up more often in Korea than stateside, given how directly American music is absorbed. The term refers to emulating another artist’s style blatantly, either by mimicking or using it as your own, without a nod to the original source.

Plagiarism, more or less. “Okey Dokey” was a decade late biting the ringtone rap aesthetic and sound. ZICO got caught up in a beat scandal. Primary was suspected of stealing beats, and ended up donating all proceeds after his sampling crossed the line into replication.

In most cases, it’s influence rather than intentional theft. The question is where the line sits—at what point does genuine passion for a sound become a balancing act of how much you can extract without getting caught. This question applies to the entire Korean music industry, not just hip-hop. K-pop itself runs on Black American musical DNA—R&B vocal styling, hip-hop production, choreography traditions that trace back decades—industrialized and exported at a scale the original genres never reached. The hip-hop scene just happens to be where the question is asked out loud, because hip-hop has always cared about credit in ways pop music doesn’t.

For most younger listeners, Keith Ape from The Cohort is the name that comes up first when biting in Korean hip-hop enters the conversation.

His song “잊지마” (”don’t forget [about me/my name]”) caught tens of millions of views and broke the internet—a pseudo-race war between keyboard warriors and Twitter fiends arguing about African-American and Korean culture, with “cultural appropriation” thrown around from every direction.

The controversy, supposedly resolved, sparked a larger debate about who owns what, who can claim what, and what a “culture vulture” is—something we saw play out with Post Malone, which didn’t go well either. This debate isn’t going away; if anything, as Korean hip-hop’s global reach expands, the scrutiny will only intensify. The dynamic is complicated by the fact that Korean artists didn’t seek out American hip-hop from a position of cultural dominance—they found it as kids, through whatever channels were available, and absorbed it the way anyone absorbs the music that changes their life. That doesn’t make the appropriation question disappear, but it does make the “culture vulture” framing too simple for what’s actually happening.

T.K. put it plainly—hip-hop is an imported artifact, and the line blurs when you take culture from a foreign place and try to make it yours:

Clearly, hip hop is not of Korea. It is a cultural artifact that Korea imported. And surely, hip hop in Korea is still in the process of becoming localized. Although Korean hip hop has come a long way in the last two decades, there is still no stand-alone “hip hop culture” as one exists in America.

K-Town to Seoul, Both Directions

Dumbfoundead came out of K-Town and left his mark through battle raps, collaborations, and music videos over 10 years on YouTube. He remains the face of Korean-American rappers working to break into the mainstream, and he did it without entering through a Korean door. He came up at Project Blowed, the legendary Leimert Park open-mic in LA—a Black-founded institution—and earned his place by rapping circles around the room. That credibility can’t be manufactured by a label or a reality show.

The gap between North America and South Korea is closing, and social media is doing most of the heavy lifting.

Korean rap hasn’t matched K-pop’s audience stateside because most Americans don’t speak Korean and can’t parse the lyrics or references. “It G Ma” got popular because of the hard-hitting trap sound—not the words, but the sonics. This will likely be the template that carries Korean hip-hop into Western ears: the sound arrives first, the lyricism follows once the audience is already in the room.

Is Korean trap the most accurate representation of Korea’s hip-hop scene to the Western world? No, but that’s fine—and that being fine is something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

Why?

A fair argument is that Korean hip-hop, particularly trap, parodies African American culture—pandering to and emulating it without proper understanding. Taeyang of Big Bang, one of Korea’s pillars in pop music, did a controversial interview, supposedly mistranslated, regarding the influence of black culture.

The emulation of “blackness” attracts attention, views, listeners, and clout within the music scene. Nobody has resolved it.

Conscious rap has taken a back seat (Kendrick Lamar being the exception), and globally it’s more about sound than lyricism right now. That’s not a negative; it’s the state of hip-hop, and Korean artists caught on quickly. The artists who last will be the ones who use the sound as a vehicle for something specific to their own experience—the way the best American artists always have.

Collaborations overseas while being bilingual put Dumbfoundead, Year of the Ox (JL and Lyricks, stylized as YOX), and others at the forefront of spreading Korean culture through rhymes stateside.

YOX has a formula that works. Trap influence shows up in their tracks, but they stick to the roots of heavy lyricism and boom-bap production. References that pull from both American hip-hop history and the Korean scene overseas—this allows for two things: the audience stateside can give a nod to the bars and references, and YOX can build a fanbase in Korea off the content they’re putting out. They’re operating in the gap between the two markets that nobody else has figured out how to fill.

The bars land on both sides of the Pacific.

Looking Ahead

Korean culture is spreading rapidly, and music is the primary vehicle. Korean hip-hop is a growing segment of that wave—smaller than K-pop, louder per capita, and harder to co-opt.

The infrastructure is building in ways it wasn’t five years ago. New platforms and streaming services with global reach, a generation of Korean artists who grew up consuming both Korean and American hip-hop natively—not as imports, but as part of their musical diet from day one. Shows like Show Me the Money have done what the underground couldn’t do alone: they put Korean rap in front of millions of ears that would never have sought it out. The trade-off is that the show narrows what “Korean rap” looks like to a television audience, and the best rappers in the country know it. The underground feeds the show; the show feeds the mainstream; the mainstream feeds the global audience. Whether the underground survives that pipeline intact is the open question.

The artists putting on stateside are getting sharper, and the movements overseas are gaining a momentum that won’t reverse easily. The Korean-American bridge—Dumbfoundead, YOX, and a growing wave of bilingual artists who don’t have to choose between markets—is critical. These are the conduits through which Korean hip-hop reaches Western ears without being filtered through the K-pop machine.

There are 50 million people in South Korea—roughly 15% of America’s population. The scene’s global impact may not match the numbers, and the reliance on Western influence will likely remain for a while, but the pace of progression has no real parallel in non-English-speaking hip-hop.

If the trend holds, Korean hip-hop won’t just be a curiosity within the Korean Wave; it’ll be its own export category within a decade.

The rhymes shift with the society.

That’s what Korean hip-hop represents.