This conversation could easily double as a motivational speech. Whether of Steve Jobsian inspiration or otherwise, hearing J. Period connect the dots backwards through his 10 year career — one in which he completely revolutionized the modern mixtape by being the first to merge music and interviews — is enough to reinsure anyone doubtful in their ability to accomplish anything extraordinary. For the San Fernando Valley-native, it began at a mixtape listening party for college radio deejays that Nas happened to attend. “All these college radio deejays were there and I was like the infiltrator in the room because I wasn’t a college radio deejay,” J. Period explains in this exclusive conversation with HipHopDX. He continues:
“Nas actually showed up, sits down and was feeling himself because that was around the time he won the Jay Z beef. Everyone put their little recorders down and he just started talking and sharing his life story during this interview. While I was sitting there listening to this I was thinking to myself ‘It would be so ill to take this interview and combine it with the music and make a sort of story book out of it.’ I went up to him after and sort of pitched him the idea, got a drop and that was that. I then went home and made the Nas mixtape…
“Maybe a month after I made it I put it in five stores: Triple Five Soul, Fat Beats and a couple of those spots. A friend of mine, Q Unique from the Arsonists hit me and he was like, ‘I’m in a barbershop in Bushwick and their playing your Nas CD.’ I say, ‘Go and check to see if it’s really the CD’ and he checks and he’s like ‘It’s a bootleg.’… That’s how my mixtape career started: 200 of these Nas mixtapes in a backpack on Canal Street selling them to the vendors and within an hour they were gone.”
J. Period details all of the nuanced encounters that proved so crucial along his improbable trek — including the Fugees lyric he inspired while in college, and the positive reinforcement received after he stumped Questlove—all while dropping a slew of valuable jewels on how to navigate this Industry of Cool.
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J. Period Details Creating Q-Tip: The [Abstract] Best
HipHopDX: How’s Los Angeles treating you?
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J. Period: You know I grew up here and not a lot of people know that so coming here is always like coming home. This just feels familiar to me and I love the sunshine. I’ve been lobbying for a couple of years to make a move out here but Brooklyn has become my home because I’ve been there for 15 years so I can claim Brooklyn, too.
DX: That’s true. New Yorkers don’t really consider you a New Yorker unless you’ve lived there for more than a decade.
J. Period: Yeah. I’ve surpassed a decade. I’m at the 15-year mark so now I’m official. I’ve lived there longer than most people that were born there at this point.
DX: Your journey is incredible. You’re celebrating the 10 year anniversary of your mixtape series. Also, you’ve got the Brooklyn Nets music supervisor gig. How are you feeling?
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J. Period: I’m feeling good. My rule with doing this was that every year has to be better than the last. I feel like that’s been happening. A lot of good fortune has fallen in my lap since the birth of my first child. The Brooklyn Nets thing happened and I scored the Dr. J movie for NBA TV. I’m working with the Roots and actually performing with them in addition to stuff that I just do with Black Thought. In addition to this, the milestone of 10 years of mixtapes and stepping across the threshold to produce my first album is what I’m working on now.
DX: I feel like technology has made it easier for everybody to be everything. If you want to be a photographer you can get your Instagram on. If you want to be a deejay you can get your Serato now. Over the past 10 years technology was kind of already in place. So away from how technology has made things easier, what in your opinion enabled you to make progress so fast?
J. Period: That’s a good question. I definitely think technology played a big role in that. When I started doing mixtapes it was hand-to-hand on Fulton Street, Canal Street and 125th Street. Getting that base there is what enabled me to get prepared when people started releasing mixtapes online. I have a mixtape that came out at every stage of that development. So the Lauryn Hill tape, for that example was when news was being spread online and not music so the legend of that mixtape spread all around the world before people heard it. Then [Q-Tip: The [Abstract] Best] was the first one that I dropped online and watched that thing crash my website for the first five days it was out. So it’s been really crazy to watch. My take on technology is that it has lowered the bar for entry like you said so anyone can do it. It’s made it so if you have a product that is compelling it can spread like wildfire. What I’ve found with my stuff is that I don’t necessarily have the best person-to-person network but I know people who have those networks and if they’re feeling it then it goes everywhere. That’s kind of the way I’ve been able to spread things out and that’s where that rapid rise you were talking about comes from.
DX: It seems like that is one of the things that is most important but still kind of rare. We get that question all the time.
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J. Period: I think it’s funny because kids who came up making their relationships through social media don’t understand it because they don’t know the power of a person-to-person relationship and all the people who run the biggest Hip Hop sites are people I’ve came up with or have seen my rise and I think it’s that combined with the fact that I’ve been doing this because I love it. There is no ulterior motive and that comes across when you speak to me and it’s in the product, meaning you hear it whether you’re a reporter or blogger. I’ve had these crazy encounters where I’ll meet Alicia Keys and I’ll go to give her a CD and she’ll say “I already have that, that’s my favorite CD.” And I’m like “Huh? How did that happen?” I think that there is a certain way I approach the tapes that makes it so you know about me and you know about how I respect these things and that makes it so there is a real connection.
DX: What was the first relationship you built where you were like “Wow that was major?”
J. Period: It’s funny, Jake Paine from HipHopDX was one of the first people that really showed me through the way he wrote about my [Best Of Big Daddy Kane] mixtape that he understood what I was doing and that was the first connection I made in that part of the Hip Hop world. Now in the artist realm, Steele from Smiff-N-Wesson was the first person to give me a verse to see what I was trying to do and help me along. Those two are the first two that I point to. But also you have everyone over at Okayplayer, like Jenny, Dan and all those guys when they were assistants on the road for the Roots. So that shared experience of coming up through the ranks and even seeing you go from being an intern at Brooklyn Bodega to being Editor-in-Chief of HipHopDX, that’s a climb right there! I feel like when you see people go through those struggles, over time the bonds you build with them get stronger.
DX: The project that stands out most to me is the Q-Tip tape. I love that project but also, your tapes are like history lessons because you’re good at finding samples and blending them in crazy new ways. How difficult is that? How long did it take you to make the Q-Tip tape?
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J. Period: The Q-Tip tape is kind of an anomaly because it speaks to what you were saying about relationships because I didn’t just want to do another A Tribe Called Quest re-hash. I want to actually remake a lot of those songs. So I put 20 asks out at various levels and because people knew me and how I would approach, everyone came back with a joint. They did this out of love for Tip or the stuff that I had done previously. So the process of reaching out and getting things back took about six months, I want to say. Initially we started working on it about two months before his album The Renaissance was supposed to come out and then we dropped a single the day the album came out because the album came out the day Obama was elected and then the mixtape dropped in February. Everyone of these things is a labor of love and I spend an insane amount of time on all of them and now I’ve stream-lined my process so I can do it a lot faster. I had a friend of mine, Ian Wallace that was one of those guys who could hear any Hip Hop song and tell you the sample. Before Whosampled.com made it easy to click and find out, he would tell me. So he helped me find a lot of those samples. Every great producer has a guy who is a digger you know? Like I’m a digger to a certain extent but this guy is a serious digger and you can just hear it and know. So that helped in the process as well, it took about a month to dig everything up.
DX: Do you still use vinyl? J. Period:
Oh yeah definitely. I have to practice on vinyl. I did an all 45s gig at SXSW and I was joking with Rich Medina that I forgot to take the record off and put another record on because I’m so used to Serato and he was like, “I play at least one gig a week with vinyl just to keep it fresh.” So I’ve started to always go into my stacks and play records just to maintain at least because so much of what we do is live now.
J. Period Inspires Lyrics On Fugees The Score
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DX: Take us back to LA. You said you were born in LA—what part? J. Period: The Valley, San Fernando Valley.
DX: At what point did you start deejaying?
J. Period: You know I was obsessed with New York Hip Hop from the time I was five years old. I saw Beat Street and it was a wrap. After that I used to go to the park and bring the cardboard box and one my friends from Watts used to come with me and there would always be breakdancing crews out there. I was dancing a little bit, I was writing a little bit. I never rapped but I wrote a little bit and I did graffiti. The music was just the passion part that fueled everything else. It wasn’t even like I was trying to deejay. I was making pause tapes as a kid. I was driving around in high school with a CD book on my lap and every song I would hear would make me want to hear another song. So before I even had the turntables down I was already kind of selecting. The deejaying started when I was in college in the Bay Area and my roommate had turntables and I would just sneak in there and use his turntables. But it wasn’t until I moved to New York in 1998 that I got my first set of turntables. DJ Skribble who folks may not know now, at that time he was on MTV and working with the Fugees and he took me to get my first set of 1200s in ‘98 and thats where it really started.
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DX: How did you meet Skribble?
J Period: I met Skribble in college when I was overseas for a year in Israel and he was on a world tour with the Rock Steady Crew and they came to Jerusalem to do a show and I was the most excited person there. They were in Israel for about four or five days and I had made friends there with cars and we drove them around and showed them the Dead Sea and the Old City in Jerusalem and we just connected. I wasn’t on some “I just want something from him.” We just hit it off. I had a crazy story from when I was in college that no one really knows about when I had written a letter to the Fugees and actually got a response. Its insane. So I had written a letter to them and gotten a response and when I told Skribble this story that was the beginning of this friendship.
DX: What did you write in the letter?
J. Period: I was basically responding to some of the lyrics and talking to them about what they represented. There was something in there that resonated with Wyclef. He actually called me. It was bizarre, and this was years before I thought of being in this world professionally. It was just the passion I had came across and this person thousands of miles away connected with me.
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DX: What lyrics did he write about?
J. Period: “See I’m known for the crew like a Jew is a Jew / Like Apollo got the moon / Like Miller got the brew.” It was a whole line about that and I was like, “What does that mean?” I wrote him a letter saying I was a Jewish kid, I was going to Stanford and I heard this lyric and I want to know what it means. Literally again, stories that nobody knows. Wyclef calls me and explains his life story, and this was before The Score so no one really knew who the Fugees were at the time. They only had the one song: “Mona Lisa.” Wyclef was telling me how he grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and how the Black kids would be like “What’s up Black?” The Jewish kids would say “What’s up Jew?” and I was like “I never heard of that but you called me so that’s cool.” His father was a minister and he was raised as a humanist and basically when The Score drops, the B side is “How Many Mics?” And he says “On my day off with David Sonenberg I play golf / Run through Crown Heights screaming out mazel tov / Problem with no man before Black I’m first human.” I was like “That’s what he was talking about?” A couple of months later they’re coming to [Los Angeles] and I was still out of the country so I sent my sister to The House of Blues to meet them. Beforehand, he [Wyclef] was sitting down and she walks up to him and says, “I know this may sound crazy but my brother, he wrote you a letter. He goes to Stanford.” And he goes “Yeah, the kid talking about that Jewish thing. I figured he would like the lyric that I put on the new album for him.” I was like “What!” She told me that line on that album was for me. Again, crazy mayhem and when things veer off course I look at moments like those and say that it’s meant to be because that type of stuff doesn’t just happen.
DX: Have you talked to Wyclef about that?
J. Period: I have. I saw him years later when he was doing The Carnival and told him the story and at that point several people had met him and reminded him of the story and when I finally met him and told him the story he was like “That was you!” And the crazy part was that this was before the “J. Period” was a thing. Later after I had done the Lauryn Hill mixtape and become close with Rohan Marley, the Fugees were in the studio recording their comeback—the “Take It Easy” track—and I got asked to go into the studio and put the cuts on the record. And again while in the studio, I was able to connect the dots and Wyclef was surprised. Again stories like that let me know that it was meant to be.
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DX: That was one of the most memorable lines on The Score, too.
J. Period: Yeah, it was a great line.
DX: That it one of the most incredible badges of honor.
J. Period: Yeah, I don’t normally tell that story on camera.
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DX: We appreciate it. What was it like working on “Take it Easy?”
J. Period: It was really exciting for me again, because over the course of my career these are people who I was a huge fan of and I suddenly find myself in the room working with them and this was definitely one of those moments. When I went in, Lauryn had already recorded her verse. I was there with Wyclef, Pras, Jerry Wonda and Rohan Marley. I was there with all those guys and the Lauryn Hill mixtape had dropped six months earlier which was the thing everyone was talking about and they were excited to have me there. It was a tremendous experience. To go from being a fan and writing a letter to actually contributing to the record later was a great feeling.
DX: That song had people very excited about a Fugees come back. It feels like an outlier now because I don’t think I have any other song they released.
J. Period: No they didn’t. It was the only one. It was really only a 12-inch single. It does say “Scratches by J. Period” on the 12-inch, so I am happy about that. That whole situation like many of these situations is so complicated. As a fan, of course I want everyone to come together and recreate what I loved but realistically that’s not going to happen.
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Nas Inspires J. Period To Merge Interviews & Music
DX: Why did you move to New York?
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J. Period: Really so I could be closer to the Hip Hop. I just wanted to be closer to this thing that I loved so that’s why I moved.
DX: Why did you go to Jerusalem?
J. Period: That was a take-a-year-and-go-abroad kind-of deal. It was about getting a bigger perspective on the world. That’s why I went out there.
DX: You just followed the signs in life?
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J. Period: I Would say so.
DX: So you move to New York, meet Skribble and he takes you to get your first pair of 1200s.
J. Period: Yeah, and we had a party later that night to celebrate me getting my first pair. This one person comes to my party and is like, “I’m having my birthday party in the East Village next week so could you come spin at my party?” I’m like, “Sure.” While I’m spinning at this guy’s party the owner of the bar comes up and asks, “What are you doing Friday nights?” That’s how my life was the first five years I lived in New York: I would be spinning at this one event and someone would come up and ask me to spin at their event. It just kept moving like that until I did my first mixtape. I was working on the Nas mixtape in 2003 and the mixtape came out in 2004. When the Nas mixtape came that is when everything turned and took off because before that I was a club deejay essentially.
DX: What was your process like creating the Nas mixtape?
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J. Period: Before I had combined interviews and music on a mixtape, no one had ever done that before. I was invited to this mixtape listening party by G-Brown who was another mixtape deejay for God Son and Nas was supposed to show up so I was like, “Yeah I’ll go to that.” All these college radio deejays were there and I was like the infiltrator in the room because I wasn’t a college radio deejay. Nas actually showed up, sits down and was feeling himself because that was around the time he won the Jay Z beef. Everyone put their little recorders down and he just started talking and sharing his life story during this interview. While I was sitting there listening to this I was thinking to myself “It would be so ill to take this interview and combine it with the music and make sort of story book out of it.” I went up to him after and sort of pitched him the idea, got a drop and that was that. I then went home and made the Nas mixtape and again, it wasn’t with any ulterior motives. I just wanted to hear what that would sound like.
Maybe a month after I made it I put it in five stores: Triple Five Soul, Fat Beats and a couple of those spots. A friend of mine, Q Unique from the Arsonists hit me and he was like, “I’m in a barbershop in Bushwick and their playing your Nas CD.” I say, “Go and check to see if it’s really the CD” and he checks and he’s like “It’s a bootleg.” He’s like “It’s really good. Here’s what you do: You go to your CD guy and you get him to make as many CDs as you can carry and you go to Canal Street and try to start selling them to vendors.”
That’s how my mixtape career started: 200 of these Nas mixtapes in a backpack on Canal Street selling them to the vendors and within an hour they were gone. They were like three or four bucks a pop and after this I got more CDs and went to Fulton Street in Brooklyn and did the same thing and cleared out. [Then I] went back, got more and went to 125th street. After four weeks of this I’d sold about 1,000 of these CDs. I was like, “OK, we’re on to something.” That was the beginning of it and when that mixtape was in The Source’s hottest mixtapes category that’s when everything took off. A few months later I was asked to do a mixtape for Big Daddy Kane and after that the rest of the story is history.
DX: Incredible. I don’t have an idea of what Nas looks like gassed or feeling himself, that seems like a super outlier in history. You’re right the streets seem to feel like more “Ether” than “Takeover.”
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J. Period: It wasn’t like he was feeling himself in an arrogant way. It was just that he had been challenged and he had prevailed. So I think he was just happy and expressive. He had this new album so it wasn’t that he was being arrogant. It was him feeling his place in the culture and that’s what he talked about in that interview. Again, sort of stars aligning, my friend had grown up with Nas in Queens and had a basement tape of Nas freestyling when he was 15 and gave me that. On the Nas mixtape that first little lead-in you’re hearing is that basement tape. Getting that one tape was another sign that me making that tape was supposed to happen.
DX: Had Nas not shown up that day—because you said you had the idea to put an interview on a mixtape—do you think that you still would’ve done what you did?
J. Period: That spark of inspiration was there from listening to him talk and just looking around the room and thinking about it. I wanted to make a Nas mixtape and that’s why I went there to get a drop. Hearing that interview is where it all started.
DX: Do you think you would’ve made mixtapes in general?
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J. Period: I was already making mixtapes in high school and before the Nas tape. I had a few tapes that were demos I’d give to clubs. I was already making them and with that transitional moment of technology around the time when CD burning became widely available—working at a graphic design company my first two years in New York was what really helped because after hours I was literally pressing up stickers and album art and cutting them out myself. It was like an art project for me so I was already doing that at that point. But I didn’t see it was the path to success. It was just me wanting to hear these songs arranged a certain way. The secret of my mixtape career I think is that I’ve never done this to satisfy anyone else’s desire. I want to hear it that way and that’s why I can’t turn the switch off in my brain to go easy. I gotta go all out because if it’s not perfect I’m not OK with it, so that’s why I approach mixtapes the way I do just because I want to hear it like that.
J. Period: “I like Projects That Sound… Ridiculous”
DX: What’s the most challenging mixtape you’ve had to put together?
J. Period: Probably The Messengers, a project I did with K’naan because you take Fela Kuti, Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. So, the first challenge is taking someone like Bob Dylan and turning it into Hip Hop. The second challenge is that I’m not telling one story, I’m telling three stories and then also telling a master story of how those three stories relate to each other and to K’naan. So I feel like that was the most intensive process. If you hear someone say they’re going to do a mixtape with Fela Kuti, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley you’ll say “Ok, what’s that going to sound like?” So making it seamless and all work in a way that flows was the most challenging part.
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DX: How close did you work with K’naan on that mixtape?
J. Period: That mixtape is probably the most collaborative of any mixtape we’ve done. We were really going back and forth. The original idea was his because those were his three favorite artists and I came together with the idea of The Messenger to weave those three artists together. We called it The Messengers because they all had a message in their music. He would send me some songs and I would flip them. Then I would send him some beats, he would rap over them and them and send it back to me. This process went back and forth for about six months. Then ultimately due to the relationship we had built, I became his tour deejay. Literally every artist who I’ve done these tapes for I end up going on tour with them. So I’ve become C.L. Smooth’s deejay, Big Daddy Kane’s deejay, Q Tip, The Roots, Lauryn Hill, Black Thought, K’naan. There is a connection made doing these live shows.
DX: That’s one of the most inspiring stories that needs to be told more often, especially in detail as you celebrate 10 years now. K’naan is one of the most talented emcees that isn’t necessarily being revered for his talents. That project sounded incredibly difficult. You had to listen to it in order to believe it.
J. Period: I think that’s true, that’s why I liked it. I like projects that sound the most ridiculous. When I asked him who his favorite artists were and he told me I said, “That sounds ridiculous. Let’s do it.” So the more of a challenge it is the more I desire to do it.
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DX: Have you ever met Femi Kuti?
J. Period: I actually met him when he did a show at Summer Stage. But it was very brief, like a “Hey how are you doing? Respect to you” kind of thing.
DX: I wonder what his reaction would be to that tape.
J. Period: The best reaction I’ve gotten to one of my tapes was to the Lauryn Hill and the Q-Tip mixtapes. With the Lauryn Hill mixtape, I’d met her brother about six months after I made the tape and he was really excited to me meet me. He said, “You have to understand, my sister has had your CD in the CD player in the kitchen for two months and she won’t play anything else.” I was like, “Seriously!? Thank you.” With Tip, it was literally a year after I put it out he listened to it and I saw him backstage at one of Peter Rosenberg’s Noisemaker events. He came up to me and literally bowed to me. I was like, “Stop it, I bow to you. You don’t bow to me.” He was like, “I listened to it and it was incredible.” So that was the stamp of validation for me because if I can take your work and make it how I appreciate it then the job is done.
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DX: Have you ever gotten a negative reaction to a mixtape from fans or artists?
J. Period: No. I’ve never had a negative reaction to a mixtape from fans. One mixtape in particular became embroiled in controversy but that was due to the bureaucracy around sample clearances and so forth. I’ve never had anyone say “That J. Period mixtape was wack.” That doesn’t get said.
The Mary J. Blige Controversy
DX: Which tape had the controversy?
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J. Period: Mary J. Blige. Also, it was the controversy that turns something into something bigger and better. A tape that I made that at one point could’ve came out as an album, and then logistically it was impossible so it didn’t come out and has never been officially released.
DX: Which tape were you most relieved at the end of?
J. Period: Probably The Messengers because again, I didn’t know how possible it would be to make it all work. So when I was finished with that and had felt that I had did the three artists featured justice, I was very very happy.
DX: They all are kind of like time capsules. Because of the tracks, samples and the interviews you come away feeling closer to the artist. Was that an unintended by-product after the Nas tape?
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J. Period: The Nas tape was the spark of inspiration. From there it evolved to become more in-depth and more involved. I tried to take a slightly different approach with each music tape to experiment. I definitely feel like you learn more about the artist, that’s one of the goals: To learn more about the artist. So one of these instances was with Q-Tip and how “Jay Don’t Walk Away” lead to “Award Tour” and Questlove when he heard that was like “I don’t even know that.” I was like, “Ok! I’m coming up with some jewels if the man who knows everything didn’t know that.” So it’s definitely an educational thing.
One of the things I was always conscious of was when I put the interviews on the mixtapes, that was unheard of. But at the end of the day you still had to get down to it, and it had to flow and the timing had to be right so that you’re never getting too much of anything and get board. A mixtape like the Nas tape has stood the test of time because there is a timeless quality to the music that keeps it flowing and moving forward and I keep that in mind whenever I make a tape.
The most recent tape, the James Brown mixtape I kind of experimented with pushing the envelope when telling a story and now I think the playing field has changed to the point where if you make an experience like that it tells a story and makes people want to put their headphones on and listen all of the way through. It’s no longer about passing it by with nobody paying attention to you. It’s like, “I’m making a musical documentary.” I thought about flipping that James brown tape with no interviews so you could just vibe to it. Then I was at a bar and they were playing it at a bar and I found that people could still rock with it even though they’re hearing talking and a story.
