DJ Quik watched first-hand as Death Row Records went from being on top of the music business to shuttering its doors – and he ultimately blames the demise on Suge Knight.
Quik spoke about the famous record label during his recent visit to Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s All The Smoke podcast. The famed producer/rapper was signed to Death Row in the 1990s, after already having success on his own, and even stayed on after Snoop Dogg, Kurupt, Nate Dogg and others left.
When asked about his time there, he noted that it had its moments – like getting to hear Dr. Dre‘s The Chronic before the rest of the world – but otherwise wasn’t being ran right.
“Sometimes it was cool and then it just became the streets,” Quik began. “All the stuff that I got away from, all the gang-banging and all that, just met me right there head-on at the office. It was hood shit. And you had to kind of be hood to deal with it because they were in there – them n-ggas was detecting fear.
“They just wanted to see if you were scared. Make you feel some kind of way. It’s like, that energy doesn’t go with making the right songs. Songwriting is a beautiful process, you know what I mean? And it’s a lot of thought involved. You got guys in here gang-banging and shit and threatening you and saying crazy shit.”
He added: “It was dangerous and it didn’t have to be, because it was the greatest record company at one point in the world. It was going to be the biggest thing in the game.”
Quik then turned his attention to Knight and how it felt being around him. “But just the ego of the boss… You know, you never wanted to get on nobody bad side. It was like just walking on egg shells all the time. A bunch of anxiety, a bunch of nervousness. A bunch of people in there playing like they tough just so they don’t get punked. That wasn’t it.
“I signed up for some bullshit when I went in there. I was like, ‘Why did I even come over here? I got my own shit. I got my own label. I got my own record company.”
“But again, sometimes it was cool,” he continued. “Like when ‘Pac came through – that was dope being in there watching. I used to go to the studio when Dre was working on Doggystyle and just letting us hear snippets of it. I’m just sitting in there with my wig blown back at just the quality of the shit.”
“Dre called me up there. They gave me cassettes of The Chronic before it came out. so I’m rolling around with The Chronic in my car and everybody was like, ‘What is that?!’ You know, you’re the man when you got some shit like that. Straight out the muthafuckin’ building. And it didn’t know that The Chronic was gonna be that. But it did. It became a fucking juggernaut of Hip Hop.”
Quik concluded: “But it just seemed like Suge just got – he just went left on everybody, bro. Threatening n-ggas, punching n-ggas, beating up n-ggas. Like I didn’t come here to be no punching bag, y’all.”
In early 2022, Snoop Dogg became the new owner of Death Row after acquiring the rights from MNRK Music Group (formerly eOne Music). Just this week, the rap legend inked a deal with former Apple executive Larry Jackson to distribute Death Row Records’ iconic catalog to the masses.
Two future albums from Snoop Dogg and distributing Death Row’s catalog — which includes Snoop’s Doggystyle, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and 2Pac’s All Eyez On Me — are among the first slate of projects that have been announced.
Dj Quik has some classics and defiantly laid the foundation for the west coast
It’s definitely, bro, defiantly is a completely different word. For example.
Snoop DEFINITELY made some money from being a mediocre rapper with zero work put in. However, Snoop DEFIANTLY states that he is a true Long Beach Crip despite gang members in his own city laughing at that claim.
Quit hating on snoop
He didn’t go left. People said RBX was about to get the shit beat out of him for stealing Suge’s chicken when they first started off. So how you go left from that? He was acting the same way from day one. Quick just didn’t expect him to snap over on him too.
Btw, that mentality was part of the secret sauce of keeping motherfuckers cranking out good music. It was their edge. He ran it like a gang with all of the gang mentality in there, but they were putting out good music and getting money from it. So who is to say he was wrong? Like somebody said about people getting their asses kicked, they don’t tell the other part of why it happened. You steal your boss’ food like RBX did, and there are going to be some consequences most places you work. Suge was like we’re family and we’re also hood, so that means you got to square up. Nobody was just jumping on your ass because you were chilling. However, that ghetto mentality produced some great music. Never been anything quite like it in the game before or since. Mofos acting like they have regular 9 to 5 jobs. You knew what it was. Everybody in the industry knew what it was because Interscope and Jimmy Iovine was at the other end of the hall on the same floor, and Dre stopped coming up there after 1993.
it’s pretty impressive you typed all that, being so clearly retarded.
I thought the same thing: imagine being so obviously brain damaged and being able to type some stuff that almost looks like sentences, but then I remembered DJ Khalid is able to remember to breathe often enough to stay alive, so the lesson here is sometimes miracles are real.
Because you sound like a bitch.
Oh, I forgot that this is the young dumb generation who doesn’t like context. Either that or one of these white supremacists who come to the site to troll.
“who’s to say he was wrong?” – time. When you look back at what COULD have been had Suge not been acting like a gangster but tried to run a real business, maybe Dre doesn’t leave and Death Row ends up signing Eminem and 50 Cent to the label instead of them being on Aftermath. It’s like saying “yeah we stole a bunch of cars and ended up causing our own downfall, but man wasn’t it cool to ride around in a bunch of new Benz’s for a little bit”
That’s the point though. In the vacuum it was in back then, it worked. Who says Eminem could ever work over there anyway? Everything worked the way it was supposed to. It’s like X talked about they were close to a deal with them. He might have gotten put on the backburner when Pac came like a lot of people when Pac got there, and the drug addiction would have certainly been exacerbated probably even worse than it was around all of that shit going on at Death Row. Shit worked out the way it was supposed to.
I just be laughing at dudes who were criminals before they started rapping getting upset because a dude ran his label like a gang, something they all knew before they fucked with him. Everybody in the industry knew. It’s like if you go in the military and complain that it’s not like the civilian world. However, they train soldiers a certain way to get the results they want, and if you don’t conform, they punish you in ways that wouldn’t stand up at a regular job. You get in trouble if you get caught cheating on your wife in the military, but that doesn’t happen in the regular world, and they do that to instill fear and discipline in soldiers. His approach got results, probably the best run in hip hop history for a label from 1992 to 1996.
ain’t you heard? Suge been gettin his ass noodled like a lil ho…