Planet Money - The Mixtape Drama

Episode Date: December 19, 2020

Mixtapes were the heart of hip-hop culture in the 90s. Until an arrest in 2007 brought it all down. | Today's episode is from our friends at Louder Than a Riot.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it is fundraising season and the easiest way to support our show is to go to donate.npr.org slash planet money and donate to your local NPR station. That is donate.npr.org slash planet money. Thanks so much. This is Planet Money from NPR. A warning before we begin. This is a Planet Money adaptation of Louder Than a Riot. And this episode is explicit in every way. It was a chilly January day in 2007.

DJ Drama was in his Atlanta studio with his affiliates, working on his next big project. That's when Drama steps outside to move his car. I walked out the door, and then that was when I just, like, swat and helicopters and, you know, here come the SUVs, and they just, like, pull from all corners. Now, Drama plays it cool, because he knows that whatever it is, he's not the target. I'm not doing nothing, you know what I mean? I'm fucking DJj drama like i'm

on the radio i'm making mixtapes and all right like we'll get to the bottom of this that's what i'm thinking yeah but then things escalate as they pull up they jump out with m16s like drawn right at me and i'm like you know i've never had an automatic weapon pointed at me. The four officers call drama by his government name, Tyree Simmons. They tell him to get on the ground and they take his ID. Then they get on their radios. And I hear him on the other end saying, we got one of the perps. So I start in my mind freaking out like, huh?

Like who? Y'all got one of them? Like, wait, there's got to be a mistake. It's clear that these officers are looking for a lot more than mixtapes, especially from the way they're barking. Tell us where the guns and the drugs are. Tell us where they are. Like they're going through the roof of the building and just looking for all types of shit. Like, just tell us where they are so we don't have to look no more his crime being a mixtape dj who got so influential it threatened the whole power structure of the music industry hello and welcome to planet money i'm jamesed, one of the producers here at Planet Money. It's a pleasure to welcome two of my NPR colleagues, Sydney Madden. Hey.

And Rodney Carmichael. What up? Who have spent the last couple years working on a show about, well, why don't y'all describe it? It's about the intersection of hip-hop and mass incarceration, and how the criminalization of hip-hop is really a microcosm for the criminalization of black and brown folk in America. Yeah, and how the music industry can be complicit in criminalizing the art form. So today's show is from your series, Louder Than a Riot, and it tells the incredible story of DJ Drama, a kid from Philly who grew up to be the mixtape king. Now, I was living in Atlanta

not too long after this all went down. And there's a lot to the story I had no idea about. Like mixtapes, how they're literally the origin of hip-hop distribution. Yeah, mixtapes launched the careers of so many rappers. Yeah, I mean, you can go all the way back to the Cold Crush brothers. 50 Cent, Jay-Z. That's mixtapes. Gucci Mane, Meek Mill.

That's mixtapes too Gucci Mane, Meek Mill, that's mixtapes too. And this whole cultural phenomenon, DJ Drama, helped make it a global movement. Until one day, it all just kind of came to a halt. Taking mixtapes from a cultural innovation to a criminal conspiracy. And DJ Drama, he was at the center of it all. And paid a pretty high price My name is Tyree Simmons also known as DJ drama also known as mr. Thanksgiving Also known as Barack or drama

Drama crews some of my monikers and then when people used to listen to me on mixtapes it'd be like hey yo it's the one and only mr thanksgiving dj drama so you know i can kind of go high we can go you know regular voice with it no matter what alias he chose at one point in time in the early 2000s and dj drama's voice it might have been the most recognizable voice in hip-hop. But Drama's story it starts back in 1996. He's already dropped his own mixtape called Illadel featuring Philly artists he's cool with like Black Thought of the Roots and he's made his way down to Atlanta to attend the historically black Clark Atlanta University. As a freshman in college, drama was still unknown. But one thing he did know was how to hustle.

He set his yellow boom box up on a campus trash can and hustle his mixtapes, homemade for the low low. You know, two for seven dollars or three for ten. And on a good week, he might have made about $150. But even then, he had this mystery sauce that separated

him from the pack, his marketing savvy. I was like a one-man show. You know, I was like, yo, I got DJ Drama tapes, but who's that? And everybody, I don't know. He just told me to set up shop. I've worked for him. I don't know the guy, but his tapes are here. And, you know, I, like, that was my hustle. But the mixtapes DJ Drama was hustling on the AUC promenade, they weren't necessarily like the ones you were dubbing for your friends off the radio. Early mixtapes were recordings of park jams and, you know, the New York City parks. Obviously, the Bronx is where it started. That's DJ Mars.

He's a famous Atlanta DJ, and he self-published the definitive deep dive on mixtapes, called The Art Behind the Tape. In the beginning, the only way to hear hip-hop was at the party or to hear it recorded on a mixtape mixtapes were the genesis of hip-hop distribution now after the part jams came the mc battles they got recorded and circulated on cassettes then came the era of the djs creating mixtapes at the crib that sounded just like you were at the party. Skip another few years and then there's DJ Clue. DJ Clue. Back again.

Represent Queens. To the fullest. Now he started doing something new. Featuring rappers on exclusive songs that you couldn't find anywhere else. He would have artists come to the house and make a song specifically for him. The only place you got that song was on a Clute tape. So he kind of changed it. Because before you were buying a tape because of the way a DJ was rocking. Now you're buying his tape because of the exclusive music that he has catered strictly for him.

Mixtapes like this define the culture. It's what drama grew up listening to, and it inspired him to make his own mark. The beauty of what a mixtape was is you didn't have to cross your eyes and dot your T's, so you didn't have to worry about clearances and splits and, you know, what the royalties were gonna be and payouts, and it was

just the Wild Wild West. That's where the concept Jackin' for Beats comes from, like give me that beat, fool. Yeah, but Jackin' for Beats ain't just a hip-hop thing. I mean, how many early blues standards were borrowed and reinterpreted over time? And jazz wouldn't be jazz without players quoting each other's riffs

in the middle of the set. It's a natural element of hip-hop because it's a natural element of Black music. Always has been. But here's the thing. Mixtapes, like sampling, use copyrighted material without permission. That's technically illegal. Copyright law goes back to 1790,

when it was created to give artists a financial incentive to create. But it's evolved over the years to be more and more restrictive. And now it stifles hip hop producers who rely on sampling. And remember, when drama started making mixtapes, there was no Spotify, Apple Music. I mean, this was still the era of physical mixtapes dubbed straight to cassette. Distribution was hand to hand. Really, promotion was word of mouth. I mean, either you knew where to go or you didn't. This was strictly an underground economy. There was a code of silence among those who were in it.

You didn't talk about, like, selling mixtapes. There was definitely that, whoa, whoa, we don't sell mixtapes. These are free. You know, it's for promotional use only. For promotional use only. And sometimes you find it stamped right on the cover art of the mixtape. Yeah, basically, most mixtapes in this era were unlicensed compilations of previously released music. That means there was no way to collect the royalties owed to artists or their labels from mixtape sales. And the industry let it slide for the most part until 1995. That's when the

Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA as it's called, took notice. The RIAA is basically an industry trade group created to protect and serve the major labels. Now, the RIAA does a lot of other things, like certifying all those gold and platinum plaques artists like to show off. But they also work with local and federal police departments to enforce copyright laws. But for whatever reason, in 95, enforcement was spotty at best. You didn't have to search hard for mixtapes. They were sold in street kiosks, flea markets, small independent record stores.

You just had to know where to look. But it wouldn't be long before bootleggers around the country started selling dramas mixtapes. And he'd be too big for the industry to ignore. That's after the break. By 2000, Jhamas graduated from college. He decides he's going to launch a Southern mixtape series just in time for Birthday Bash. That's the big annual summer concert, hosted by the Atlanta hip-hop radio station 107.9. He coins the new series Gangsta Grills. The name is loud and menacing, just like the shiny gold grills down South rappers like to flash for the camera.

And just like the flash for the camera. And just like the King of Crunk. Yeah! ATL is your motherfucking nigga. One of them motherfucking kings of Crunk. So Lil Jon comes, does the drops for me. I guess this is where you guys can put the legendary Gangsta Grill drop in right here. I don't want to have to do it.

I want the people to hear it. Gangsta Grizzil. If you don't give a damn, we don't give a fuck. Yeah, that. Man, Gangsta Grizz was like Sonic wallpaper in Atlanta back then. Now, his drama is launching Gangsta Grizz. He gets a call from a local hustler who manages an up-and-coming artist. And he calls me and he says, hey, I got this new artist. We just signed to LaFace.

His name is T.I. And can I bring him through to do a freestyle for you? And I'm like, yeah, sure. You know, I never got a phone call like this ever. It's the first time anyone's ever called me off of one of my mixtapes to, like, do something for me. So they come to the crib, and this young kid with bifocals, you know, this intense southern drawl is, like, you know, in my little apartment in this little room where I make my mixtapes telling me he's the king of the South.

And I remember him leaving and me telling Sense, like, yo, that nigga's crazy. Like, he said he was the king of the South. He looked at me like, damn, why you want that kind of truth? He looked at me like, man, you bold. Now, T.I. wasn't exactly the king of the South. He looked at me like, damn, why you want that kind of trope? He looked at me like, man, you bold. Now, T.I. wasn't exactly the king of the South just yet. But through their

early collaborations, drama would help him earn that title. In drama, he would become a kingmaker with a style all his own. Man, it's time to bang this tape up.

The streets is fucking calling. I kind of wanted to just do it a little different. Like, I just wanted to give it a sense of a narrative. Not just regular shout-outs. Like, really, like, listening to the music and going along with what the music was about. You know what I'm saying? So, you know, really becoming, like, a real host, in a sense. Man, y'all niggas ready to do this Gangsta Grills?

Oh, man, you know what I'm saying? I'm born ready. Let's do it. Gangsta, Gangsta, Gangsta, Gangsta, Gangsta Griseal. So the process is kind of like you collect a body of beats that are like other people's instrumentals that are like big songs out at the time. I'm giving T.I.'s script to read, to create drops, to almost give the tape a narrative. So he's doing freestyles.

We're putting records that aren't out yet. And then I'm sprinkling in my ad-libs and my sense of my narrative. So, you know, you layer it with the music. Then you put the hosting, like the DJ aspect of it on there. And then you add the drops, the bells and the whistles. And then you have this like mixtape. Here goes nothing. I never heard classic. P.S.C. down with the motherfucking king.

DJ the fucking drama. Hey, what's happening, man? This T.I.P., you understand that? King go to South, reppin' the A-town to the fullest. Drama? He was just in his little apartment, making mixtapes. And this just shows you how raw and immediate the mixtape game is. No need for lawyers, drawn-out label meetings, or booking expensive studio time.

One minute you're on the phone, the next you're laying tracks. And at the same time drama's finding his voice, a new subgenre is emerging in Atlanta. One that would become known as trap music. A name inspired by the crack houses and traps where drugs are bought and sold. Now around this time, drama starts working with a dope boy turned rapper who goes by the name Young Jeezy. And for their big breakthrough, Gangsta Grill's mixtape, Trap or Die, nearly all the music is original. I mean, it was basically Jeezy's debut album before his debut album. Hard that I'm holding got a gangsta grin.

Heard from old school shitheads to be my coops. Got a hundred niggas with me and everybody gonna shoot. This kid from Philly, he was changing the course of hip-hop by representing the bottom. Not just the bottom of the map, but those perceived to be at the bottom of society. I didn't envision it. It kind of like, it just happened. i get thrusted into this into this spot where i'm like i am the voice of the streets that niggas didn't believe us now while mixtapes were on the rise, record sales were taking a steep nosedive.

It's 2005. The industry's on its deathbed. Major label releases are basically being cannibalized by bootlegging. Online streaming is still a pipe dream for the most part. And piracy sites like Napster are being cast as the villain. And the industry is so desperate that the RIAA is filing lawsuits against random fans for illegal downloading as a scare tactic. But while all that's happening, mixtapes are becoming more popular than ever. And DJ Drama, he's selling more than ever. Yeah, the mixtape game, it had its risks, but it also had its rewards.

Drama didn't have to license any of the music. He didn't have to pay rappers. And it cost probably 50 cents to print a CD. And he would sell it for $5 to $10. Did you have a sense of how many tapes you were moving a month? Gangsta group? you were moving like a month against the group? There were some months when we probably easily,

like, it could have been like $50,000, $75,000, something like that. And that's not accounting for the bootlegs? Not accounting for the bootlegs. He remembers watching as his bank account grew into hundreds of thousands of dollars. So even though the labels were losing money, they were benefiting from the mixtape game too, because it meant free promo for their artists before their official projects dropped.

Like, take Lil Wayne. Weezy was already a vet in the game when he decides to reinvent himself with the Gangsta Girls Dedication series, starting in 05. This right here is the Dedication 2D2 drama. Dramatic and no filious, man. I appreciate everything y'all does for me. Wayne's already a star by this time, but mixtape Wayne? He was a beast with that series. Listen close, I got duct tape and rope I leave you missing like the fucking earth balance

And all that mixtape buzz, it boosted his major label bottom line. His next major label release, The Carter III, ended up becoming Wayne's biggest selling solo album. As of 2020, it's six times platinum. Mixtapes did that. Yeah, and drama's career, it got a huge boost too. In 2005, the Atlantic subsidiary, Grand Hustle, TI's label, signed drama to a recording deal to create a legit Gangsta Grills album.

Record labels loved me. They were calling me all the time to work with their artists. Record labels loved me. They were calling me all the time to work with their artists. I started getting $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, $25,000 from labels to do Gangsta Grills with their artists because it was a way for them to now break their artists, per se. My relationships were A1 all across the board with all the labels. But grills popularity and it was starting to present some problems dj drama made a deal about this time with an independent distributor and they started selling his mixtapes in a major retail chain next thing you know drama says they were airing gangster grills commercials on bet

that's when he started to get a little nervous. They put barcodes on them. You can't put that in Best Buy. You been a barcode? That shit's, nah, you guys, no. Like, I didn't even realize that what we were doing was that big, that that was possible. By this point, Drama was selling mixtapes of Southern rappers on his Gangsta Grill's website,

which also had stuff like madonna michael jackson remixes on it so it's one thing to be a kid selling mixtapes on your college campus but it's something else entirely to be selling tens of thousands of dollars a week in cds all around the world and not paying a penny in royalties to the songwriters or labels you're trying to profit off of yeah and the pushback wasn't just coming from the RIAA either. Successive gangster grills, it was breeding contempt even among artists who really benefited from the series, but who also weren't getting paid from the mixtapes directly,

like Lil Wayne. Fuck you if you're a mixtape DJ. And all that heat from the RIAA, that's what led to that day in 2007 when the SWAT team showed up at Drama Studio. Tell us where the guns and the drugs are. Tell us where they are. Like, thank God there wasn't a weapon or a spliff in the building. Yeah, but what they do find is mixtape CDs. Tens of thousands of them. They confiscate the mixtapes along with studio equipment, computers, four cars,

bank statements, even the hard drives containing songs recorded for Drama's upcoming studio album. Then they take Drama and his Gangsta Girls affiliate, Cannon. They stand me up when I'm outside and they take out the paper and they say, Tyree Simmons, under the RICO law, you're being arrested for bootlegging and racketeering. RICO, that's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization. Now, these are kind of serious conspiracy charges used to take down dangerous organized crime outfits like the mob. A drummer doesn't even know what RICO stands for at the time. Fulton County SWAT team and officers from Clayton County raided DJ Drama's Gangsta Grills recording studio last night. And local footage on the 11 o'clock news that night,

Drama and Cannon are dressed in blues with their hands cuffed in a courtroom. Drama's trademark fitted cap is missing. It's like he lost his crown. This is my first time ever being locked up and I'm in the cell. People start hearing, yo, DJ Drama and Cannon are in here. So we go to court. As soon as we get in there, and they tell us no bond, no bail. Now I'm thinking, like, yo, I'm not going to see the sunlight again. Like, what the fuck did I do? I was making mixtapes.

Like, you know, how did this ever happen? This is when Drama finds out his arrest by local authorities was made in conjunction with the RIAA, the same trade organization whose seals appear on all those gold and platinum plaques hanging in his office. For Drama, this is deeper than a personal betrayal. It's a betrayal of hip hop. The labels wouldn't know what was coming next if it wasn't for mixtapes it's the veins of the culture everything in hip-hop from 95 to 2007 it happened all that shit everything came from mixtapes Biggie even the blend style from Ron G with R&B vocals over hip-hop beats, that's mixtape shit that became a style of music that the labels got rich off.

Like, 50 Cent, that's mixtape. Jay-Z and Clue, that's mixtape. Lil Wayne, that's mixtapes. Young Jeezy, that's mixtapes, bro. Like, it's all from mixtapes. Gangsta Grills is the biggest thing arguably ever in the mixtape history. That's hip-hop. Like, no.

This is what y'all make billions off of. Don't sit here and tell me that what we're doing is wrong. Fuck that. So why then did the labels go after drama? Well, we tried to ask the RIAA that. And despite several attempts, they wouldn't talk to us on the record. But Carlos Linares, who was vice president of anti-piracy at the RIAA when drama got arrested, he said this at the time to MTV News. There is no RIAA policy geared towards

going out and enforcing against mixtapes. We do, however, have an ongoing policy to help identify illicit music product and to bring it to the attention of law enforcement. After Drummer wakes up in a cell that morning, he finds out he and Cannon are able to make bail after all for $100,000 a piece. And that's when they find out how serious those RICO charges they've been slapped with really are. So I went to online banking and my shit said 0.00 and I just froze. A bank account full of hundreds of thousands of dollars reduced to nothing. In that moment, Drama says he broke down and cried. Drama and Cannon, they were charged with the Georgia state law that made it illegal to sell CDs without putting your name and address on them.

Essentially, it was a way for the state to enforce federal copyright law. And they hit him with a RICO charge on top of that for mass distributing the CDs. After the arrest, the charges against Drama and Cannon were dead-docketed, which means they would not be prosecuted. But the charges could be reinstated at any time. And Drama says the DJs were never given back all that money that was seized. There's a real irony of what's happening to him, because he done all this for the culture of hip-hop, which the industry benefits from.

And then the industry turned on him. Yeah, Sid. And, you know, like so many black cultural innovations before, man, the industry criminalized the mixtape. Then they co-opted it. Today, playlists like Spotify's Rap Caviar serve to fill some of the void mixtapes left. Yeah, but the main thing missing is the curator

who weaved it all together, the mixtape DJ. I mean, of course mixtapes still exist in name, and some of them do record-setting numbers and even get Grammy noms. But the era of the mixtape DJ discovering new artists and shaping the culture is over. DJ Mars said the mixtape game came to a dead halt. Distribution kind of died. You see these two dudes getting locked up on TV, nobody wants that. Like, nobody wants that.

So it just dried up completely. Totally. I felt some guilt because I'm like, yo, this shit, the mixtape, I can't let the mixtape game die on my shoulders.

Like, here's this culture I grew up loving and then I go to jail for it. If they can lock up Drama, nobody's safe. This shit's done. It's over. It's a wrap. Yeah, but Drama, he wasn't completely left out in the cold. Because after all that drama, the raid, the arrests,

the damaged hard drives and the emptied-out bank accounts, DJ Drama had something beyond street cred. And the same industry that locked him up, it wanted him back in. See, now that Drama had a criminal record, thanks to the music industry, his label Atlantic was more hyped than ever to drop his debut record. My record label was super excited. Oh, my God, you can't pay for this type of publicity. We're putting your album out ASAP. Move the release date up. Like, you're the biggest thing in hip-hop right now.

And guess what that first single was called? Beds Taking Pictures. You would've got the right nigga for this shit, man. Take the grocery bag. Let's take a picture. I'm a chick. I'm a chick. It's taking pictures. And that might sound like paranoia and overdrive. Because for the rest of the world, it's just entertainment. But for hip-hop, it was real life. Let's get a few things clear.

We wasn't the first to do this mixtape shit. But after we showed up, shit ain't been the same shit. And only because the streets need us. If you enjoyed this episode and want to support journalism like this, support your local NPR member station. You can do that by going to donate.npr.org. That's donate.npr.org.

Big thanks to the whole Louder Than a Riot crew who put together the original episode, to editors Michael May and Chiquita Paschal, producers Dustin Tisota, Matt Ozug, and Sam Leeds, Josh Newell, the engineer, and senior supervising producers Rachel Neal and Najri Eaton. Original music by Casa Overall, with additional scoring from Ramti and Ara Blui. And shout out to Jacob Gans, our digital editor,

and Will Chase, our fact checker. Y'all hit us up on Twitter. We're at Louder Than A Riot. And to follow along with the music that you heard in this episode, you can check out the Louder Than A Riot playlist on Apple Music and Spotify. This episode was produced by James Sneed. Hey, that's me. Appreciate you, folk.

Pew, pew, pew. Yeah. Engineering help from Gilly Moon. Jacob Goldstein was this episode's editor. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's supervising producer. And Brian Erstadt is Planet Money's editor. If you want more bass-heavy shows, check out the whole Louder Than a Riot series wherever you get your podcasts. They just had their season finale.

I'm going to binge the whole thing this weekend. I'm Sydney Madden. I'm Rodney Carmichael. And I'm James Sneed. This thing this weekend. I'm Sydney Madden. I'm Rodney Carmichael. And I'm James Sneed. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.