DJ VLAD

By Mark Williams-Washington

Shine recently caught up with one of the most creative cats in the mixtape game, DJ Vlad. He’s originally from the west coast, and if you don’t know who he is, you been sleeping for a couple of years. My dude been putting it down, so go copp his sh*t...

Shine: So what’s good fam?

DJ Vlad: Ay – man just chilling right now.

Shine: What are you working on right now?

DJ Vlad: Well, right now a hot cam DVD that comes back from the printers tomorrow. So that’s about to drop next week. That’s been about a year in the making. It’s a real big project. It’s called Hot In Here DVD - Sex, Drugs, and Hip Hop. We got the biggest hip-hop stars, like Fat Joe, Fabolous, Ying Yang Twins. And we go to the porn sets, we go to Brazil. We got actual crackheads wildin' out. It’s kind of crazy.

Shine: (Laughing) Word you got crackheads in there?

DJ Vlad: Crackheads in there. What you know about that?

Shine: (Laughing)

DJ Vlad: We got another DVD about to drop. It’s called What’s Cracking.

Shine: So what made you move from California to New York?

DJ Vlad: Ay man, you know what, it’s just the resources in New York are crazy. You know if you do hip-hop, New York is where it started. And you trying to impact hip-hop on a worldwide scale, then NY is a place that you have to be at.

Whether you are here all the time or whether you are here a lot, you have to be here. You got MTV, The Source, XXL, BET, Vibe, you know all these kind of outlets is what you need to have access to if you trying to be a big dog in this game.

Shine: What inspired you to do the "Unsigned Heat" column on your website?

DJ Vlad: It’s like everything is always changing. You never know who that next hot dude is going to be. When you recognize that talent you have to let it grow. You could be the hottest dude in the world, but if you just sitting there in your bedroom, you not really going to get to where you need to be. The key is promotion. I try to give cats an outlet to promote themselves. Cats have gotten deals from being on that column up there.

Shine: That’s what’s up, much respect to that yo. How did you hook up with Dirty Harry, how that went down?

DJ Vlad: Basically we had a friend in common and we met at a strip club. We were posting in a strip club and we started pollying. He been doing it for a long time, and we just started bouncing ideas off of each other, and came up with doing this Biggie idea. It just worked out well. The chemistry is real good between us.

Shine: What artists have you broke so far?

DJ Vlad: My man Balance, I been pushing him real hard since my very first mixtape. He’s really starting to make some noise right now. There is a cat name Aasim, he is signed to Bad Boy right now. He is really going to do some interesting sh*t. I was pushing Saigon way back when…he starting to make a lot of noise now. You know Kay Slay is f*cking with him. Tomorrows Weapons, they got a song called "Mira Mira," which is getting thousands of spins.

Shine: Do you do production outside of your mixtapes?

DJ Vlad: Like beats and all that? Not so much. I kind of get more satisfaction on finding a really hot beatmaker. You know, and kind of sitting down with him and kind of vibing with him. Like right now I’m doing a lot of work with Roc Raider from the Executioners. We got this big thing coming out in a few weeks called Rock Phenomenon.

It’s going to be all hip-hop and rock. With him, I’ll bring him an idea—like a blend—and I’ll give it to him, and he will flesh it out and turn it into a real beat. He will take the original beat I used and chop it up and sh*t like that. To me that’s much more satisfying, ’cause I’m not that dude right now that will sit over the drum machine for three days straight. There’s cats who really like doing that a lot more than I do, so I let them do their thing as opposed to me.

Shine: You’ve been credited to be the first DJ to release a mixtape through an MP3 format, what made you think of doing that?

DJ Vlad: I was in Cali, and unlike New York, there ain’t like a million outlets for mixtapes. There was really just like one or two. And, it was important for me to get this music out to a lot of different people. I would see something circulating around from this dude named Prize Fighter. Whenever I would go and search for MP3’s I would see his remixes and everything; so I was like “Yo, what’s up with some mixtapes?” So I started putting some mixtape joints on the Internet, and it was kind of surprising how many people got that sh*t in their hands. I started getting e-mails from all over the world. That sh*t was crazy. So I was like, I think I might be on to something here.

Shine: What do you feel are the ingredients of a good mixtape?

DJ Vlad: I think a really good mixtape has to capture the moment, the era that it is in right there. You have to capture it a certain kind of way. A lot of people who do mixtapes kind of do it. You know what I mean, you can have your exclusive songs, but then again a week later every other DJ might have those same songs. First of all, what I look for is it has to be able to be marketed a certain way. People have to want to care about the mixtape as a whole. It could be whether you have songs on it that are crazy, or some blends on it that are crazy, or just have someone on there like a host just saying some sh*t that people want to talk about.

Like – I had Shaq on one of my mixtapes hosting and he dissed Kobe on it. And that was hot, and the next thing you know ESPN was talking about the mixtape and sh*t. Or like we dropped the Tupac “Rap Phenomenon” on the seventh anniversary of Tupac’s death. There was a lot of sh*t going on around Tupac like – the Tupac movie had just been released. It was all this hype about Tupac and then we just dropped this crazy mixtape right at that moment. So it’s a combination of sh*t. It’s also the timing.

Shine: How many mixtapes have you put out over your entire career span?

DJ Vlad: Ay man, not as many as I should. Like about twenty. I don’t drop that often. Maybe more than that, maybe twenty-five. You can go to my website and check it out.

When I drop I’m like an artist. I don’t just want to throw together some bullsh*t just to put it out. When I do [drop], I kind of want to put my heart into it. And these days the more I get into this music business and the more I get into my career, the more sh*t I get into. It’s not just doing mixtapes. At one point all I did was mixtapes, but now it’s like I do a lot more sh*t. I got the radio show, I got the DVD sh*t, and all that kind of sh*t, so it’s like it takes a long time. I’d rather spend a little bit longer and make a hot @ss mixtape than just kind of throw out some bullsh*t, then have mutherf*ckas be like, “this is just another wack @ss mixtape”.

Shine: What do you think of DJ’s that aren't so creative?

DJ Vlad: I think they have their purpose. Like you got cats like Big Mike who, basically, they don’t do creative sh*t, but they have a system where they get all the f*cking new music from all the artists that people care about. We call it street crack. They drop the sh*t and a week later they drop another mixtape. I think there is a place for that. Like some people just want to hear the songs. They want to hear the new D-block song or the new G-Unit song, and that’s it. They don’t really care about that other sh*t, and some people care about more creativity sh*t. Everyone kind of plays their position and does their thing based on their skill level.

Shine: Can we expect an instrumental tape from you?

DJ Vlad: Nah, there’s no creativity in that. If I do, it would be under a fake name or something. I don’t want to put my name behind that sh*t.

Shine: Where can we copp your mixtapes?

DJ Vlad: djvlad.com, mixtapemurder.com—they always got the official joints.

Shine: Any last words or shout outs?

DJ Vlad: Check out the website www.djvlad.com. Peep that DVD. I’m about to be in the DVD game real heavy. I was the first west coast dude to really come out to New York and make a name for myself, and I did it in a couple of years. I’m going to be a beast, and when I’m really inspired by some sh*t, I attack it real hard. I’m about to be up in the DVD world, the movie world, and the TV world, so look out for that sh*t.

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