DJ Muggs has made a solid name for himself in the game rocking the tables for Cypress Hill and producing for everyone from House of Pain and Mobb Deep to Zack de la Rocha and Pearl Jam. Our man J-Who? gets at him to talk a bit about his production style and the evolvement of his music.

Website: Djmuggs.com

J-Who?: Peace Muggs

Muggs: What up homie, shoot with the questions I got the answers.

J-Who?: What kind of a setup do you have over there?

Muggs: We have some MPC 3000’s over here, we record onto the windows, that’s our basic shit right there. Then we use various keyboards to pull sounds off of. I use Reason, I don’t really program into the computer. I use Reason to store all my sounds in there, keep all my drums and shit in there. Everything else, we sample, we have musicians come in at times.

J-Who?: What do you think about the new (MPC) 2500?

Muggs: I think it’s interesting it’s cool ya know what I mean? Personally I don’t equipment hop, I grab something, and I stick to it so when I close my eyes I can work it. When I’m constantly making records I don’t have time for the learning curve, to sit there and try to figure something out when I’m trying to be creative. In my spare time I might mess with something new, ill learn it on the side and then add it to my arsenal, but I never just turn over into something new.

J-Who?: Do you advocate keeping it simple? A lot of producers are like you don’t need a lot of shit, that all you need is your crates, your tables….

Muggs: It’s always simple, you can’t over think music, it ain’t rocket science, it’s music, it’s emotion, its feeling and trying to be able to transfer that emotion and feeling across to tape ya know what I mean? Or now it’s just digital fuckin air…the greatest music in the world from Louis Armstrong, to Ella Fitzgerald, to Pink Floyd, to Michael Jackson is simple. All these computers ain’t gonna make you better or nothing, if you ain’t got it the computers ain’t gonna help you get it. What it’s doing though is making the mothafuckas who would be garbage period, it’s letting to many mothafuckas into the game and making them just good.

J-Who?: Riiiiight.

Muggs: And when there’s a bunch of good shit it’s like ehhhh….just average…it’s like a bunch of average looking bitches yo, it ain’t doing you no good. It’s just too accessible for the average joe to just get something and think that he’s a producer now.

J-Who?: I feel you a lot of dudes get their hands like on a KORG Triton, then everything comes out sounding like that. There’s not a lot of innovation in Hip-hop now. Public Enemy used to take little pieces of different songs and make like a musical collage out of it, but nowadays everything is the same old mundane… monotonous… its just a bunch of bloops and blips and shit…ya know what I’m saying.

Muggs: I’m not mad at what their doing. I wouldn’t want Hip-hop to go back to the late eighties for the simple fact that mothafuckas wouldn’t be making dough, we wouldn’t have no Grammy’s, we wouldn’t have no video shows all over, we wouldn’t have our shit played on daytime radio, that’s the struggle we got through, and with that struggle, trying to get on the mainstream, what their gonna do is mainstream it out for you and that’s what they did. Back in the day you couldn’t be on rand b records or you was wack or you sold out, now you go on the rap charts and the first three records, are fuckin r and b records. That shit is amazing to me how it happens, but I’m never gonna be the mothafucka sitting back bitchin and complaining. I might not like it, or appreciate it but I’m gonna understand it and find out what I gotta do to dwell in this environment and keep my shit moving. I personally need that shit cause that makes my shit that much more special.

J-Who?: True indeed. How do you feel that your music has evolved with the times?

Muggs: My music has just changed…personally I went through changes from just wanting our albums to be just Hip-hop, to doing rock records, to doing albums with Tricky to Janet Jackson, U2 Pearl Jam, Dre, Wyclef, GZA, Lauren Hill…the reason I got into the music was the spirit of Hip-hop and what it represented and the way the underground culture was, and what it was about ya know what I mean? It was more than the music, it was our lifestyle and the lifestyle has changed so much for the Hip-hop culture. I still wanted to tap into that time and what we was waving the flag for. Back in the day it was about being original about thinking outside the box, going to the left, there was no rules for Hip-hop. There was a word called biting, you couldn’t sound like nobody, sound like nobody, you couldn’t use the same beats, same style. It was some shit called wack. You was wack. If you was wack you wasn’t being accepted into Hip-hop. Now if you tell someone their wack, oh you’re hatin’. Yea you might be a good businessman, but your wack, I ain’t hatin homie. They came up with this fuckin word for that. A haters a hater. If someone is dope and their making money you’re a hater, but your wack homie your wack. Mothafuckas aren’t understanding that.

J-Who?: That word hater kinda protects the wack niggas..

Muggs: Yeah! So I’m saying the spirit when we came into the game, we stood for something, everybody’s a follower now, like a puppet, it’s funny watching them, this is the new word, the new style of beat, flip your hat to the left, that’s the new shit…everybody’s like let me get a tattoo on my neck, its like Jesus fuckin Christ… we gotta a bunch of followers thinking their leaders. It’s only a few leaders and those are the few who are really doing it.

Posted by J-Who? on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 and is filed under SICKWIDIT, SPOTLIGHT.