J Rocc in Bonafide

• May 31, 2011

The following is an excerpt from the J Rocc feature by James Ernesto Lang, published in Bondafide Magazine #5, their Old School x New School special. J Rocc talks about the making of his album Some Cold Rock Stuf and his time working with J Dilla.

J Rocc, a name probably unknown in the mainstream yet is one of the most fundamental cats in hip-hop. A founder member of L.A. turntablist crew the World Famous Beat Junkies, J was the third member of Jaylib and is part of the Stones Throw family. He also makes number one in many heads’ DJ lists. After years of being known solely for his selective and manipulative powers on the turntable, he’s now turned his hand to releasing an album, Some Cold Rock Stuf.

“Dilla was still alive when this album was signed,” he recalls down the phone from his L.A. crib. “That’s how long this has taken. Egon [who runs Stones Throw Records with Peanut Butter Wolf] was like, ‘You know we paid you in advance for that album? Where is it?’ Then I realised he was serious.”

It’s taken a while for others to get their head around it too, with J recently resorting to tweeting, “MY ALBUM IS NOT A MIXTAPE,” all caps to emphaise that, while he’s thrown out more mixtapes than most DJ’s have records, this is his first album proper.

The album is old-school through and through, and an encyclopaedia of breaks. It both demonstrates J Rocc’s reputation as a digger of crates extraordinaire and his ability to suck-up new technology like a hip-hop hoover. The LP is both contemporary and like something that would have been played out loud from a boombox back in the day. “I used CDJs on the album for looping, time stretching, all that stuff. But I use Serato to make beats too. I use anything. I used to use a 4-track before I had a sampler, layer those beats on top of each other. I got no problem looping a break by hand – it’s 2011, you can use whatever you got.“

“Me and Egon went back Me and Egon went back and forth with it. Jeff and Wolf agreed it was a good idea – Wolf didn’t hear it until a week or two after mastering. He wasn’t as hands on as he is with Dam Funk, Hawthorne and those dudes. I’m different – I don’t pull out my stuff for him to listen to in the car like those guys might. Some tracks I definitely had an audience in mind, like the megamix cut-up, to make it danceable. But some of ‘em I was just trying to make beats, not really for a certain audience. Just making it for me in the hope that people will listen to it and dig it.”

Part of what makes this a real album, in J’s terms, is that it is a vinyl release. “I can just put a download up on Soundcloud anytime and call it an album. This [album] had to be more concrete.”

Unsurprisingly, making the physical product look sick was a priority. If you owned tens of thousands of records, wouldn’t you want yours to stand out a little? Both the vinyl and CD versions of the album come elaborately packaged. “The DangerDoom vinyl on Lex Records was dope. Oh No and Alchemist did a chainsaw – it’s not supposed to be sharp but you can damage yourself. I actually just picked up vinyl shaped as a fan by A Taste Of Honey – that’s pretty crazy looking. I have a ‘50s Disneyland record that has each record in a booklet…

“I know my vinyl’s expensive. That’s why we made it some other shit, we tried to make it so you get a couple other things like the poster and stickers. Jeff Jank designed the album packaging with Gustavo Eandi, who did the drawing. Jeff submitted a number of covers but wasn’t happy with any of them. Now he’s spent so much time going back and forth with the printers because they kept fucking it up. He had to make the jewel case for the CD by hand and took that into the CD place, a prototype, because there simply wasn’t anyone that could do that. Jeff went really all out; he put time and effort into it to make sure it all made sense. He wouldn’t settle for the first try, he always wanted to change it up.” [See photos]

What if Stones Throw had said they wanted to do download only first, then see how it does before a vinyl release? “I don’t know, man. It would have to be my second or third album. My first album has to be vinyl, be official. Even if you don’t have fancy artwork, if you can just do a limited press, then that can only be a good thing. You gotta take care of the vinyl purists – there’s always somebody out there that wants the vinyl, not the CD or download.

“The vinyl pressing plants, they’re the last of the Mohicans. But as long as someone’s pressing records up they’ll be in business. Unless, like Technics, companies stop making the parts. Even that equipment is ancient though! They’re probably working on a new edition made in 88…”

J Rocc took much inspiration from Dilla during their friendship and since his passing. “On Donuts, all the time stretching, plug-ins and crazy shit, all done in-house. He didn’t care what he was using – whatever was available. If I came over to his house hyped about Ableton, he would have tried Ableton. When Madlib bought some little in-house sampler, Dilla went out and bought one too. He didn’t trip, he was definitely a technology head. He’d be like, ‘Yo, J Rocc, you didn’t get these plug-ins yet? Man!’ He would use keyboards and all that shit too, but… if I could show him what Ableton could do now he’d be like, J Rocc, what!

“If he was here now, he would have been on some other shit.. Probably like Flying Lotus plus him plus Madlib plus a frickin’ dash of Questlove, Alchemist… everyone who is influenced by him. Imagine all the dopest elements of those people.

That would be him right now, ‘cos all those dudes were influenced by him. He switched it up every fucking time. The beats he was playing me just before he died were some other shit! The last batch, man. They were like Donuts, but a different style. Still chopped loops but… I can’t even explain it. I would go to Dilla’s at least once a week just to kick it, play records, smoke… just chill. Common would be there ‘cos they lived together, Ma Dukes would be there… he would definitely, definitely be on some other shit. He just got his keyboard back, his Voyager, just before he passed… MAN. Then he would’ve took it somewhere else from there! All this shit now, he would have done three or four years ago. You would know who the father of the style was.

“With Stones Throw he went back to the underground. ‘Fuck all this major label shit, these fools fucking with me. Just put my shit on Stones Throw. They wanna release a beat tape? Go ahead, release the beat tape.’ He was close to everybody. From Jeff Jank to Wolf, even probably some of the people that were in the office at the time — everyone was hella close.”

J Rocc is in the right family when it comes to vinyl appreciation. Stones Throw could run a great business solely out of digital sales, but they’re one of the few last bastions of keeping wax alive, and J and his mates still make the time to wade through the vinyl underbelly of Los Angeles. “But I don’t really run into anybody if I go record shopping. Usually I’d go with Madlib, [Beat Junkie] Rhettmatic… L.A.’s so spread out. Everybody goes, just they don’t tell each other when. Everybody tries to be secretive. There’s a lot of good records still out here man.

http://stonesthrow.com/jrocc
http://www.bonafidezine.com

J Dilla & J Rocc photo by Egon, circa 2004