Arabian Prince

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

A lot of beat scholars from all relevant areas of the world are probably equally excited because today we’re going to dip into pretty uncharted territory. We’re talking about LA in the ’80s. Later on there was a group called N.W.A., which most of you will know, but there was also a thing called techno or electro earlier on which had not too much to do with all of the stuff you see in London and Berlin these days and all the crazy haircuts. But it was real street music. Therefore, the man who introduces himself on the phone at Brother Arab, welcome.

ARABIAN PRINCE

Thank you. [applause]

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So there’s a rumor now and then about a club called Uncle Jamm’s Army, but if you try and Google for it and find information for it, I think it’s hit number 85 and that’s only about a reunion party. And in this day and age you would think that every relevant club scene would be pinned down by now. Why has it been written out of history?

ARABIAN PRINCE

I don’t think it’s been written out of history, but I think a lot of the things that happened back in the '80s happened way before the internet. And anyone who had anything to do with that era, never took the time to document it. I mean, there’s not much video on it, except maybe the Breaking and Entering movie that shows Ice T, Chris 'The Glove', Egyptian Lover, a lot of what was going on on the West Coast in the '80s was never documented. Even to this day it seems a lot of people have forgotten where the street scene was at first – and I take some of the blame for it – before introducing gangster rap and kind of killing out the West Coast electro funk movement.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Now, for all of us who haven’t spent much time in LA, there’s a hell of a lot of streets in LA. Car culture has a hell of a lot more relevance there than anywhere else in the Western world. So what kind of music would you be listening to in the car, and how would that differ to what you’d hear in a club scenario?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, back in the day the music scene was kind of crazy. Just so you guys know, I’m old. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I made my first record when I was 15-years old back in, I think, 1981 or ’82, and we were kind of experimenting with music. I mean, we were all DJs and I had my own club in LA when I was 16. After school I would go and I had a cheap Technics turntable and as a matter of fact I had the turntable that had the straight arm back then – I forget the number – and there were no scratch pads back then. I don’t think they even existed, you had to cut paper and put it on there and go about your business.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Belt-driven or direct drive?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Belt-driven. So you had to be a good DJ if you wanted to scratch on them. But I think we were playing and listening to old school funk, at the time. Like Cameo and the Bar-Kays and Parliament-Funkadelic. That’s what we were playing. And on the other side there was a big punk rock movement, like Depeche Mode and Oingo Boingo and Kraftwerk, that was our big influence when we switched over to electro and Cyndi Lauper. We were playing funk and then also playing this kind of stuff in the same club.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

That same kind of club. What did it look like back then?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Whoo, well, the first club we had it was called The Cave in the back of an old pet store and it was like a pet feed store and I was 16 and I had to go get a job. So I had to go to the pet store, but this was no ordinary pet store. This guy sold like 100lb bags of pigeon feed and chicken feed and stuff.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Must’ve been smelly then?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Oh, smelly! And my job? It was carry these 100lb bags of chicken feed from here to here to here. But this guy owned a community center in the neighbourhood and at the weekend he’d do stuff like weddings and private parties and I was like, “Well, when there’s nothing going on, can we throw parties in here?” And he’s like, “What do you mean?” And I’m like, “Well, all the kids in the neighbourhood want to have something to do, and we can put together some parties and do something really cool.” So we tried it out and packed it out. The place held about 250 people and we packed it out, so we started doing it every weekend Friday and Saturday and it got pretty big. But what happened was it got too big and we had to start turning people away and then we’d get the fights because people couldn’t get in and stuff like that. Me and Egyptian Lover at the time were playing a lot of parks and little parties around town and we decided that we wanted to something a little bigger so we got together with some other guys and formed Uncle Jamm’s Army.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Which was named after?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, it was from Parliament/Funkadelic. Uncle Jam was one of the songs from an old Parliament/Funkadelic album, which we used as kind of our moniker. And they had all these little DJ crews back in the day, which was Uncle Jamm’s Army, which was me, Egyptian Lover and a couple of other people. Then you had Wreckin’ Cru, which was Dr Dre. Now people forget that Dr Dre was the big hip-hop ganster producer, but back then he was an electro head. Back then it was dance music, 130bpm.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Back then, was it the World Class Wreckin’ Cru?

ARABIAN PRINCE

It was just called the Wreckin’ Cru at the time, and back then they used to do dances on this side of town [points to one side] and we’d do dances on this side of town [points to other side]. We’d put up posters for our dances and they’d drive by and take our posters down. That’s how I met Dre, like we drove by one day, and he’s there like pulling the poster off, and I’m like, “Dude! What are you doing?” And so we became friends and started doing stuff together. But that was the scene back then, DJ crews battling each other. We’d do a club over here, and they’d do a club over there and we’d try and see who got the most. Believe it or not, back in the early ’80s the club scene was huge ’cause nobody had anything to do. So we would rent out the LA Convention Centre, which held like 5,000 people. Or we’d rent out the LA Sports Arena, which is where the Los Angeles Clippers Basket Ball team used to play at and that held like 10,000 people. We would sell out these things with DJs and people dancing.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What would they be playing?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Like I said, back then when we first started I think one of the first records I had on vinyl was “Pull Up to The Bumper”.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

The long edit?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, we had like all 12”s and used a lot of 12”s and like “Atomic Dog” and “Flashlight” and a lot of Parliament/Funkadelic and a lot of Depeche Mode and that weird fusion of music. And at that time that was kind of the beginning of the rap scene, too. Sugarhill Gang and "Planet Rock" had just come out when we started doing the bigger clubs. So that’s when we started to think we’re playing all this music and we love the music scene so much, we want to get more into it. So one show we were on stage – and this is the funniest thing, no one believes me till this day – we were at Toys R Us and I think it was Mattel had come out with this little bitty thing called Synsonic Drums. It had like four little drum pads on it and it was a toy for kids. And it had four pads and a bunch of little buttons and you’d press and it’d go ‘boo-boo-boo’ [makes Linn drum noise] and it had toms or whatever. So we’re like, “This is cool!” We took it to the dance and we were playing "Planet Rock" and then we go, “OK, Uncle Jamm's Army – live in concert,” and we start beating on the Synsonic Drums and people kept dancing. We’re like, “Whoa! They don’t care! They just want to party.” So then we bought an 808 and that’s when it got sick. We just started doing beats and stuff and soon after that we made a record, because we had this beat going and we started playing like a “Planet Rock” type beat and we didn’t rap back then, we hadn’t gotten into rap yet. So we would just go, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” and the people woud go, “No, no, no, no, no.”

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So almost like a Go-Go thing?

ARABIAN PRINCE

We made a record out of it.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You got the record there?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, I got it. We sold like a couple hundred thousand of those things and let me see if I got it [goes to laptop]. If I haven’t got it on vinyl here… and it’s amazing. That was the beginning of what we were doing at the time. And I just got to look back and think if it wasn’t for that… OK, I’ll play the vinyl.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What label did it come out under?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Back then we had a record label called Freak Beat. OK, here we go. I don't have the “Yes, Yes” song, but I have the first single that we did back then, and I’ll play that for you. There we go.

(music: Uncle Jamm's Army – “Dial-A-Freak”)

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What’s up with the balance? Sounds like the engineer was not very sober? Like, it’s not very crazy on the highs, and very bass heavy.

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, yeah like I say, that was our first ever record. But I don’t think it was the actual mixing of the record, but the pressing of the record. Beause that was the first one we did, and we went to some real cheap pressing house and the test presses came out really, really bad. We were just so happy to get a record out that it was a good thing. So that was really our introduction into it and from there we went on to make better records, you know? Egyptian Lover’s “Egypt, Egypt” is one of the biggest 12”s of all time.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You must have that there somewhere, right?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Oh yeah, I can play that for you. I mean, even today I look around and the “Egypt, Egypt” single is still one of the top played or top bought 12”s. In a re-release or whatever – it’s crazy.

(music: Egyptian Lover - “Egypt, Egypt” / applause)

So that was pretty much our style back then. Our style – I won’t say stole – but we were influenced a lot by Kraftwerk then and “Trans Europe Express”, “Numbers”, those kind of songs. We took a bit from “Planet Rock” ‘cause they took from them and we kind of made this thing. But we put a bit of funk into it, too, with some rapping which made it huge. Then we stole from the Arabic music to make it meld together and then we had like a new sound on the West Coast to go along with the breakdancing and stuff.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What’s up with the imaginary naming? It’s a bit like Afro-centricity meets Californian porn industry?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, I’d say that.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So the Egyptian Lover has sparked a lot of vivid imaginations around the world. What can you tell us about him?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Hmmm, I just spoke to him yesterday as a matter of fact. Cool guy. I think the influence of the whole Egyptian Lover, Arabian Prince thing is back in the ’80s and late ’70s that going into the '80s that was Prince and the Revolution era.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Are we talking the shirts against the blouses now?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Ha, ha! Yeah, there are pictures out there that I will never show anyone. ’Cause we used to wear like leather boots and the tight parachute pants and you know lace gloves and stuff. We used to DJ and at that time that was it – either you were down with Prince and Morris Day and that whole scene or you went to the punk rock scene or you were a rudeboy and you wore the black and white chequered stuff and the mod hats and all that kind of stuff. So we were into women! We thought we were hot and, “If we do this kinda thing, and in all of our songs we talk about girls and women, it would be cool.” ’Cause we knew that if the women came to the clubs, everyone else would come. And we had a little thing we would do with our clubs where we would line up all the guys, we let all the girls in the club, and leave all the guys outside for about 30 minutes, until it was time to let ’em in ’cause they wanted to get inside ’cause all the girls were in there.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

That’s a bit of testosterone...

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, but it worked, it kept us packed every week. Girls in free before 10 o’clock so all the girls get there at nine o’clock and you let 'em all in and by 10 o’clock there two or 300 guys just waiting to get in. Or even a couple of thousand, you know?

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

How long did these nights go? Was it an all-night affair?

ARABIAN PRINCE

That’s the bad thing about LA, even to this day, Los Angeles shuts down at two o’clock. Yeah, at 2am clubs are closing, no more alcohol, go home. We got the underground after hours clubs, which are not legal, but for the most part we shut down at 2AM. But from 10 ’til two it was non-stop party, people would never stop dancing. And the BPMs were all about 125 and upwards back then.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So before the BPMs drop, are we talking funk then and Prince, and then a bit of progression with the Kraftwerk thing and it picks up a little pace, how does it get up to 120 or 130 BPM?

ARABIAN PRINCE

How does it go up?

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Well, when did that happen?

ARABIAN PRINCE

You mean, going up to 130 BPM or faster? Hmmm, I think we were doing this whole thing and we found the faster the beats, the more people would party. And this is a little selfish on our part, but the faster the beats, the more they party, the more they sweat, the more they want to drink, the more money we make. That’s the honest truth. OK, people are sweating and they’re drinking. If you play slow music, they don’t sweat and they don’t drink. Fast music, they sweat they drink and you make more money. And we actually loved that feeling, it was high energy pounding beats, you know? Beats and snares and the vocoder that whole thing. It was the feeling that we liked at the time.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What did you guys know about other regional scenes that had phenomena like this, like Detroit, Miami or Ohio?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, you know, one of my best friends, Juan Atkins, which a lot of you guys already know, you know Cybotron and Technicolor and "Clear" and… Missy just sampled "Clear" for one of her new songs. That was kind of the same movement going on in Detroit. The same thing was going on in Miami with Miami bass stuff too. The music was pretty similar from LA to Detroit to Miami. But on the West Coast, we used more structured rap and if you listened to your West Coast rap you got 16 bars of rap then verse, chorus, another 16 bars of rap and it was more song-oriented. A lot of stuff out of Detroit was more instrumental or with a bit of chanting. And on the Miami bass side, there was just dirty talking all the way through it, it was like booty music just for the strippers. I think it all kind of fit together. ’Cause when we play in a club we play it all, you know? We play everybody's music, we don’t care. Europe, wherever, anything that came though the West Coast, we embraced it and played it and we incorporated it into what we were doing.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You just mentioned strippers and what a lot of people find hard to comprehend is what a big role strippers play in popular culture and music in the States. I mean, from like then, probably even earlier, up to Lil Jon or whatever – can you elaborate on that, and how that matches the puritan ethic of the rest of the country?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, you know sex sells, and a lot of people like sex and sexy music they go hand in hand because you go to strip clubs and what do they do? They dance to music. Or when you see videos, all the new videos or even the videos back in the day was always [about] the sexiness in the music, and that’s what draws people to the music. The sexiness of it, and that’s something we tried to make sure we put in all of our songs. The first five or six songs that I made, every one of them was talking about a girl, you know? And we’d think, ‘This could be a hardcore street cut, but we’re talking about girls,’ and even if you fast forward to now all the way to 2005, to the hardest gangster rapper out there, 50 Cent, 90% of his songs are talking about girls. It’s hardcore beats, but he’s talking about girls. Because he still knows in his head this is what sells.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So, you were talking about Wreckin’ Cru earlier, how did the Wreckin’ Cru become the World Class Wreckin’ Cru?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Riiiight. Well, this is when me and Dre and DJ Yella were getting together and were talking about how do we make more money? We got an 808 now, we can make beats.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

How did you find out about that in the first place?

ARABIAN PRINCE

I think the first time I saw an 808, we went to a store to buy some needles of something like that, and someone was playing it. Now, I hadn’t known at the time where that ‘BOOOM’ sound had come from. I was like, “How did they get that 'booooom'?” And I finally found out which drum machine it was and so we bought one, and started messing with it, messing with it and then we found out… Well, I’ma tell you guys a secret for those who don’t know. You probably already know, or you don’t use it anymore ’cause you can get it as a sample. But the click sound, that most people use, that Kraftwerk click, is from the 808 or some old analogue synth. But with the 808 we figured that if you take the pulse out, that you use for sync, to sync up other devices, and ran that into a mixer, you get this kind of clicking sound. And if you accent it, you get this kind of rhythmic electro-click thing. And we used it for all of the clicks in all of our songs. No one could figure it out. People were taking like hi-hats and try to EQ them, but unless you use that 808 click it never sounds the same.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Did you use the box the same as it ever was? Or did you open it up and modify it?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, my 808 was kind of tempermental, and I don’t know if you can hear it but my 808 had a phantom clap. Every now and then it would clap on its own ‘Clap [pause], clap, clap. Clap [pause], clap, clap, clap.' Like these little echoes, I think mine was broken. But it was cool, they only clapped on beats, so I kept it. I think the only thing with mine was that I MIDI’d it, I eventually got it MIDId. I still own it.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

But with MIDIing it, didn’t you lose any of the sequencing?

ARABIAN PRINCE

The feel of it? I mean, yeah, we did but we could actually run it into a sequencer at the time, so it was kind of cool. But you know, like you say, you lose that live feel. Some of the keyboards are played a little sloppy here and there, and but that was part of the sound and part of the feel. ’Cause I think for me part of the biggest record I ever did – well, I wouldn’t say the biggest – I spent $400 dollars on this record by a girl group called JJ Fad - “Supersonic.”

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Well, we should probably listen to it.

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah I’ll play you the song. I think we sold four or five million records with this thing. I spent 400 bucks in the studio on this thing.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

That’s a pretty good turnover.

ARABIAN PRINCE

808 and I think a Juno 60, that was it. We made one of the biggest… well, it was the first 12" to go gold on Ruthless Records. Even before the N.W.A. and Eazy-E stuff at the time. I’ll play that one for you a little bit.

(music: JJ Fad - “Supersonic” / applause)

There was a little something of a story behind that, too. Me and Dre used to date two of the girls from JJ Fad and…

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Not the same girl? Two different ones.

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, at the time, Dre had an old beat up Mazda ’87 with no back window. And we lived in LA and these girls lived in a city called Rialto, which had to be about an hour away. And being as young and naïve and as broke as we were, and you know, when you broke you don’t really have any women, we figured, “OK, whatever…”

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Is that true, though?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, we figured if you got girlfriends, you drive a long way to see ’em. We used to get on the freeway and drive out to these girls house. With no back window in the freezing cold to see ’em, and at that time we were still doing the electro funk thing. They would always tell us, “We can rap, we wanna do songs.” And we’re like, “Nah, we don’t think so.” We got them to rap for us and it was pretty bad. Anyway, they started doing this jump rope thing, like ‘Samma Samma Sue’ – I’ll have to play it so you can hear it. Anyway, this thing that little girls would do with their jump rope and we’re like, “That’s cool.” So I went to the studio one day where I was doing something else, and I made this beat and just had ’em rap on it and do that thing at the end. So they thought they were big time rappers and wanted to do another rap dissing Roxanne, the real Roxanne from Roxanne Shanté, who were really good New York rappers. So they wanted to do this song “Another Ho Bites the Dust” and we’re like, “Fine, whatever,” and we did “Another Ho Bites the Dust” and it was pretty bad, ’cause they can’t rap and they wanted to make it the A-side, so I’m like, “OK, fine. Just let me put Supersonic on the B-side.” And just as I thought, as soon as the DJs got it they flipped it over and started playing "Supersonic". They didn’t even care about the other thing. So we had to go back and repress the song by itself without the other one on it, and that’s when it blew up and became a big hit.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

When you say “we,” was this already including Jerry Heller?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, what happened with that was I made the song by myself, I just put up the money and made the song. And I put it out on another label company called Dream Team Records, I’ll play that in a minute, too, with some other friends of mine from back in the electro day. And they had just had a big hit with a track called “Rock Berry.” And so they were hot and I was like, “Well, here, let me throw this out on your label.” My own buddy tried to rip me off, he wouldn’t pay me. It started selling and he wouldn’t pay me so we took it back and when we started Ruthless Records, we re-released it on Ruthless. And so the rest was history on that. Let me play the end of the song.

(music: end section of JJ Fad - Supersonic)

So that part of the song right there? Everybody heard that part of the song and went nuts. And all over the radio that was all you heard for a year. Just because of the end of that song.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Did you ever do an edit which focused more on that?

ARABIAN PRINCE

We did do one, which I don’t believe I have here. It had a bit more of an edit, but that never really hit the radio much, ’cause by that time the song was already dead. But yeah, that’s another niche in the whole history of the electro thing. There was a lot of songs on the West Coast. Like, a lot of my songs and Egyptian Lover stuff, I’ll play one of my songs which was highly sought after. As a matter of fact, if you find one on eBay, call me ’cause I need it, I don’t even have the vinyl. Matter of fact, it’s going for like a 150 bucks right now. If you have it. But there was a song I made called “Take You Home Girl.”

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

But the one thing I’m wondering about – whether I’m just a stupid European wondering about it – is you got no money you ain’t got no girl, you put out records about, “Yeah, take me home girl…” it’s not exactly a subtle approach, is it?

ARABIAN PRINCE

No, it’s not.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Does it ever work?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Oh yeah, it worked, ha, ha! I mean, we went on worldwide tours after that. We used to go on stage when we were DJs. Let me tell anyone who’s a DJ, not to put anyone down, but when I go and see DJs in a club, when I go out, a lot of DJs are so into their mixes or their set that they forget about the people they’re playing for, they forget about the audience. They’ve practised their set and and they stick to it. Like, if the crowd doesn’t like what’s going on, they just stick to it. We try to do anything in our power to keep people partying all night, ’cause we knew that people came here to have a good time and we wanted to make them have a good time. We were always on the mic and always playing instrumentals of songs and changing the words. We’d make up our own songs to a song and people would actually come and ask me, “Aren’t you gonna do that other version?” Like, “We like it when you guys sing on top of it, as opposed to the regular record.” It was just something fun, it was something different. People just got tired of hearing the same old thing, and it just made the club seem really, really fun. And as far as the girl stuff went, we thought of ourselves, whether we were or not, as these suave cool debonair kind of DJs. And we tried to make ourselves that. And by doing those kind of songs the girls liked them and that impressed the radio and yeah, it worked. I’ll play you some of the “Take You Home Girl.” Now this song is pretty goddamn fast. This is about 135 BPM, let’s see.

(music: Arabian Prince - “Take You Home Girl” / applause)

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So, with all of these lines in there, will you be going to see Depeche Mode tonight?

ARABIAN PRINCE

They're here? Nice. I didn't know that. I might just go see them. I got to meet them a long time ago.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

When was the last time you saw them?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Like in the ’80s or early ’90s. It's been that long. But that was definitely one of the influences.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So when you were sitting there programming this stuff, you got 16 pads on the 808, and there’s not exactly much space to move around, regarding where the focus is. So how do you keep yourself entertained for all that time? Like, “Hmmm, I might do that on the two, or the two one…”

ARABIAN PRINCE

Ha! Well, at the time we wanted to be creative. We had so much gear and equipment that it’s almost harder. ’Cause if you only got an 808 and a keyboard, then you got to be creative. It was like, “What could I do with the 808 now?” Turn the kick up, or instead of using the click I’ll use this, I’ll try triplets on the hi-hat, or whatever, like I’ll triple the snare or something. Have you tried synching up an 808 in the studio [makes questioning look]? It don’t happen. That thing would be so offbeat by the time you got to the middle of the song, it was ridiculous. You had to do it with the 808 right there and that was your song. The 808 only has so many patches, or so many beats you can make until you have to erase them, or export them. I was producing some other groups at the time and I had their beats in there as well, like Bobby Jimmy and The Critters. In that song I accidentally hit the play button and one of their beats played in the song! But I left it in there. Oops. But I only had so much studio time, and so I wasn’t going to go back and redo it. So those beats stayed and nobody knows but me. And you guys.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Who were those guys?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Bobby Jimmy and The Critters? I’m going to show you guys something. Don’t laugh, ’cause if you laugh I’m leaving. They were a comedy rap group [shows covers] that I happened to be in. I was just producing them but they kept wanting to put me on the covers, I don’t know why. You can pass this one around, the back of this one is pretty bad.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You don’t happen to have any World Class Wreckin’ Cru?

ARABIAN PRINCE

You know what? You want to hear the first ever Dr. Dre record? A lot of you guys don’t know about the old Dr. Dre. You know about the Snoop stuff, but he’ll probably kill me for this. Let me see if I can play some Wreckin’ Cru for you…

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

And if you don’t have the cover, you should tell us the story about how the eyeliner got up there.

ARABIAN PRINCE

Oh, so you want to go to the eyeliner, huh?

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

We’re all about the eyeliner.

ARABIAN PRINCE

We’ll talk about that as well. Let me play you some “Surgery.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER

This was a comedy rap group?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, it was a comedy rap group. We did covers of other people. We’d make fun of LL Cool J, and there was another group called Timex Social Club, who had a song called “Rumors,” and we made a song called “Roaches.” They’re saying, “Look at all these rumors,” and we’re saying, “Look at all these roaches.” It was actually a hit.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Can we hear it?

ARABIAN PRINCE

It’s on that record, I think. But I’ll play some Dr. Dre for you and see if I have “Roaches.” This is Dre’s first 12” and it’s called “Surgery.”

(music:World Class Wreckin’ Crew - “Surgery“ / applause)

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Do you have “House Calls” on there, too?

ARABIAN PRINCE

“House Calls?” No, I don’t have “House Calls.” I just found a Bobby Jimmy and The Critters that would be interesting to you. You guys remember that Prince song called “Housequake?” We redid the song and called it "Milkshake".

(music: Bobby Jimmy And The Critters - “Milkshake” / applause)

ARABIAN PRINCE

So that’s got you stunned, right?

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

I really want to hear the “Roaches” one.

ARABIAN PRINCE

I have the cover but I don’t have the record in it. It would be cool to let you hear that. What else do we have? I’ve got a song I’ll play later.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What song are you saving?

ARABIAN PRINCE

I’m saving what would be the last electro song in LA before ganster [rap]. But we still got a little way to go on the old school movement.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What would be the next step in that way? And we still haven’t talked about the Jheri curls and the eyeliner.

ARABIAN PRINCE

OK, back in the day there was thing called a jheri curl. And a lot of the guys on the West Coast would wear ’em. If you look at pictures of Ice Cube, he’s got massive dripping jerry curl going on. I had one, and Egyptian Lover had one. Now about the eyeliner and Dr Dre. The record label, well Jesse Johnson, who used to be part of Prince and The Time or whatever, and Egyptian Lover and the Wreckin’ Cru decided they didn’t want to do the whole electro dance thing anymore. They wanted to sing more R&B love songs. So they did an album called Rapped In Romance and they were wearing these suits with glitter on them, and Dr Dre had on this shiny sequined doctors outfit and he had on the lipstick and make up. ’Cause the publicist said it would be more appealing to the women. And that’s the picture of Dre that gets circulated. In fact Eazy-E posted that picture on the internet when Eazy and Dre had a falling out, “Here’s the real gangster rapper right here.” The records are still out there, but a lot of people don’t know about the old stuff. I could walk up to a thousand people and say, “Do you know Dre?” And they’d say, “Oh yeah, Chronic, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent.” “You ever heard of ‘Juice’ or ‘Surgery?’” “Nope, never heard it.” And if it wasn’t for those records, he wouldn’t be where he is today. ’Cause those were the records that played on the radio back in the ’80s on KDA, which was our hip-hop station back then. It's actually back on that air.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

The popular game of ‘what if?’ applies. What if a film like Colors or Boyz N The Hood, you could hear little glimpses of club scenes, but the music always focuses on what you’d hear in a car.

ARABIAN PRINCE

Or else we’d all be wearing tight pants and breakdancing? Well, when Colors came out it was actually on the tail end of the electro scene. We had moved into doing the Boyz N The Hood stuff. And I actually take partial blame for killing the electro scene on the West Coast ’cause we stopped doing it. We were the last ones making it, so when we stopped doing it, everybody else stopped.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

When you say we, you were already under a different name at that stage?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, the N.W.A. stuff. If you look at the first two albums, there were two electro songs on there. “Panic Zone” and “Something To Dance To.” We put ’em on there because we loved the music and the stuff we were doing with N.W.A. was so hardcore that it would get no radio play. So in order to get the radio play, we had to do the electro music. But once the other songs took off, it took over and we just stopped doing the dance music altogether. It was a whole new era.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

But before we get to N.W.A., there were other crews involved, right?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Oh yeah, the Fila Fresh Crew but that wasn’t something that we wanted to do. We were on a little label called Macola Records, and that’s why I wish there was an outlet around today for all you guys. It was a little mom and pop record distributor. Anyone could go and get a record deal if you had a song that was decent enough. You could go in and get it pressed and get it distributed, you know? You may sell a couple of thousand, you may get lucky and sell a hundred thousand. But there was this avenue, and we all went through it. Me, Egyptian, LA Dream Team, even Stacy Q – who had this song “Two Of Hearts” – and MC Hammer. So many artists started at Macola. But they were crooks. And if you left to get a bigger deal, they’d press everything you’ve ever done and put it out. That’s what happened with the N.W.A. And The Posse _record. We never made that record. We made a record called _N.W.A., that had five songs on it. He made N.W.A. And the Posse ’cause he wanted to bring out a full album. So he put on stuff he had laying around, like the Fila Fresh Crew and some other stuff, and he put it on there just to make the album. And they sold like a million copies of that. And people thought that was the album.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So you told us of one night were you met Dre and there’s a whole lot of key players right in there. Ren, Yella, Eazy-E, how did you meet all these guys?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, me, Dre and Yella were all DJs, and Dre and Yella were in the Wreckin’ Cru. MC Ren and Eazy-E lived in the neighborhood. Ice Cube was young at the time. He wasn’t really old enough to go to the clubs. So he’d just hang out with us. And we all got together one time at Eazy’s house.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What were fine young gentlemen like you doing at Eazy’s house?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, he lived down the street. And Eazy was the neighborhood drug dealer. We were broke, we had no money and we were getting ripped off by the people we were producing for. We had hit records, but we weren’t making any money at the time. And Eazy had flashy cars and he always said he wanted to rap. And he says, “I’ll fund you guys. I don’t want to do the whole drug thing anymore, I want to stop.” And we were like, “OK, you want to go legitimate, we want to continue making records.” So we said we’d do the song and just start this new group and go from there.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

But if he was that loaded, couldn’t you get him an EQ to sound a bit better?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Eazy, God rest his soul, couldn’t rap. At all. We’d go in the studio, and imagine a session where the song is done, the music is done, and but you’re in there for about eight hours trying to punch his vocals in because early on he couldn’t get the timing right. He couldn’t remember the words, couldn’t get the timing, so we had to punch. And actually people liked it. They liked the way he sounded, I guess because he couldn’t rap.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

He’s got a distinct voice.

ARABIAN PRINCE

And a distinct style.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

But who in that band could actually rap?

ARABIAN PRINCE

MC Ren? Q? They could rap. I never professed to be a great rapper, I love the music, I’m more of a producer. I’ve always done music, same as Dre. Dre's got many hits out there, but he doesn’t profess to being a great rapper. We just had a knack for making hits. We know what’s good and what’s bad. And for every one good song we’ve had, believe me we got a thousand bad songs, but we know what sounds good.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

How did the D.O.C. come into this game?

ARABIAN PRINCE

D.O.C. was from the Fila Fresh crew, and we were in Texas one time... The same thing was happening with the D.O.C. He was distraught because he was in this group and whoever owned the group wasn’t paying him.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What do you mean, whoever “owned” the group?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, there’s always one guy who runs the group. Who makes the decisions, who collects the cheque and if he’s not sharing the wealth, people get mad. So he wanted to leave, and we heard his stuff and brought him over to LA and put him down on the “Funky Enough” thing and made it happen.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Jerry Heller?

ARABIAN PRINCE

That name is evil. He used to be our manager with N.W.A. He made us believe we should only take half of the money that we made, and they’d take the other half and put it in a pot and leave it in the record company. But he was taking it! We figured out that one pretty quick.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

And what happened?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, that’s what disbanded the band in the end. He had this huge thing with N.W.A. that was making so much money and selling so many records, but we weren’t making the money we should have been. And we ask, “Where’s the money?” And they’re like, “Oh, don’t worry, go on tour and when you come back it’ll be here. Oh, but we got you guys some cars, and we got you a house.” They were buying it for us.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You got a good deal at least.

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, I’d rather have my money. That’s one thing in this music business. Really watch your money, your publishing, just keep an eye on what you do. Trust everybody but don’t trust anybody. Really watch your stuff and when you let anyone take your stuff, make sure you know where it’s going, and you have a line of where the money is coming from. You got to do that nowadays.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Before we go deeper into that, what was the song you wanted to play before it all went gangster?

ARABIAN PRINCE

One of the last electro songs that was done before the change was a song called “Panic Zone.” That was on the N.W.A. album, so I’ll play a bit of that. “Panic Zone” is actually a city, next to Compton. If you drove your car there after dark, there was panic. You were going to get robbed or shot at or something. That’s why we made this song.

(music: N.W.A. - “Panic Zone” / applause)

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Can you tell us when you realised there was something going beyond LA city limits?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Well, we were so stuck in LA, we never really traveled much. We would do shows in States here and there, but when we got the idea that “Oh! We’re worldwide,” we used to take our record ourselves do our own self distribution. We’d put a thousand records in the back of the van or car, drive to the swap meet, drive to the record store. “Here’s five records, buy ’em from us,“ and we did that for months. Pretty soon we got a buzz, and we got people calling us up from other states wanting the stuff. “How did you find out about it?“ “Oh well, this guy called us from here and said you guys were hot, and we want a hundred of them. Now I want a thousand of them.“ Next thing you know we were too big for what we were trying to do, so we had to sign with a major. The small suburbs around the cities started picking up on our music and turned it into this huge thing, and it helped us. Sometimes I feel sorry that I helped to start this so-called “gangster rap,” but let me set that straight right now. We never set out to do anything gangster or say anything. All we did was talk about what was going on in the neighborhood. We were talking about what the police were doing in the neighborhood, you couldn’t walk down the street without getting pulled over. Harrassed everyday. We talked about the shootings and killings, the drug dealing, we just talked about stuff that went on in our neighborhood. And that turned into gangster rap. People who came after us, turned it into gangster rap. Guys who made up stories about how bad they were and how crazy they were. That’s what ruined it. People didn’t understand. We got a letter in the mail from the FBI saying, “You cannot sing this song anymore or make music like this ever again.”

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

And at the same time, you got kids all over the world getting these records bought by their grandparents for Christmas.

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, and we thought they can’t do that. This is freedom of speech, they can’t tell us what we can or can’t do. At the time we were on tour in Chicago, and we got to the airport and the police were there waiting for us. Lots of ‘em. Like one of them Blues Brothers movies. At the time Ice-T was on tour with us, and this was how picky they got. Ice-T used to wear a gold chain with a gun on it. The gun was like this big [makes teeny symbol with fingers] and they’re like, “We got to report this, someone had a gun on the plane.” And they took him away, just to harrass us. Dre opens his mouth and says something. They took him away. They told us, “You can’t sing these songs.”

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Like, “Fuck The Police?”

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, and they said you can’t sing this in our city. So we went to the show, did the show and at the last song, we did the song. 15 seconds into the song, you ever seen a flash grenade go off? But in the middle of the club all you could see was flashes and lights and this explosion, and all these guys rushed the stage, all police.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You felt pretty bad and dangerous then, huh?

ARABIAN PRINCE

It happened from city to city the same thing. It just became a headache. And then Tipper Gore got involved, vice president Gore’s wife.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Rap critic, etc.

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, and she decided she was going to take our records and bulldoze them on television. And all it did was give us press. Now, everyone wants to know what’s on the records that’s so bad, and our record sales shot up 100 fold from there!

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

And in the meantime Mr Heller is like, “One dollar, two dollar, three dollar, four…?”

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah. And it was a weird, weird time. That’s what killed the whole dance scene at the time, because now music had moved to this slow 90/95 BPM kind of gangster hip-hop music. That’s what ruled for the next three to five years.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

All of a sudden you had to cater to audiences who couldn’t dance at all.

ARABIAN PRINCE

There were no more parties, no more dances, and the gang scene had got so bad in LA that you couldn’t even have a concert anymore. But I never stopped, Egyptian Lover never stopped, Dre never even stopped. He wouldn’t admit he did electro music, but he did. I invented another moniker so I could keep doing electro music, called Professor X. And me and Unknown DJ, and a couple of guys started a group called X-Men, and we started a group X-Men & Professor X. And that was what I could do on the side, while I was still doing the N.W.A. thing.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

How do you feel about all these stories about Missy calling up Juan Atkins? Is there some kind of poetic justice?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yes and no. They asked Missy when she first did the song what the sample was, and she said “Planet Rock.” She didn’t know that it was “Clear”.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

But there’s this story that Juan got an amazing check before the record even got cleared, and it feels like finally he gets some financial recognition for the fact he started a thing or two.

ARABIAN PRINCE

That song is timeless. “Clear” is a timeless song, “Planet Rock” is a timeless song. There were a few timeless songs out there that you could play. Missy really didn’t do too much to the song. They just sampled it and played it as it was.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

That’s raw in a way. So how many calls did you or Egyptian Lover get after that?

ARABIAN PRINCE

It’s the rebirth of electro right now. Electro funk has been reborn, ’cause as soon as Missy put that record out, there were a couple of groups doing covers of them, someone redid “Planet Rock.” And all the Ying Yang Twins and Pitbull and this reggaeton stuff, it’s electro funk, too, but with a different swing to it.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

But with the demographic development in California, reggaeton, with the history of the electro scene and who’s living there now, it’s just made for California.

ARABIAN PRINCE

Even now every week or month there’s a concert in the Hispanic neighborhoods. Some of these clubs hold 2 or 3,000 people. And they’ll have Debbie Deb or Trinere, or Sir Mix-A-Lot will come down. In fact, anyone got Sir Mix-A-Lot’s number? I need to contact him, but he’ll come to town and do shows or want us to do shows and play electro ’cause that’s the kind of music they love and they just want to party. I just got back from an electro festival in Paris, and it was all electro: electro funk, more traditional electro, electronic more computerized, it was one of the best festivals I’ve been to ’cause it was the whole culture. Three days of it and it was amazing.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

The Koln guys performed?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah they performed and a couple of other people. It was nice.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So what’s it like for you know? How do you meet that recognition?

ARABIAN PRINCE

I like it. For me, when I tour around the world and do shows, some people want me to do the hip-hop stuff, and some people want me to do electro stuff, so I try to do a bit of both to appease everybody. But I love the music and the culture, and I love being able to share the music with the world and other producers. Just going there I met these guys from Rotterdam and Belgium and Germany and everywhere. And listening to their style and what they use. One of the guys did his whole show with this Behringer control box and a sequencer. It was crazy. He had all his songs sequenced and he just sat there and twisted his knobs and did an hour show. It was cool, I ain’t seen anything like it, but it was cool for me to see that there’s so many different ways that people can express themselves in music.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

When you say you’ve been doing this for 25 years, and a lot of this music is about this peak-time moment – Friday night, everyone has worked hard all week, and everyone’s getting it on, and it’s the kind of thing that the people you went to school with wouldn’t care about anymore, right?

ARABIAN PRINCE

You’d be surprised. They’re out there. There’s a lot of people out there who still love the music and who want it to come back. The music scene in LA, it gets kind of old. ’Cause the radio plays the same 20 songs all day every day. Top 20 that’s all you hear. And now KDAY came back but the scene is not that advanced as if you go to New York or somewhere, you get a more diverse music culture.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You mentioned some names like Debbie Deb. Could you tell some stories behind classic anthems of the time?

ARABIAN PRINCE

OK, Debbie Deb has probably got one of the biggest classic anthems around the world. Everywhere I go I hear that song. And now I’m hearing house versions of it. House versions, trance versions… so I’ll play that one.

(music: Debbie Deb - "When I Hear Music" / applause)

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Who were the guys producing that track?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Debbie Deb? I think Pretty Tony had something to do with that track, if I can remember. From Florida, ’cause he produced trinear and freestyle and that kind of stuff.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Is it possible to hear the track Professor X later?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Ah, you know what? Actually, I can do one better. I actually got a live video of Professor X in concert in Paris. Let me see whether I got it, and if not… you can kill me or whatever, haha! Oh, and he’s got vinyl, I don’t even have the vinyl of that. Let’s see if I got the show, it’s Professor X live.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

It’s actually more dark and not so funky that one… Professor X, I’m here.

ARABIAN PRINCE

What I tried to do is… Well, I got all these aliases. I’m Professor X, I’m Arabian Prince, I’m Brother Arab. The Brother Rab stuff was more hip-hop. Arabian Prince was more happy, talking about girl stuff, and the Professor X is more the dark computerized mechanic stuff, and I just released an album on Clone Records, that’s coming out this month.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

There’s also a bootleg movie called Breakdance or something, with tracks made by you and Egyptian Lover. It’s really hard to get and it’s got some really dark beat programming and maybe just a small bassline, and that’s it. Like totally trashed out 808 beats like ‘tak, tak, tak,’ and really breaky. And it’s not like a straight electro beat, it’s continuously freaking out.

ARABIAN PRINCE

I’d like to see that. That’s another thing that goes on a lot in the industry – bootlegging. Especially on old stuff, ‘cause that was mostly vinyl. I don’t know if you remember, but there were no CDs in the ’80s. It was just cassettes and records. And you forget that if you don’t take that vinyl and get it remastered, people will never hear it. And that’s why a lot of this stuff died and a lot of these records are worth a lot of money.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

A question. The label Metrovinyl, is that also LA-based?

ARABIAN PRINCE

You mean Metroplex?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

No Metrovinyl. X Ref? The track “Dream 60?” ’80s electro funk, really moody vocals in it?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Never heard of it. I don’t think it’s LA-based.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

The beats are wicked, there’s a live bass in it and a vocoder, but the man is crying his soul out, it’s fantastic.

ARABIAN PRINCE

I’ll have to dig through your crates, ’cause you’re pulling out stuff I never heard! [plays video of his festival performance] I didn’t even know the breakdancers, they’d brought breakdancers down for me. I wanted girl dancers, they brought me breakdancers… haha! It was fun.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

“The Innovator” track got re-released, right?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, that track got re-released with a 2005 mix. And a remix by Dynamik Bass System. Yeah, that’s a cool thing I’m going to do this year, too, take all my old singles and re-release all my old releases and get new producers to do remixes. So, if anyone wants to do remixes of electro, let me know and we can talk. I’ll hook you guys up on a release. So it’s just another way to get the stuff out there, and give up-and-coming producers a chance to showcase their stuff too.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

The last track had a Detroit In Effect kind of feel. I think it was ’97 or ’98?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Which one, the first track?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Ah, what was it called?

ARABIAN PRINCE

We’ll come back in a minute. So the new album that’s coming out is called Electro Funk Experiment ’cause I’m going to experiment with different kinds of electro and funk and fusion kind of things. Before, if you look at my house now, I've got every old keyboard and drum machine known to man. I’ve never sold a piece of equipment in my life. In fact, I left it at the hotel, but I brought the original DJ mixer we used back in the ’80s. The original Radioshack mixer – you needed two DJs to move the fader form one side to the other ’cause it was so stiff. You try to do crabs on this thing? No way! It actually clicked in the middle and you had to yank it across to the other side. It still works though, it’s in mint condition. Well, not so mint but it still works. But I got all this gear, and about a year or two ago… I’m actually a computer nut. I own a special effects company for doing CG effects and studio macs and Lightwave and Maya. I own a videogame company and produce videogames for Universal and Fox as well, so I’m a tech head, I’m a computer nut. Anything to do with computers, I’ve got. So somebody hit me to software sequencing. So I’m like, “OK, I’ve used Cakewalk, Logic, stuff like that.” He’s like, “Have you ever tried Reason?” I’m like, “No, what is it?” Somebody showed me Reason. All my computers, all my keyboards, all my drum machines in one corner. I do all my music on a laptop now, all of it. I don’t touch my 808, ’cause at the moment I figured out I got an 808 sound on my laptop, every keyboard sound known to man, and every drum sound? That’s all I need. I’m sitting on a plane working on music. I’m in the back of a car working on music. Now in the modern age you can create music anywhere. And I’m going to say this – I sit on the toilet and work on music. I do. I go in there on my laptop and I work on music.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Yeah, to get extra bottom…

ARABIAN PRINCE

To get the bottom end. There you go. I actually love a lot of the software stuff it’s helped me to be more creative in less time. ’Cause if you know, I’ve got a Minimoog, and try to sequence up a Minimoog? Man. A lot of the early Moog keyboards had this sound, like it was a buzz. Like this ground hum that you could never get rid of. Same thing with the 808, so a lot of my old gear had this gritty sound to it. Which was kind of cool, but you had to gate it and compress it to get the sounds you want. But a lot of the software stuff is amazing. That’s what I’m using.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

So how long does it take you to make a track these says?

ARABIAN PRINCE

A good track? If I get inspired and I think, I’m going to sit down and make a song, that could take days. But if I get inspired doing whatever, watching Spongebob or whatever, and I think, ‘OK, I hear it.’ Cartoons for me, honestly, I watch cartoons and I get ideas, like I can kick out a song in an hour. There’s a song, actually I’ll play it for you. There’s this song I’m releasing along with this Statix song on Clone records, overseas. And I acually did the song in two hours. Vocals and everything. It just depends on the inspiration and how intricate the song is. Hey, put me in the studio, I can bang out some beats, definitely. Like I say, I love making music, I’ll probably sit in a hotel room tonight and do a song. I have a task, I got to complete three albums by January.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Well, you got three days here.

ARABIAN PRINCE

I’ma do the Professor X album, I’m going to do an Arabian Prince album, and I got a new name, AKA. So if you hear of anyone called AKA, that’s me. That’s something new. I’m a do a hip-hop album, all new stuff. This next track is some kind of computer electro. Well, it’s just something weird and different that I wanted to do. Let’s see if it will play. Now some of you guys are DJs and some of you are producers. One girl I talked to she’s a beat maker. But whatever it is you set out to do, just go out there and do it. There’s a lot of opportunities out there for people in music. I know people who’ve been grinding for years and years and years and they’re about to give up, when all of a sudden they have the biggest hit known to man. So whatever you’re doing just keep doing it. And sooner or later it’ll pay off, whether it’s for your own sake or whether it’s monetarially. Definitely give it a shot and keep going. And religion doesn’t hurt. This is something that I made in a couple of hours [fiddles around with cables and then plays track].

(music: Professor X - "Rekonstrukt" / applause)

Arabian Prince

And you can hear those shameless plugs for the companies that sponsor me, too, ha ha!

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I’ve really enjoyed the lecture so far, but we’ve almost reached the point that I’m really interested in. The fact that you’re connected with the whole electro sound. You and all these guys from Detroit and I don’t think there was much distance in the genesis of hip-hop from the actual sound of Detroit 20 years later, but to me the misconceptions of people saying hip-hop has nothing to do with techno, or that techno is shit and it's hammers and nothing more, that always felt like trying to deny something that’s obvious. And you probably know this better than me, you were at the birthplace of probably both styles, and the other night I was listening to a radio show. I was listening to Andre 3000 saying he loved Carl Craig. And I’m like, “Why aren’t there more people who come out of the closet with this? Why isn’t there more unity within the whole scene?” If it’s all about the music like you are saying, why is it all preconceptions and why are so many people so existentialist? And why [voice quivers with emotion] is it do you think that things don’t happen in more of a genre-free manner as to promote the whole evolution of everything?

ARABIAN PRINCE

I think a lot of it has to do with the cool factor. You got these people out there, and there’s a lot of them, that think I can’t associate myself with this kind of music, ’cause it’s going to lose my fans and I’m not going to be cool any more. Like Andre 3000, he’s a different kind of producer, he’s more free and open with what he’s dong, but even him in the Outkast days, early Outkast days was about Cadillac music and just real funky slow stuff. He’s always liked that stuff, but now he’s been able to express himself by crossing over. If you notice when people cross over and they start making that bigger money, and they see hey pop music, or this music. To me music is music, I don’t care what it is. Electro is this, hip-hop is this, dance is this, whatever. As a DJ, I’m a play whatever. I mean, my friend went to a bar mitzvah last year, and I went with him and played a whole load of stuff that I’d never heard before, you know? Whatever makes people happy, I’ll play. But as far as people not associating with where the music came from - I hear a lot of rappers going, “Yeah, rap started in New York and it was this and it was that,” and I’m like, “Do you remember Grand Master Flash And The Furious Five? Or, did you see what they were wearing? Spikes and cowboy boots and crazy stuff and the music was fast.” They were really into the fast stuff, you know the breakdancing and all that stuff? That was fast stuff. And that was hip-hop. Period. You can’t deny that it was hip-hop. But the newer generations don’t want to embrace that. And the younger kids don’t know about it. Unless Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five does some thing on some awards show. They don’t know. Even if they hear it on the radio, they’re like, “That’s a cool song.” But they don’t know what the roots of it are. I mean, it’s sad that it hasn’t stuck and people haven’t taken it. Electro has always been this kind of music that I play. You go to another country and electro is something totally different and a lot of people go, “I hate electro! It’s terrible music.” And I don’t understand why. People are going to like what they’re going to like, and all music to me is good music. I just don’t know why people don’t embrace things. But now, if you notice, things go in a circle. Now music kind of does this. You’ve had this whole thing where music got really really slow, and now it’s getting fast again. And people want to dance more they want to have a good time, and it’s going back to the fast music, or back to the party scene. Now you got people like Tiësto making $50,000 a night doing shows, it’s ridiculous. And that only helps the music industry and what you want to do. If you have a music or a style that you love, and there are people out there who love the same thing, you got to bond together and make it a scene. I notice there are a lot of websites out there by people who like certain types of music and there’s these big communities and they start having clubs and parties and that’s the only way to keep certain music alive.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

When I was listening to the new tune you just played, I can’t help myself but doing this in my head, “Eins, zwei, drei, vier.” There’s still a very big Kraftwerk influence, that’s what it looks like.

ARABIAN PRINCE

And that’s where I’m headed for. Just for the simple fact that the Professor X stuff was a more Kraftwerky kind of style. And I wanted to keep it as pure to that as I could. Like my own style but stick to the more computerized Kraftwerky thing, because it’s so sad that Kraftwerk died out. For a while, Kraftwerk couldn’t even sell a record. Now they’re back, they’re doing tours all over the place. But the music is good, the music is great to me, you know? It’s sad that I don’t hear music like that. And it’s not until I’m on tour overseas that I’m like, “Wait a minute, there’s hundreds of songs like this over in Europe. But they never hit America.” You know? We never hear that stuff over there. There’s no radio stations for it, there’s no outlet for it. So if you don’t go and buy the record in the store, you won’t ever hear it. So it’s up to people like me, and Egyptian Lover, who do have kind of a name out there and who are still really active in the club scene, to bring that music back and start to force feeding it to people. When I play clubs now, I’ll play the top 40, but I’ll start fusing in some of the electro stuff and the old school stuff so people can groove to it and get used to it again.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

But one of the things that I think makes Kraftwerk so special is that they had to produce their own sounds and their own way of performing, and there is a very typical and strong… For example, in “Numbers”, if I played the track now, in a club or something, it hits the dancefloor so much harder than other records ’cause the sound is strong. And if you’re working with Reason nowadays isn’t there a thing that you might be missing?

ARABIAN PRINCE

I used to think that. As I told you, I was an analog head. But after a bad back from carrying around all this keyboard gear, and all the problems I had in the studio, trust me, it is a science to use analog gear to create a sound. But one thing you got to remember also, too, I kind of liken music to do other things. Sports, for instance, like basketball or football or any of those sports, back in the day, it was very, very raw. But with technology today, there’s so much more that you can do, and I’m not taking away from anaologue or creativity, but whether you got a stick and a drum or a vocals or reason or whatever. It’s not what you use, it’s how you use it. Like with that last one, It’s not like I thought, ‘Oh! Here’s a patch, and here’s a patch.’ I actually go in and create my own sounds with ’em, it’s just with a laptop. You know, I sit there and tweak my envelopes and my LFOs and I actually spend a lot of time getting that sound. And I make sure I make a sound that no one else can get, especially arpeggiating sounds. But my snare? You can’t get close to it. Like, my snare has like eight sounds in it like this on it or that on it or whatever. There’s still a lot that goes into it in making something special.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

A lot of the old school West Coast guys, they’re coming back to making beats. I just want to know whether Unknown DJ and LA Dream Team are back?

ARABIAN PRINCE

I can call him right now, and ask him? Me and him hand out a lot, me and Unknown. I hear that there’s another Unknown DJ out there doing house or something.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I think we’re talking about the same one.

ARABIAN PRINCE

No, there’s two different ones. Unknown DJ out of New York, who does house or something. And there’s the old school DJ 808 beats, Basstronik and we talk pretty much everyday. And I’m like, “Dude, you got to do a record, you got to do a record.” And he goes, “Well, you didn’t let me rap on your record, why should I come back?” We’re always arguing. But he’s going to do an other record, yeah. He’s actually working on something right now. This guy, Unknown DJ, he’s my buddy but he’s a strange beast. He’ll sit on one song for a year and a half. I mean, he’ll work on it and work on it, then call me up one day and say listen to this beat. And I’ll say, yeah? And then he’ll call me back a month later and say, “I just did the breakdown.” It takes him that long to do his song. But once he does it, it’s a work of art, you know? LA Dream Team is coming back, but Rudi from LA Dream Team passed away three or four years ago in a scuba diving accident. Who else is making a supreme comeback? I’m trying to get Juan Atkins to come back with Cybotron, or something of a reasonable facsimile. I’m begging him like, “Dude, we got to do a record.” But he’s doing like this Detroit house stuff now and I’m trying to get him to do some electro, you know? And if I can find Sir Mix-A-Lot…

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Did you know DJ Matrix, the West Coast guy?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, I haven’t seen him in a while.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Are you in touch with any of the guys who did Breakin' & Enterin’?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Yeah, all of those guys. Glove…

AUDIENCE MEMBER

That film, the documentary about the West Coast electro scene back in the day, and it’s impossible to get hold of.

ARABIAN PRINCE

That’s what I hear.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Everybody’s waiting for it to be re-issued. There’s loads of really bad quality bootlegs going on on eBay, where’s the re-issue of that?

ARABIAN PRINCE

Thing is, I don’t think anyone actually owns it anymore. The guy who did the original of it, he went out of business or something and now I don’t even know if there’s a master of it somewhere. Everybody I talked to who was a part of it, doesn’t have a copy of it. It’s just one of those sad things that goes by the wayside. Like I tell you, I don’t have all my own vinyl. Just for the simple fact that you’re like, “OK, I got my records,” and someone’s like, “Hey man, let me get that,” and you’re like, “OK, cool… I’ll get another one.” And you never get another one. You never press another one. And you’re thinking, “I don’t have it.” I’ve actually gone on eBay and bought my own record just so I can have an original copy of it.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So, I’d say thank you very much for enlightening us.

[applause]