It started in a room with Nas. At a listening session for God's Son, a young Brooklyn DJ heard Nas telling stories from his career and wondered what would happen if those stories lived inside the music. That idea became Best of Nas, hosted by Nas himself, and a format that turned the mixtape into an audio documentary.
Questlove has called J.PERIOD "the most creative mixtape producer of all-time." His Best of Lauryn Hill put him on tour as her DJ, he built The [Abstract] Best with Q-Tip, and The Hamilton Mixtape went No. 1 on the Billboard 200 after Questlove handed him a phone with Lin-Manuel Miranda on FaceTime and said, "You guys go work it out!"
Our eighth Collector Spotlight covers all of it: the tape that carved his lane, his mixtape with sneaker designer Salehe Bembury, and what makes music worth burying in a time capsule. There's video too, with Black Thought and Benny The Butcher on the Live Mixtape stage at Roots Picnic.
From the Crate
"For me, the Mixtape is the last genuinely authentic Hip Hop format: it curates a unified experience out of scattered elements, and makes the whole greater than the sum of the individual parts."
J.PERIOD, on why the mixtape still matters.
One More Thing
J.PERIOD is on the road with MacArthur Fellow Josh Kun for The Art of the Crossfade, a four-city series pairing a musical lecture with a Live Mixtape performance. Three of the DJs he named as his picks for our next spotlight, DJ Spider, DJ Severe, and DJ Mal-Ski, played the Los Angeles show with him. And on Thursday, we're going back to where it all began: Best of Nas.
Experience the culture at mixtapekings.com
— Diony C.
