DJ Warren Peace plays XS on Saturday.
Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2012 | 6:01 p.m.
In 1988 you were a college radio DJ mixing vinyl. Today you’re a resident at XS. What stands out along the way?
I’m proud that everything I did, I reached the top level. Award-winning college DJ. Hiphopsite.com [a successful online record store]. I was on KLUC with the longest-running hip-hop mix show. Top of the game on mashups. Started an all-house radio mix show, the first of its kind here. Direct Music Service supplies records to the likes of Z-Trip, Chuckie, Aoki, Vice, most of the SKAM artists. Then I started at Tryst, and I opened XS.
Talk about your experience when Las Vegas started moving away from hip-hop.
Around 1999-2003, hip-hop’s image was horrible. After the 2Pac shooting, the ego and gangster mentality was huge. Club owners thought if you played rap music only black people and urban crowds would show up. From the business side you didn’t want it. From an image side you definitely didn’t want it. From a hotel side, the older white people at the slots were deathly scared of it. Everyone saw what I built at RA and saw my skin color, so I got pigeonholed as a black hip-hop DJ, which is understandable. I was doing radio, but I couldn’t get a club job to save my life.
How did the mashups phenomenon happen?
Mashups were a polite way of playing hip-hop that the clubs were behind. The idea was between me, Dave Fogg and Chris Miracle. We heard mashups before but wanted to do more. Before us, people were just taking instrumentals from one song over vocals of another song. We started mixing part of this a capella and instrumentals from that song with pieces of these instrumentals with pieces of those hooks. We melded way more together. We did a 50 Cent and Nine Inch Nails mashup that was huge.
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