Jermaine Dupri Bought An Entire Record Store
It may come as a surprise to some vinyl purists, but Jermaine Dupri is a serious crate digger. Though Dupri made his name producing polished, radio-friendly hits for Bow Wow, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, and many others, he has always been a fan of the grit and grime that comes along with record collecting.
It all started during his early days as a producer, when Dupri had to rely on records to get his ideas across. “All we had was records, you know?” he said in his episode of FUSE’s Crate Diggers. “It’s interesting trying to make music and you don’t have keyboards and you don’t have a drum machine. You find so many ways to make music if it’s actually in you.”
Once he learned the nuts and bolts of production, Dupri realized that he definitely had music in him. He also realized he had a voracious listening habit that required a constant stream of new vinyl. “I just used to sample as many records as I could get my hands on,” he told Shawn Setaro of The Cipher podcast.
“Breakbeats to me are as bad as having a drug addiction as a producer.”
For Dupri, his ever-expanding mental library of samples was almost like an internal hard drive. “Whatever records I could find I was trying to download them into my system,” he told The Cipher. “We couldn’t download records back then. So you had to download them into your system and know the records.”
At one point, the constant need to add new breaks and samples to his mental hard drive was almost like a drug habit. “Breakbeats to me are as bad as having a drug addiction as a producer,” he told The Cipher. “When you use a breakbeat on a record and it works, you want to use a breakbeat every time…Pulling myself away from breaks was hard as hell.”
Before he broke away from sampling for a bit to experiment with live musicians replaying samples, Dupri decided to purchase an entire record store for his personal collection. “I bought a whole record store one day,” he told FUSE. “I went into a store that was going out of business and I told ’em I wanted all the soul records that they had, all the urban music. I think it was like $1500 dollars to buy all the records.”
“You find so many ways to make music if it’s actually in you.”
While some producers are fine having a small selection of records in their crates, Dupri likes to immerse himself in as many records as possible. “Usually what I like to do is just have a big quantity of records so I can really dig and listen to music,” he told FUSE. “Because if you have a small [collection] then your opportunity of finding things that nobody else has is very slim.”
Dupri may have taken a break from sampling at one point to test his musical abilities in other areas, but that doesn’t mean he gave it up altogether. In an episode of his YouTube series Living The Life he flipped through stacks of vinyl to find an old, warped Slick Rick record for a beat he was working on. He then explained why he took the extra time to find the actual record. “The vinyl is so fucked up,” he said. “But I just gotta have that sound. I can’t do the CDs…I could have easily went to iTunes and got ‘La Di Da Di’ and it would have been so crisp. But I need this.”
Connect with Jermaine Dupri on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and on Twitter @jermainedupri.
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