Mo’ Wax — Where Are They Now: DJ Assault (2000)
Mo’ Wax was a record label started by James Lavelle in 1992, which closed about ten years later. Initially they released 12" singles and licensed a compilation from Japan of Japanese Hip Hop, until 1994 when they began releasing albums of their artists original work. While some of these artists such as DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, and Money Mark continued releasing music after Mo’ Wax closed, others have seemingly disappeared from the music scene. In this series I will look at each artist on Mo’ Wax and try to find out where are they now…
DJ Assault is Craig Adams, though his early work also featured production from Ade’ Mainor, and for their early career together DJ Assault was often considered a duo. In 2000 Mainor left and began releasing music as Mr. De’, while Adams has continued releasing music as DJ Assault. They released one album on Mo’ Wax.
Born in Detroit, Craig Adams started DJing while he was young, and began his music career as part of a Hip Hop group called Assault-N-Battery. In 1995 Adams met Ade’ Mainor while they were both working at Buy-Rite Music, a record store run by Clifton Thomas which was also the home of Thomas’ D-Bass Records, a record label which sold their releases exclusively through Buy-Rite Music. Clifton Thomas had signed Assault-N-Battery to his label and Ade’ Mainor was brought in to help with production, but Assault-N-Battery broke up before they had released anything. After the split, Adams kept part of their name and became DJ Assault, and with Mainor still producing, they turned Assault-N-Battery’s Rap songs into something which would later be termed Booty Music and Ghettotech.
The first DJ Assault 12" singles arrived in 1995, starting with the Supply N’ Demand series, and were followed that same year by Tec-De-France and Party Time. The records sold well, so Craig Adams decided to leave D-Bass and start his own label, with himself and Ade’ Mainor starting Electrofunk Records and splitting all their earnings evenly. The label made its debut in 1996 with the first in DJ Assault’s Straight Up Detroit Sh*t mixes, which were followed by two further volumes in the series in 1997.
1996 also saw the release of DJ Assault Ass-N-Titties, initially on the Pimps-N-Players EP before it was given its own 12" release in 1997. The song has been called “DJ Assault’s magnum opus, easily the biggest novelty hit Detroit’s ghettotech scene ever produced”, and became typical of the sound DJ Assault developed over the next several years. While the lyrics became infamous, Adams would later explain that they weren’t meant to be taken seriously:
The whole dirty lyrics thing… it’s just my sense of humor and the types of things that are funny to me. It was all in fun, nothing so serious…[Ass-N-Titties] was just me being silly once again...It’s good so many people like it. It’s funny how it keeps going and going; younger and younger people keep asking me about it.
Also in 1997, DJ Assault released the mix Belle Isle Tech, which was released as a 2CD set. In their review All Music described the first CD as “the duo’s brand of potent gangster rap, which merges the violent egomania of NWA with the pornographic sexism of 2 Live Crew”, while the second CD features a mix of 38 songs featuring several of DJ Assaults previously released singles such as Ass-N-Titties, which were described by All Music as their “booty/ghettotech anthems”.
In 1999 James Lavelle released Be There, a new single for his UNKLE project, which had released their debut album Psyence Fiction the previous year. The Be There single contained several remixes, including Celestial Annihilation (DJ Assault Remix), a remix of another song from Psyence Fiction. This was DJ Assault’s first appearance on Mo’ Wax, and was followed by several releases under Mo’ Wax’s new Booty Wax sublabel in 2000.
Booty Wax put out seven releases in 2000, three 12" singles and one album from DJ Magic Mike, and two 12" singles and one album from DJ Assault. A Booty Wax tour was also held that year, starting with a show in Sheffield in May, and ending the year with a show at Fabric for James Lavelle’s Vecta night in December. Muzik attended May’s show and described it as “James Lavelle’s
attempt to sell the Stateside booty phenomenon to us mild-mannered Brits” but noted it was “unlikely to make much impact” based on their experience.
DJ Assault’s two 12" singles for Booty Wax were each titled Belle Isle Tech and featured songs from the album of the same name which was re-released by Mo’Wax / Booty Wax in a slightly different form from its previous release in 1997. While the 1997 edition featured two CDs, one of Rap and another a DJ mix, the Mo’ Wax edition removed the Rap CD and instead released only the mix. Also, to confuse matters, Mo’ Wax / Booty Wax released another version of the album with a slightly altered tracklisting from their other pressings, and all of the Belle Isle Tech singles and album from Mo’ Wax feature the same NSFW album artwork.
The Village Voice (12 Dec 2000) reviewed DJ Assault’s two singles and wrote:
Assault’s eerie atmosphere is more compelling, if less distinctive, than his funny funk; his latest album squeezes 83 cuts into 57 minutes, but this EP’s got genuine songs (or, okay, chants: “every freakin’ day, every freakin’ day”) oozing out of the vagueness, then wobbling and percolating and eventually falling into deep wormholes of dub.
The album was given mixed reviews, with The List awarding it 2/5, and describing DJ Assault and their label mate DJ Magic Mike as “Not hugely exciting out of the context of nudie bar or the back of a jeep”, while All Music gave it 4/5 and wrote that the mix “is a perfect place for newcomers to get a quick education in…Assault’s late ’90s canon”. NME also gave the album 4/5, praising the mix of genres and “up to the minute” sound, but they felt that song titles such as Big Bootie Hoes And Sluts Too and Drop Dem Panties were infantile and offensive, closing their review with, “if you ignore the dumb sentiments you’ll find this in sound from way out right up your alley.”
Much was made of the albums lyrics and song titles, with Mo’ Wax placing a sticker on the cover warning buyers the album “Contains no socially redeeming value whatsoever”. But most reviews agreed that DJ Assault weren’t meant to be taken seriously, and the Birmingham Post (March 11 2000) awarded the album 4/5, writing “there’s really nothing more offensive here than Kenneth Williams in Carry On Emmanuelle.”
Following the release of Belle Isle Tech, Craig Adams and Ade’ Mainor went their seperate ways, stating “creative differences”, and from this point on DJ Assault releases were only by Craig Adams, while Ade’ Mainor released his own solo work under the name Mr. De’. Mainor had already been working on the next DJ Assault record, but when they broke up he completed it solo, and released the debut Mr. De’ album Electronic Funkysh*t in 2001. Mainor also took control of the pairs label Electrofunk, and Adams started a new label Jefferson Ave.
DJ Assault continued to release new music, with two albums arriving in 2001, Off The Chain For The Y2K and Jefferson Ave. (The Accelerated Funk), and in 2002 he featured on ex-Mo’ Wax artist Andrea Parker’s Freaky Bitches single. Freaky Bitches was the first release on Parker’s Touchin’ Bass record label, and the song featured both DJ Assault and DJ Godfather, another well known Gettotech artist from Detroit. It was later remixed and re-released in 2008, again by Touchin’ Bass.
Several solo albums and singles from DJ Assault followed, and more recently he has made most of his back catalogue available on Bandcamp, including the complete 1997 version of Belle Isle Tech, the Straight Up Detroit series, and some recent free EP’s titled Remixes & Edits. Ade’ Mainor meanwhile has continued to run the Electrofunk label, and in 2009 the label released a compilation of his work with DJ Assault titled Grand Quarters Electrofunk Dance Music 1996–2000.
While both Craig Adams and Ade’ Mainor have spoken with one another again since ending their production partnership, in 2017 they both told Red Bull Music Academy that a new collaboration between them was unlikely. In the same discussion they both reflected on their careers and the legacy of DJ Assault, and Craig Adams commented:
I honestly think I lost people with some of the [Jefferson Ave] stuff that I tried to pull off…it was just too far from the core audience. It’s a business and you have to be very careful what you do as an artist, because I don’t really think you can be something different once you have a fan base.
Likewise Ade’ Mainor found that the response to his Electronic Funkysh*t album was “What the hell is this…I wanted to hear more ghettotech”.
But while both Mainor and Adams have seen their careers shift since the early 1990’s, both have remained in the industry, and in 2005 Ade’ Mainor became president of Submerge Recordings, the home of Underground Resistance. He has also continued to DJ and tour, and in 2015 re-released his first EP which had appeared on Supply N’ Demand in 1995.
Craig Adams’ has also continued to run his label Jefferson Ave and work on new releases, and in 2020 he released a two-part DJ Assault compilation, The Street Narrator (2004–2009), which followed his most recent new release in 2018, No Viagra Needed. Through 2020 DJ Assault has continued DJing, and in 2021 he will travel to the Netherlands for their Best Kept Secret Festival in June.
