DJ Slugo "Godzilla"

 

DJ Sluggo 

Godzilla Remixes

scum stats: sold by the boatload

A few months back I read the wonderfully exhaustive oral history of Detroit ghettotech written by Ray Philp.

Ho-lee shit. I found myself absolutely smitten with the story, I was vaguely familiar with some of the narrative, but I just jumped in wholeheartedly. The most rewarding part has been going back and tracking down the records referenced in the piece.

None tend to loom any larger than "Godzilla" by DJ Slugo. I could attempt to contextualize, but I'll just copy-and-paste what Philp communicated at the bottom here.

Safe to say, it's been a minute since I've played some music that got a reaction out of Swank. Once the drums kick in on this one, I heard him exclaim from one office over "This goes HARD!"

I felt like I had some deep unlocked memories of this song...a YouTube comment mentions the that this played on WJLB every Friday and my immediate gut reaction was "OH SHIT, that's it! I remember this from when I was a kid" But once I realized the song was released the year I turned twenty years old (2002) I had to reverse wrap my brain around the fact that this just sounds SO timeless, SO perfect, SO inimitable that the genetic make up of the mix, the sample, all of it, as so precisely tweaked within an inch of exploding by DJ Godfather....nevermind the fact that I've never even seen the original (any?) of the Godzilla films, so it's not like this is some sort of lost recollection buried within my psyche cued by the mental trigger of the sounds. Shit is just solid.

I don't use the term "quintessential" all willy-nilly. But I mean it to the fullest extent here. Enjoy.

GODZILLA

Mr. De’

“Godzilla.”

Keith Tucker

The theme from Godzilla was another [anthem].

DJ Slugo

There ended up being a big hoopla about that record.

DJ Godfather

[Slugo] didn’t even make that record. From what I understand – and I kind of understood this later – a guy named RP Boo made that record. It never got released because Dance Mania went out of business. It was an old record. It was a B-side. It was on a DJ Slugo record. Finally, I called him. I go, “Look it. I think this record could be big. Do you want to release it? I think this will definitely be a big thing in Detroit.” He’s like, “Yeah, we could release it.”

RP Boo

Me and Slugo, we was real good friends. Even with “Baby Come On,” “The Ice Cream Truck” and the other tracks, he was the type of person who would always try his best to look out for people. Dance Mania had just collapsed. We wanted to push this to get it out on other labels and give other labels an opportunity. What had happened was that... We didn’t know that it took off, because I was at work. I didn’t go to Detroit. I didn’t go nowhere.

DJ Slugo

When I first started out, I was one of the ones in Chicago who had all the equipment before any of the other DJs. At the time, RP Boo was one of the people I was teaching how to produce, on a [Roland] R-70. I end up getting two of them. I loaned him one and let him use it to make beats. [Then] I needed it back because I sold the other one. So when he brought it back, it had the samples to the Godzilla record. When I heard it, I felt like he didn’t chop them up right. It was too muddy, and the samples wasn’t clean enough.

DJ Godfather

[Slugo and I] worked out a deal and then after it’s released he kind of told me that RP Boo made it. I’m like, “Wait a second. Is there an issue here? What’s going on?” He’s like, “Oh no, he owed me a favor.” He owed him money or a favor or something. I don’t know. Slugo was owed something from RP Boo, so Slugo released some tracks. Or he gave Slugo the tracks. I don’t know the exact story.

DJ Slugo

I went to the record store and asked them for [the original record], because I wanted to sample it from the record itself. So when I played them what I wanted, one of the guys that worked in the store was like, “Oh, that’s Pharoahe Monch, that’s off of the Pharoahe Monch album.” So I chopped it up, did it the way that I want to do it. I actually never released it – I released it on a mixtape one time, and that was basically it. So then I meet Godfather, and then he asked me for a song. But the song he wanted was the “Where The Rats?” record. So we released that and then we needed a record to be an album filler, because I didn’t have enough records that I thought were strong enough to give to him at the time. So I had [“Godzilla”] in the archive and I just threw it on there.

RP Boo

Word got back, it was, “Hey, Slugo, he’s taking credit for your track that you did.” I already knew that because Slugo asked me, could he do a remix. “Fine, no problem.” I actually gave him my record so he could do it, chop his samples up. I was like, “Yeah, I know Slugo has a remix.” Word got back like, “No, it’s not the remix that he’s claiming. It’s the one that you actually did.” When I saw the label, and I saw the print. It was DJ Slugo’s remixes, but that wasn’t the remix. It was the actual track. He was able to put out what he want because I had no access to Godfather. That’s when it just went, “No, I can’t do this no more.” Slugo was not the only person that I had these problems with. I had problems with this with other people.

DJ Slugo

The reason I felt like I didn’t care [about the track] was because of the samples. We’d never cleared the samples. So I was like, “I don’t care, I don’t want no problem from this record, you can do whatever you want to do with it.” [Godfather] was cool with that, and the record took off. Then the big old thing came out where people thought I sampled RP Boo’s record. I was like, “Well, all you gotta do is listen to the record, and listen to the record that I’ve done and you will hear that the production is the production I done.” And then if you look at the record, I even gave Boo credit. I gave him credit for the original concept, because the idea was his. I heard it from him first. I was like, “Oh, I like that but you did it wrong. So I’ma do my version. And I asked permission when I didn’t even have to.

DJ Godfather

The record started doing good but then I thought it could do better, so we did a remix record. I did a remix and a few other people did remixes. Then the remix I did was the one that got the most popular. Yeah. Story of my life: that had a sample in it and it could only go so far, because we got offered a lot of money to put it in a car commercial for an international commercial and we tried to clear the sample from the Godzilla people and they wouldn’t clear it.