Brooklyn’s own Olivia Dope is one of the nation’s sought after DJs. Dancer, designer and a curator of music, this girl does it all. I have first seen her play at the MCM x Puma event, where she opened for Rapsody and Big Daddy Kane a few months back, and I was in awe with her vast knowledge of music, that I just had to pick her brain. I sat down with the Bed-Stuy native as we speak all things crafty, from first equipment to advice on the DJ business.
How did you find your love of music that made you get into the craft?
It started young. I used to dance around the house from the time I walked, from what I was told. So I was dancing which eventually lead me to dance school, trained professionally in ballet, modern, tap and all the while I didn’t realize it wasn’t dance that I loved. It was music.
Do you remember your first equipment that you used?
I do have a memory. It wasn’t even equipment. I was about 7 years old and I remember En Vogue’s Funky Divas coming out and they had one particular song. I forgot the track number and it was called “It Ain’t Over Til The Fat Lady Sings”. The beginning of the song was instrumental, funky kinda hip-hop beat. I remember trying to just sample it by taking a blank cassette tape and just repeatedly record and stop. It was really weird because I remember playing it on the CD and try to record it onto cassette just the instrumental part of that song by itself. I don’t know what kind of engineering I thought I was doing at the time. I was just 7 or 8 years old trying to do something like that! So now that I think about it, I was really trying to be a producer on my mother’s Sony stereo!
Yeah, I have! Absolutely! It’s in the works. I’m still trying to learn what I need to learn. The engineering and stuff like that.
When did you decide that DJing was something that you wanted to take up professionally?
I decided to take it up professionally in 2010. That year, I was in somewhat of an identity crisis, careerwise. I knew I wanted to do something creative. I knew I had so many different talents in the different realms of the creative world, I just didn’t know where to tap into. A DJ friend of mines from Brooklyn, DJ Big Rave, he taught me how to DJ. Within two days, he taught me the basics of what I need to know in terms of Serato and turntables and all that and about a week later he tells me, “Oh, yeah, I have my radio show. You’re gonna come on and do a set.” I was like, “Are you kidding?”
He just put you right in the hot seat, huh?
Yeah, just threw me into the fire! (laughs) It made me really buck up like, okay, this is not a game. At any given moment, you have to be on. There is no preparedness or anything like that. You learn as you go.
So out of all the gigs that you did, what was the best one?
The best one….because there’s some good ones, some really good ones. I think the best one was the MCM event.
Yeah, that party was fun!
Not only it was a fun party. For them allowing me to curate the sound for that night, in terms of 45 years of hip hop, I could go literally anywhere I want to in terms of sound. For them to put that in my hands and say, “We trust you with this. We know you’re gonna do good,” I was taken aback. I was going to be opening up for Rapsody and Big Daddy Kane. That was an epic night. Maybe the fact that it was one of the rare occasions that I can go anywhere in the hip hop world and I was given that opportunity. It was dope.
How old are you, don’t mind me asking?
I’m 32.
Yeah, you know your shit. I say that because some DJs today, they’re like “We’re not gonna play any old school,” and they don’t really give it the respect that it used to have.
And that’s the problem. I feel like, and I say it all the time…in 2016, I wanted to quit at one point, because I felt like there was a major gap, musically. We had Hip hop in the golden era, and I don’t know what happened in the mid-2000s or late 2009 to about 2012, something went blank and then we had trap music, and nobody beforehand understands what’s going on now, and the up and comers have no idea why there are here and are able to have this freedom of music. That freedom of expression.
Right. I’m all for freedom of expression, just know your roots. Remember where you came from. That’s all that I ask for. You read articles and listen to the radio and some of these new artists be like, “Fuck these old school cats! They don’t know what they are talking about!”
Are you serious? Like, you just can’t say, “Fuck Dad and Uncle.” You can’t just say that! You can’t! Because these are the ones that brought you up, even it they were absent, you still learned a lot from the things that you heard about them, the things that you know about them, who this person was, the fact that you had to put shit on your own. You couldn’t learn that from nowhere. You wasn’t like, “I woke up today as a poet.” They forget that it’s poetry. “I woke up today as a rapper.” You can’t just wake up as a rapper. There are things that you have to learn. There’s all these samples. That’s why I’m really heavy into teaching my Instagram audience about samples and how influential it is to the hip hop community. There’s a lot of songs that sample things of yesteryear that people still know. I think that’s where the disconnect is: “Y’all too old and y’all too young.”
Some music you understand and some you don’t.
Right. Some of the music I understand and some I don’t, even the worst of the worst that we had in the golden age of hip hop. We had our few artists that were just like, “I don’t know how you got a deal, but okay,” but I still understood what they were saying, whatever wack message they were trying to portray or bring to the masses, it was still a message being brought. It still stood for something. I can’t believe you if you got a deal and you singing “rollie, rollie, rollie, bling, bling, bling”, I can’t believe that because you got a deal from SoundCloud last night. How am I supposed to believe that you rolling in all this dough? It doesn’t make sense.
It’s funny that you say that because in this day and age, you don’t even get a deal off of skill anymore. It’s off of followers.
Yeah, popularity. It’s a popularity contest, it’s not even about talent anymore. It’s about who has the biggest following and that’s it.
I think the difference between male and female DJs is that we are not really that ego-driven, because you hear that “You’re not bad for a girl DJ” line.
Right! Like “Excuse me?” (laughs)
That’s the part that disgusts me the most.
I don’t hear it that much anymore, but I do hear that on that rare occasion. I was asked one time, what is the most annoying thing you hear about female DJs. I told him I just finished Djing at an event an some guy that works in the industry comes up to me, I can’t remember his name, but he works for somebody such and such, and another person told him that I’m a DJ and he came up to me and said “I didn’t hear you spin, but I like how you look, so here’s my card. Let’s work.” I was like “Excuse me?” That was probably the most offensive thing that I’ve ever heard. And he was like “Why? It’s a good thing, that you look good. You don’t have to work hard.” It’s not about that because I’ve been working hard my whole life. I try to harness and really engulf in my craft and in that manner, I’m not gonna take it lightly. That’s disrespectful.
Let’s get into the DJ/promoter relationship of the business. Sometimes, it can be a very janky. I’ve seen some DJs that get booked and not get paid, so on that note, what are your dos and dont’s of dealing with them?
Oh, hell. I wanna say don’t deal with promoters, but I have a good amount of friends in the promotion business and it is not an easy job because like anytime, you can have a great event one time and the next week, it’s just Flop City, so much respect to them. But what I will say in terms of dos and dont’s, DO work with people that you feel that you can trust. Build yourself a relationship with said promoters because you can’t work with anybody just to work with anybody.
In terms of consistent work, as well as, they’re building their brand and following, you’re building yours because one you hear their name they’re automatically gonna link it to yours. Don’t hop from person to person because it’s just not good business. You wanna build business relationships. My don’t is, and I learned this the hard way, monies needs to be paid the day of the event at the very least. Don’t wait until afterwards. That should be in the budget. Because at the end of the day, if they have the money to pay the venue, they should have the money in the budget to pay everyone associated with the event. down, that’s cool. No hard feelings.
Shamika Sanders-Sykes
