djs-from-the-united-states

"I will be dropping an album end of this year and my main aim is for the album to open doors for our local artists on the international market"

"Zimbabwean music has been underrated for a while now and yet we have artistes which are well-seasoned"

"However, it was really when my grandmother passed away from anorexia that I made health and wellness a priority in my life"

"I grew up in a household that was very into the world of wellness; my mom loves reiki, very plant-based and conscientious about nutrition"

"Maybe it started out as trying to be a goody two-shoes but I always remember being the one kid at the table who just ate all of the gefilte fish, and everyone was always talking about how I would [always] eat all the gefilte fish"

"I was always very proud of my Jewish heritage. I knew from a young age that I wanted to have a bat mitzvah, I also knew from a young age, that this was very different from how my mother grew up. She really wanted me to own both sides. My mom was a very confident woman herself, and so she definitely instilled a lot of that in me"

"I won’t say it was hard, and I won’t say it was easy"

"Growing up in NYC from a prominent Jewish family, with a very strong black mother who grew up during segregation in the south side of Chicago from a middle-class family"

"from a young age, I was very aware of both of these sides of myself. It can be challenging being mixed, especially in the 90s and 2000s — obviously now as well — but as a young girl, trying to figure out your identity and it being a little more complicated than most"

"Fashion is one of the greatest vehicles to merge music, art, architecture, design, typography... It’s a wide enough canvas, or a big enough sandbox, to touch all the different things that I’m into."

"You know my style of clothing is basically a discourse between me and the kids. That’s what the premise of the brand is... We’re talking straight to the market. But I believe in the romantic interchange between intellectuals about fashion."

"Don't ever burn a bridge. Let me ask you a question: can you walk on water? Don't burn no bridge. Only God can walk on water."

"A lot of people see the glory, and don't know the story."

"It breaks my heart They ain't believe in us We the best music They played themselves While you hatin' and being jealous You could be over here embracin' that love More love, more blessings, more life GOD DID You either win with us, or you watch us win."

"They kick you when you're down but they wanna kick it when you up."

"The key is to make it."

"You do know it cost money to put a t-shirt on your back? You do know it cost money have a house, a home? You do know it cost money to eat? Get money, don’t let these people fool you."

"I eat pears now, and shit like that. Shoutout to all the pear."

"I just can’t wrap my head around it – I don’t want to believe it’s real – and nothing I can say will serve his memory any justice right now. I’m just f-ng sad sad."

"Feed the soul, starve the ego."

"(on the plane crash) I saw Travis running and flailing, trying to put out fire on his body. He screamed, ‘What do I do?’ and I said, ‘Roll!’ He did, but the fire didn’t go out. He tried to rip his clothes off. I finally put the flames out by smothering him with my body. Some of my burns are from that. His sock was on fire – I burned my fingers taking it off."

"They shaved my head and took layers of skin from my scalp. To heal the wounds, I was in a hyperbaric chamber for 90 minutes twice daily for four days. It’s claustrophobic. One of my first nights home, I watched ‘Iron Man’ with friends. In the scene where Robert Downey Jr. comes out of the cave with a blowtorch, my whole body cringed. That night, I had a nightmare someone spilled fuel on me and was trying to light me on fire. I woke up and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is going to happen forever?’"

"I hadn't heard his remixes and didn't know how amazing a drummer Travis is. But we got together, I threw on James Brown's 'Funky Drummer,' one of the most sampled beats in hip-hop, and 'I Know You Got Soul' by Bobby Byrd. His face would just open up; he would match the beat perfectly. I thought, 'Damn, this is fun.' It's like a skeleton you get to put the clothes on. And once the clothes are on, you yank out the spine."

"I have really bad days and I have really OK days. It's strange. I'm blessed. I'm alive. I'm here."

"There’s no reason why I should have lived or why I lived and they didn’t. And it’s something I struggle with every day."

"I've prayed every night for the past 10 years. There's a lot more to thank God for now. My philosophy is 'live life to the fullest,' [and] I was saved for a reason. Maybe I'm going to help someone else. I don't question it. All I know is, I'm thankful I'm still here."

"The fact that I can be in an airport and someone says, "there's DJ AM" means something, right? I just don't consider myself a celebrity, I've never viewed myself that way. Five Minutes with DJ AM (August 2008)."

"What I do with the majority of my free time is help people get off drugs. It’s nice to just sit and listen to them talk about what’s going on in their life and not think about what’s going on with me for a while. Success is not money, it’s happiness. Interview with DJ AM"

"New York, New York. Big city of dreams, but everything in New York ain't always what it seems. Last Twitter posting by DJ AM (August 25, 2009)."

"Iam kida the greatest Dj of all time."

"I saw DJ AM play in a mansion in Miami, and he amazed me with his skills and the music he picked to make the crowd move. He made sure everyone — I mean everyone — had a good time!"

"I am deeply saddened by the news of the passing of DJ AM. He was our resident DJ at Rain Nightclub at the Palms Casino Resort. We considered him a friend and a great artist. He will truly be missed."

"In complete shock. I really want to use words right now but I can’t get em. Fuck. We’re supposed to lose our friends to time, at an age when we’re ready to agree to the terms of having lived a long life. Not now."

"We were live on-air and I had to fill for time, so I just rolled up on him — I didn't know him. And I remember thinking how unfazed he was that we'd just shoved a camera in his face, because he was kind, he was charismatic, he was funny. He was a good guy and I remember that meeting very well. We spoke after that, and we would see each other out a lot and I would go and see him play. He was always cool, like effortlessly cool."

"This week has been one of the hardest I've ever lived. My close friend, Adam had passed away. Known for his impeccable DJing. He was much more than that to me and many, many other people. He helped and touched everyone who met him. Treating you as if he had known you forever. He was always sharing such joy among others… and if you were lucky enough to hear the sound of his laughter, you got to hear something very, very, special. It's incredibly hard to think of what to say about you Adam, as tears are running down my face. All I can say is I love you Adam and I miss you and am so glad you were someone in my sister’s, and my life."

"I have never experienced anything quite like Adam Goldstein. He made me feel warm and whole. He smelled soft. Adam was a remarkable human being, and so many have been blessed by his presence. We talked of marriage and excitement of having children together. He would whisper in my ear sometimes before we went to sleep, 'Goodnight, my sweet angel.' Most mornings when I woke up, he'd make me toast and juice and say, 'Good morning, soul mate.' I will cherish the memories forever. Even though our time together was short, I would change nothing. The love I continue to feel for him and the love that we shared together will live with me and those who witnessed us together forever. I will never be the same without him. A part of me has passed away with him. Even the warmest of days will never compare to the warmth I felt when I touched him. He was my soul mate, and now he is my soul. He was my amazing grace."

"Being a DJ, I take the art of digging seriously...it has almost a karmic element of, 'I was meant to find this on top.' or, 'I was meant to pull this out because it works so well with this.' So it has a lot of meaning for me personally."

"Producers like Organized Noize mix samples and live instruments really well, but for me, it almost feels like a cop-out, because I'm a collage artist. It's like, 'Damn, if only I could find this one part. Well, maybe if I just had somebody paint it, and then I'll put it out.' That almost feels like cheating. Lots of times, I have trouble finding bass lines, because it's not very often on a record that there are good open bass lines. Sometimes I wish I could just have somebody come in and do what I want him to do on a bass line. It would be so easy. But what I do just keeps things much more challenging, I guess."

"Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it."

"Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records. The type of mixing that was out then was blending from one record to the next or waiting for the record to go off and wait for the jock to put the needle back on."

"Now he took the music of like Mandrill, like "Fencewalk", certain disco records that had funky percussion breaks like The Incredible Bongo Band when they came out with "Apache" and he just kept that beat going. It might be that certain part of the record that everybody waits for--they just let their inner self go and get wild. The next thing you know the singer comes back in and you'd be mad."

"A scratch is nothing but the back-cueing that you hear in your ear before you push it out to the crowd. All you have to know is mathematically how many times to scratch it and when to let it go — when certain things will enhance the record you're listening to. For instance, if you're playing a record with drums--horns would sound nice to enhance it so you get a record with horns and slip it in at certain times."

"Herc really slipped up. With the monostrous power he had he couldn't mix too well. He was playing little breaks but it would sound so sloppy. I noticed that the mixer he was using was a GLI 3800. It was a very popular mixer at that time. It's a scarcity today but it's still one of the best mixers GLI ever made. At the time he wasn't using no cueing. In other words, the hole was there for a headphone to go in but I remember he never had headphones over his ears. All of a sudden, Herc had headphones but I guess he was so used to dropping the needle down by eyesight and trying to mix it that from the audio part of it he couldn't get into it too well."