A missed flight resulted in three tracks on Kanye West’s Graduation album for Atlanta’s DJ Toomp. This bonafide Hip-Hopper had encouraged his name and that of Bankhead’s most notorious trapster in the earlier part of the new millennium. Now he was being hailed as the best in the South by the "Louis Vuitton Don."

DJ Toomp has been raised on sound. His father, lead singer of The MVP’s, had taught him the basic fundamentals of music at a young age. Lessons he adhered to and carried with him to where he is today; those same lessons that have encouraged his production to be appreciated globally.

Now, if the Grammy's go ahead, he will be there front and center once again only a year after grabbing his first for T.I.'s "What You Know". That missed flight really did have its advantages.

Through his patience and aversion to force, this well respected producer has the potential to change the pecking order that has dominated production for the last ten years. Just watch.

HipHopDX: Your history in the music game goes back a bit further than your work with T.I. which some people might not know.
DJ Toomp: Basically I have always been a lover of music since as I was a kid. My father had a nice record collection and then it got to the stage to when my parents started to trust me to work the stereo. I was about six or seven at this time and once I started listening to so much music I was interested in it. I noticed I was paying a whole lot of attention to how it was put together. You know certain things, you know from the break downs, all that caught my ear. Of course I didn’t realize I was going to be a producer. I started out rapping first, then I learned how to deejay and once I watched the movie Wild Style, that was it, I just stayed with the deejaying side of it.

Around 1985-1986 I decided to go to the studio and learn. You know nobody ever gave me any lessons; but I always had an ear for music. Next thing you know things started to fall into place and the music I was putting together was making a lot of sense. I started to get a whole lot of compliments from other people and so I stuck with it. Now here we are.

DX: Was it hard for you starting out?
T: It wasn’t that hard as there weren’t that many people doing it. I stuck out like a sore thumb. There was hardly anyone around here doing that, just like when I started deejaying; there wasn’t too many deejays on the scene. Compared to the likes of New York and other major cities, there weren’t people doing tricks on turntables down here. I was ahead of my time. Even though I didn’t know anything about publishing and that side of things I knew I had the power to create music and I was just excited to hear my stuff on the radio. It was later on that I started to get familiar with the building side of things. I put out my first record in 1985-1986 with a guy called Raheem the Dream. From there on I started getting a lot of notoriety. People were hearing my songs on the radio and the excitement of that made me want to stick with it. Just the excitement. [Laughs] Then later on I found out that you could get money for it.

DX: Well you came from that generation where it wasn’t really about the money.
T: Exactly. Nobody was really caught up in the money, it was all about fun. People were more about the excitement, the love of Hip Hop and the love of the music. People were glad to get on the road and you had some people who would never have left their home town until they actually got on tour. It was a beautiful thing the music business around that time. It was just exciting and that was the thing, the excitement was in the air. Then it became a lucrative business, Kurtis Blow was the first rapper with an endorsement which was Sprite. He was the first one to have an endorsement and from then on you saw a lot of corporations pay attention to rap.

DX: Do you think there was a greater appreciation for the music back then when it wasn’t such a vast money driven genre?
T: Oh definitely, you could hear in the music back then that all people were about was making good music and having fun. But some stuff, it has been whipped up in five or ten minutes nowadays. Not to take away from anyone but you can hear the difference. Back then it was wild, when someone brought real real music to the table. It does get to point at sometimes when it feels like we have lost.

DX: It was your work with T.I. that pushed you into the mainstream, made you a household name. Finding someone to believe in you and your direction, was that difficult?
T: Yes it took a minute. I had produced for a lot of different people, but you are right. It took for me to find that artist that I could really produce, where I could say, "Okay, you know what, I am going to introduce this music." It was the same tracks that I was shopping around to a lot of artists but it took for me to get my own artist to display my type of music. It was almost like fashion designer, you know you can have some nice pieces but you need to find someone to model those clothes, on the runways to display it. That is basically what T.I. did; he displayed a different type of production. I come from the Miami Bass era with Luke and all those people. Around that time, the game slowed down and the tempo, so what I did I just put all my energy into him and the next thing you know we changed the whole face of the rap game in the south. Of course you have people like OutKast who have been had their respect since day one, but it got to the point where people didn’t think guys could get it to pop down here for real. They started to hear so much bass music and booty shake music; people didn’t think we could rap down here. T.I. proved that there was a movement down here and there were a lot more other young cats down here who were just as serious as him in this game. That opened a lot of doors, as far as us having some great rappers, New Orleans, Louisiana, the whole south. Continued on page 2 »