DJ Aladdin back on the rampage
By Chris Ziegler

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

DJ Aladdin was hip-hop in montage: he came up from Compton watching how Joe Cooley used to play and then he auditioned into the original KDAY DJ line-up (where he got Compton rappers their first airtime) and then he used those several thousand watts of power to get him to Rhyme Syndicate and Ice-T, who would later use Aladdin to produce 1991’s O.G., but . . . before Aladdin finished laying claim to the west coast, he decided to head east because they was hip-hop out there, too. That impulse to conquer got him out to New York City, where he stepped out of the flying saucer with his clothes all wrong but won or placed in all the DJ competitions anyway. (He’d go on to second place in the world championships in London—and beat champ Cut Master Swift at the next competition.) Then back home again, he ran the machines for Low Profile’s We’re In This Together (big song: “Pay Ya Dues”; big moment: “Aladdin’s On A Rampage”) and got back with Ice-T and did MTV with Dr. Dre and—I include all this only to indicate the loss of gravity suffered when he disappeared in the mid-1990s. DJ Aladdin: one of the west coast’s best, gone in a puff of smoke. Reports from the unknown years barely exist—some say “the streets,” some say jail. But then he was at Stacks Vinyl two years ago—looking a little more leathered and scheduled only to talk about the early days. DJ Icy Ice pulled out some unscheduled dubs of “Rock The Bells”—Aladdin’s championship vehicle—and unscheduled fingers started flexing and suddenly Aladdin revisited his DMC victory with such vigorous acrobatics that they thought he was going to leap the turntables. Call it a comeback? I’d call it a reclamation—it’s been a long time.

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