Veteran Hitmaker Talks Personal Life And Motivation With Philly-based Blogsite
Last week, After DJing an incredible set at Philly’s Silk City Nightclub as a part of Heineken’s Greenroom Sessions, producer and DJ extraordinaire Just Blaze defied the threat of a looming snowstorm to hold court with HHS1987’s E-Money before an attentive crowd at Milkboy Studios. In the interview, the legendary beatsmith touched on a number of topics concerning his career including his inspiration to continue producing, his interest and upbringing in computer programming and his work as one of the very first innovators of ringtones on two-way pagers.
“At this point I think what keeps me motivated is the fact that I don’t have to do it,” said Blaze of his continued dedication to his craft even after his storied success. “I was reading this article the other day, some featured piece about me,” he continued, referencing a Noisey article highlighting the irritants of his fame, “one of the things that they said was ‘You would assume that somebody who’s accomplished what Just Blaze has done would ride off into the sunset with a bag of royalty money and call it a day’ and I never really looked at it in that capacity but I thought about it and I’m like ‘Yeah, technically I could.’ But that fact that I don’t have to do it anymore is what makes me happy to do it.”
“There was a point when I was scrambling to establish my name, to establish my hustle, to make money, make a mark in the industry where I was just doing beats for anybody and everybody and the end result wasn’t always great,” Blaze said of his early days in the game. “At this point the name is established, the bank accounts are okay. I don’t have to do this to chase a check but that’s where the more creative freedom comes into play: where you can just sit back and say ‘Okay, I want to do this.’”
Fans of Blaze will note his near nerdy interest in computers, computer programming and information technology. He continued by going into detail on what spawned his interest in all things IT. “My father was a computer programmer,” he began, “even before I knew what it was I was in computer labs […] I was just fascinated by it. […] [I] snuck in my father’s man cave […] got the books and at like 6 years old created my first computer program. […] Around the same time you had like the Atari, Nintendo, The Sega and my thing was I wanted to make video games. So I taught myself how to make basic video games. That’s where a lot of my love of technology started,” Blaze revealed. “From there I was just always a tinkerer. I would take apart cordless phones, my father had a work pager […] took that apart, got in trouble; I was just tryna figure out how it worked.”
Just Blaze would go on to discuss how his childhood love for computers and his childhood love for music would merge after seeing Soul II Soul’s “Back 2 Life” video wherein the producer, Nelly Hooper, played a keyboard attached to a computer.
Ironically, the ability to make music on a computer would serve Blaze well later on in the early stages of his career.
“Before you had iPhones, before you had Android, before you even had a Nokia 6220 […] there was [sic] these devices called the [Motorola] PageWriter [2000]. There was an app in there that let you design your own ringtones. You had to enter numbers in certain sequences and get them to equate to musical notes and I figured out a way to make those into ringtones of rap records. I was actually more popular for that than I was for making beats at that time. I would make them, send them out; […] Being the weirdo that I was gave the music industry ringtones for a couple of years.”
With his firsthand knowledge of the positive impact that computer technology can have on young minds, Blaze also spoke on how it could possibly fit in future school curriculums.
“I think there’s a push for [teaching computer programming languages] right now. They’re trying to get programming languages legitimized the same way we’d teach communicative languages […] I’m all for programming languages being taught […] it’s like, ‘you can take French or you can take Flash.’”
Check out the entire 3-part interview below.
