New Book Alert: Bust a Move – The Story of Delicious Vinyl
The story of Delicious Vinyl, the little LA label that could – and did! The scrappy music start-up that hummed on ingenuity and grit that overnight put LA hip-hop on the charts and transformed the genre into a global sensation.
It belongs in the pantheon of great entrepreneurial start-ups. Two LA DJs working out of a dusty apartment in central Hollywood would disrupt the star – maker machinery of the music industrial complex with a string of hits that would break hip-hop open into a killer genre with a historical impact – and the classics would just keep on coming.
‘BUST A MOVE: Matt Dike, Delicious Vinyl, and the Hits that First Conquered Pop’ by music journalist Peter Relic – with a foreword by B-Real of Cypress Hill – is the first to press story of Delicious Vinyl, launched in a little Los Angeles flat in 1987 by Matt Dike and Mike Ross. Together they became veritable pioneers of American hip-hop, producing new beats that would quickly match New York’s hip-hop scene and help push the genre over the edge into national, then global, reach.
With $5,000 and some primitive drum machines, Dike and Ross would introduce the world to irresistible hits, from Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” and “Funky Cold Medina” to Young MC’s “Bust a Move” – you want it, baby you got it!
Newsweek would call the gentlemen of Delicious Vinyl “The New Heroes of Hip-Hop.” Their shared love of obsessive passions, experimentation, unfettered ambitions, and ferocious gambles on newcomer musicians would pay off, and then some.
In less than two years, the fledgling label would sell 10 million records worldwide, dominate MTV, and their posse of artists would sell out countless venues. And that was a prelude to what came next: Releasing classic, chart-storming records by The Brand New Heavies, Mellow Man Ace, The Pharcyde, Masta Ace, J Dilla.
According to Spotify, “Bust a Move” has been played 183 MILLION TIMES.
Relic’s book is part oral history and part mystery. Just at the height of Delicious Vinyl’s success, Matt Dike disappeared. Relic has the last full interview with Dike and BUST A MOVE will finally solve the mystery of Dike’s inexplicable drop-out from the music scene he built, down to his final days.
BUST A MOVE is full of delicious anecdotes about the way the late 1980s and early 1990s art world weaved, rose, and fell, moving between New York and Los Angeles in a pivotal moment in America’s culture, its art and music scene. N. W. A. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rammellzee, Beastie Boys, The Dust Brothers, Ice-T, Snoop Dogg, Van Halen, KDAY, Casa Camino Real, director John Hughes, Flea, Cypress Hill, Jesse Jaymes, Masters of Reality, Clive Davis, Billy Squier, Brian Wilson, Rick Rubin, Chris Blackwell, director Tamra Davis and so many more are all part of this fantastic history. They all tangentially or directly revolved around the central orbit of Delicious Vinyl’s spectacular tractor beam of success.
The label’s rise was just at the moment when hip-hop was poised to cross over – and it all fell apart nearly as fast. By 1992, what Ross and Dike had dreamt up a decade earlier had fractured. Yet the music plays on. Effervescent, rollicking, nostalgic, and a delicious chronicle of the rise and fall of two sonic pioneers, BUST A MOVE is a deftly written snapshot of an electrifying moment in music history.
Purchase your copy of ‘BUST A MOVE: Matt Dike, Delicious Vinyl, and the Hits that First Conquered Pop’ right HERE.
