Destroying Stereotypes: How DJ Ez Eddie D of KNON Defines Hip-Hop.
DJ Ez Eddie D is the host of Knowledge Dropped…Lesson Taught., Saturday nights on Dallas’s award-winning grassroots radio station, KNON. On the air since ‘87, Eddie’s is the longest-running hip-hop show in the country. His fingers are crossed for a nod from the Guinness Book of World Records. In the meantime, this story starts in Eddie’s hometown of Cincinnati with records of the vinyl variety.
– WORDS and photos BY Lisa Petty & Courtesy Photos
Read on for DJ Ez Eddie D’s crazy, true, and inspiring life story–in his own words. After all, when you talk for a living, the knowledge should come straight from the source.
Part 1: Cincinnati to Dallas
Intro to Hip-Hop, Digging in the Crates, Party in the Parking Lot
“In ’76 we went to this house party in Cincinnati. There was a DJ, a strobe light, a bowl of chips, and me, my brother, and our friend, Joe. This one song came on and we looked at each other like, ‘What the fuck is that?’ The song was Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk, and it eventually became the body of Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock. That’s when I got into hip-hop.”
“They have this saying in hip-hop: digging in the crates. I was doing that even before there was such a term, you know what I mean? I found out a long time ago that, yeah, there’s the A-sides of singles and 45s, but every now and again you can find some jewels on the B-side. So, I was always into looking for stuff like that.”
“One day my mother said that my aunt was leaving Cincinnati to go to Houston, and I said, okay, I’m just gonna go, too. I went to Houston for the summer, but it was too hard to get around, so I moved to Dallas in 1984. On my first night here, my friends took me to this club called the Pizzazz on Camp Wisdom Road. This legendary DJ, Ushy, he DJ’d there, and I had never seen anything like it. We didn’t even go in–you didn’t have to go into the club because it was broadcast live on the radio. So, people had it on the radio and the parking lot was full. I’d never seen anything like that. I was like, okay, I’m never going back to Cincinnati.”
Part 2: On Air (and Off and On Again) at KNON
Birth of Blending, Cisco Soul, Down By Sound
“Here in Dallas, a friend said there’s this guy you need to meet, he’s like an electronic wizard. He had this technique. Everybody was scratching then, but he had this thing called blending. He would take two records and put them together and make something totally different. I was like, ‘Man, that’s cool.’ It took me a year to learn how to do it. Later, we went down to this station called KNON. The guy was on a show there called Cisco Soul & the Party Patrol. It was Dallas’s first mix show. I became part of that staff for a week, then his cousin stole the mixer and they canceled the show completely.”
“Then I joined this group called the Fresh Ones. At that time, for me, they were the best MC group in Dallas. We had two DJs, and I was one of them. I would blend records over the top of the beats, and the second DJ would scratch. There was this gentleman named Nicky Jones who had a show on KNON on Fridays, called the Funky Fresh Freaky Friday. It was the first all hip-hop show in Dallas, and he would give people their starts there.”
“So, if you’ve got to give it a starting point, I just say 1987 is when I got my own show. My first show was called Down by Sound. Then there were a couple of times when this one guy took me off the air. I can’t remember why, but he was a dick. And so I was off the air for a little bit, then I came back again to KNON. …I want to get in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest-running hip-hop show ever, which I do have. It’s crazy, because even in New York, L.A., nobody has been on as long as I have. It’s just crazy.”
Part 3: True School Hip-Hop
Defining the Style, Social Commentary, Sparking “Something”
“Big Al from KNON would go to New York and bring back a bunch of records. He played this one record by a group called Ultramagnetic MCs called Ego Trippin. Anything and everything I thought about hip-hop was encapsulated in that song, in that group. So from that, I was like, this is what I want my show to sound like. I always give them props–they’re what took me on that journey”.
“Peace, unity, love, and having fun. That’s what hip-hop is supposed to represent and what it should represent. …I don’t play anything disrespectful to women, all that bullshit, you know what I mean? I don’t fuck with it. I’d rather add on than destroy. And if I do have to destroy, let it be stereotypes and misinformation. I’ve always infused social commentary along with the music that I play. That was from the jump. Hip-hop is a genre that has a lot to do with what’s going on in the world. It’s still a struggle, even more so now than ever.”
“There’s a saying, ‘Each one, teach one.’ I used to want to be a preacher. I was raised a Seventh Day Adventist and I wanted to be a preacher. One day I was like, man, all these religions in the world, and the world’s like this. What the fuck are you all doing? So my morality, you know, to be a good person, you don’t have to know about religion, not at all. It sounds cliché, but I want to leave it in a better place than it was when I got here. Maybe the information I’ve got will spark something in someone’s head.”
