The story behind DJ Quik’s 1991 track ‘Born and Raised in Compton’
DJ Quik is a Compton boy through and through, so it’s fitting that the rap single that made his name reflected that fact. ‘Born and Raised in Compton’, his debut release in 1991, laid out exactly what Quik was about.
The song, which featured on his debut album Quik Is the Name, one of Kendrick Lamar’s favourite ’90s albums, made a bit of a splash on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop songs chart, debuting in the top 20. While this hardly represents a mainstream phenomenon, the song certainly helped to boost Quik’s reputation within hip hop circles.
There’s a certain innocence to how a young DJ Quik put the song together. Still in the process of learning his craft, the young man was playing around with his drum machine and cassette recorder, trying to get a handle on the art of sampling; it proved a fruitful experiment.
‘Born and Raised in Compton’ featured samples from NWA’s ‘Compton’s N the House’, 8th Day’s ‘She’s Not Just Another Woman’, and Isaac Hayes’ ‘Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic’, which was introduced to Quik by his mother. She used to play it a lot, and he, in turn, “fell in love with that record,” as he reflected to Complex in 2012.
Quik also recalled how he had recently bought the NWA Straight Outta Compton album and that, as a fellow Compton native, he felt “entitled to use” the album track ‘Compton’s N the House.’ NWA, for their part, never bothered him about it.
“Eazy E and them didn’t have a problem with it,” Quik claimed, “They never sued me. Dr Dre and Ren, they never got on me about it. They actually liked the record”.
Quik spoke about this period with some fondness, implying that this early use of sampling in hip hop was entirely driven by artistry. Claiming that he and his peers of the time “just sampled everything we could”, he insisted that they hadn’t been “thinking about commercial success or nothing” when they did it. It was just about sampling and celebrating “all the records that we liked”.
Compton had become a centre of rap music in the wake of NWA’s success by this period, and Quik’s song was tapping into the attention the city was getting at the time. But beyond his love for his home, there was a certain bitterness powering ‘Born and Raised in Compton’, too, because someone he knew had recently stolen some of his music equipment.
Characterising the theft as “the ultimate disrespect to me”, Quik was motivated by it to make ‘Born and Raised in Compton’, and he never looked back from there.