"My imagination is just wild" DJ Muggs tells me, as he explains just how he painstakingly assembled the list of his thirteen favourite records. "They have to be albums that blow your fucking mind and your imagination", he says, with a collection of titles that combine the weird psychedelic rockiness of bands such as Led Zeppelin with experimental hip hop pioneers like Public Enemy, Run-D.M.C, Ice Cube and EPMD. Muggs himself worked with many of these acts in his early musical days both in The 7A3 and Cypress Hill. Before then, he caught many of them live at underground mix shows in New York in the late 80s and early 90s as a young music fan hungry to know more.
"I remember seeing [Ice] Cube early on. I was in a band before Cypress Hill called The 7A3 and we opened for NWA one time at Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim…I saw a lot of live stuff back then. I saw Public Enemy, Run-D.M.C, I saw Wu Tang very early on in the game before they blew. They were all pioneers," Muggs says, excitedly describing the energy and fearlessness of the artists he watched.
All of Muggs’ Baker’s Dozen choices have inspired his own music-making in some way. "I get influenced by a lot of things. I take it, ingest it, put it through my filter and spit it back out through my filter. The trick of it is to be inspired by these people but make the art and the music your own, don’t copy. Run it through your filter and reinvent it and bring something fresh to the game through that inspiration. Don’t just put music out and be a bloodsucker of this culture: bring some real shit to it – bring some imagination."
