Detroit 2000s Hip Hop: Playlist of Reference

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We have the pleasure of continuing our awesome series featuring the stories behind some of the best playlists representing genres and subgenres of music on Whyd. Today, something that hits close to home for our Community Manager. Literally. 

Detroit is known around the world for the automobile industry. But there is something that Detroit has been producing this whole time as well, an equally international export: music. From the funky days of Motown, to the garage punk epoch, through the rise of electronic and most recently - the advent of Hip Hop, Detroit is in a constant state of creative evolution. Capturing an era that many can point to as its revival, The Backpackerz have put together their latest “Heavy Rotation” playlist around Hip Hop from the 2000s, “Detroit Hustles Harder.”  

Can you introduce yourselves? What is the idea behind The BackPackerz and when did you get started?

We are Antoine and Hugo, the two co-founders of The BackPackerz. We met at Toulouse Business School around 2012 and quickly discovered our common passion for Hip-Hop. Longtime rap addicts, we decided to create The BackPackerz while studying in Barcelona in 2013. In fact, we couldn’t find the type of content about Hip-Hop we’d like to read among the existing websites, especially in French, so we decided to create it ourselves!

The BackPackerz is a web-magazine dedicated to celebrating and educating its readers to Hip-Hop culture. Through in-depth analysis on cultural landmarks, interviews and reviews, the 12 members of our team are creating the freshest online resource for anybody interested in Hip-Hop culture. We also curate the best Hip-Hop events (concerts, festivals, exhibits) in France because HIP-HOP LIVES!

Where does your passion of Hip Hop come from?

Antoine: I was introduced to rap music very early, around my second year of middle school, by a friend’s brother who had me listening to NTM, IAM and the whole Hostile posse. At the beginning, I was on French rap mostly because I liked the rebel attitude that came along with it. Then I started to dig into the American rap from the 90s after I got struck by Cut Killer’s mixtape “Party Jam - 1989 1996, The Golden Age.” I was in high school when I first heard Nas’s “Illmatic,” A Tribe Called Quest’s “Midnight Marauders” and Wu-Tang Clan - “Enter the 36 Chambers” which are still my all-time favorite albums. At that time, I was spending hours translating lyrics and searching Urban Dictionary (a time before Rap Genius) to get a better understanding of what those cats were saying.

Later with Olivier Cachin’s books and films like “Wild Style,” I discovered Hip-Hop was not only a music genre but also a fascinating culture with other elements like graffiti and dance and tremendous impacts on our modern society. Since then, I kept reading and gathering artifacts (records, films and books) of this sublime culture. A few years ago, I realized this archiving work had to be shared so I decided to launch The BackPackerz with Hugo.

Hugo: My passion for Hip-Hop came later than Antoine’s. In High School, I began to listen to mainstream stuff such as 50 Cent or Eminem and I immediately fell in love with this music because it combined rhythms that made my head bang hard and dope lyrics spit with amazing technicality. Soon I would dig into the history of this genre and couldn’t stop, because every day I would discovered how deep and wide this culture was. At first, I was really into the producers (Preemo, Dilla, Pete Rock, Q-Tip…) and how they chopped samples etc..They were my entry door to real Hip-Hop, more than the MCs.

Tell us about the concept of your Heavy Rotation playlists?

The concept of the Heavy Rotation playlists is to bring to our readers 10 dope tracks every Monday, in order to soften the pain of this particularly hated day of the week. Most of the time you will find a selection of 10 hottest rap songs of the last couple of weeks but sometimes we build playlists around a specific subject: a genre (e.g beatmaking edition) a specific technique (e.g brass edition) or for a special occasion like this “Detroit Hustles Harder” edition for J Dilla month. There is no rule, it just depends on our mood! Now our readers are really looking forward for them to come out, because you know “Fuck it’s Monday…but at least I’m gonna hear dope music!”

What’s special about this Post 2000 Detroit Hip Hop playlist?

Originally, the idea of the post 2000 Detroit rap playlist came up while we were preparing our interview with Detroit superstars Phat Kat, Elzhi and Guilty Simpson (that we will drop in a couple of weeks). As we were deep-digging into our hard drives, we were amazed to see how prolific and brilliant the Detroit scene was in the 2K decade. From Slum Village, to Elzhi, Black Milk or the great Apollo Brown; it seems that Detroit has never stop shining since we changed millennium.

On top of that, releasing a fine selection of the dopest tracks from Detroit rappers was exactly what The BackPackerz is meant for: curate history to educate and entertain. The purpose of this playlist - along our article Detroit State Of Mind - is for our readers and followers to discover / remember the greatness of this scene over the past 20 years.

Curating the playlist, we realized this excellence would not have been the same without a man: James Dewitt Yancey a.k.a J Dilla or Jay Dee, one of the greatest producer of all time. If you look at the playlist, you’ll find Jay Dee’s legacy in almost every single track: as a producer, an influencer or in the lyrics. We decided to release this special Heavy Rotation in February since it is known among his fans as “J Dilla month” (as he was born and died during the month of February).