Outside the Lines With Rap Genius
OTL 54: Brian Brater Excerpt #3
Brian Brater: Soundbombing really solidifed the Rawkus point of view in hip hop history. So everything about it, you know, from the beat junkies - from J. Rock and Babu - meticulously putting that together. And we're talking before Ableton, Pro Tools sucked balls, right? It took a lot of work to seamlessly fuze together compilations like that. Whereas today, I think it would be a lot easier to do that. And then you just look at everything from Eminem, really his first kind of like after taking the West Coast crown on the Sway and Tech show which is where I guess he claimed his ascendancy

SameOldShawn: Right, and we'll get into your relation to him in a minute

Brain Brater: Sure. You know, Common, bringing Common back, which is another thing I'm incredibly proud of. I was into all the Relativity stuff. You know. And that's another label that really influenced us: Relativity Records. You know, No I.D. and Common, and everything happening, and Fat Joe, and all that stuff. That's when I realized we were really doing something historical. Because here I am, I have an opportunity to help relaunch legend's careers, because Common was kind of in between things. This was before the Respiration Remix, 1999 was kind of a big deal, yeah, so, you know, it was a phenomenon, Soundbombing; it was a mixtape that went gold. We had commercial airplay off the record. It was an incredibly popular thing and to this day, I think it's definitely one of the two or three most important records we put out. And something Jared and I are really proud of because we were the ones who put it together