Picking Apart AI Hot Takes; Plus: The Lost Dust Brother

Peter Relic's new book Bust a Move is about a bunch of things: the label Delicious Vinyl, home of Young MC, Mellow Man Ace and Tone Loc; more broadly, a moment in L.A. music in the late '80s and early '90s, before the Rodney King riots and The Chronic. (The scope reminded me a bit of Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, Ryan H. Walsh's 2018 book about the Boston music and counterculture scene.) 

More than anything, it's about Delicious co-founder Matt Dike, the creative genius of the Dust Brothers. Raised in a strict Jehovah’s Witness household, Dike brought wide-open ears and kid-in-FAO-Schwarz energy to everything he produced: Young MC’s “Bust a Move,” Tone-Loc’s “Wild Thing” and “Funky Cold Medina,” and one of the high-water marks for hip-hop’s ‘80s sampling era, the Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique. 

"You can hear the absence of Matt Dike in Odelay," Relic told me, comparing Paul's Boutique to the Beck album the other two Dust Brothers, John King and Mike Simpson, produced without him. (I would agree – Odelay is still a great album, but the production is more workmanlike than Paul’s.) Dike had a Jedi gift for mining loose song elements — the Van Halen tom-tom fill from “Jamie’s Cryin’” in “Wild Thing,” a sample of obscure Swan Song band, Detective (likely a sly in-joke directed towards Led Zep-sampler Rick Rubin) in Mellow Man Ace’s “Grim Reaper”  — and making them the spine of something new. The crucible for his work was his time as a DJ at LA club night Power Tools, where he could be heard mixing up everything from Ted Nugent to Yma Sumac. Kim White, a Power Tools regular, said “you'd laugh” listening to his DJ set. “Not because [it was] funny, but because [it was] just so cool.”

Dike’s run as a producer only lasted for a few years; he struggled with opioid addiction and cut ties with his partners in 1992. That year friends tried an intervention with attendees like Rick Rubin and George Drakoulias, but Dike refused any help. He was a hermit in his LA mansion for years before dying from complications of salivary gland cancer in 2018. Relic aims to address the fact that "people don't really know his name," he says.

Bust a Move also makes a subtle case that L.A. in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s had a similar energy to NYC in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when different strains of music and culture were colliding in an unformed, febrile way. “The gangster-rap blast radius [to follow] made it almost seem like nothing else ever happened,” says Relic. One almost-ghostly presence connecting the two eras is Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom Dike had known since they were teenagers in NYC, who was in the background during some of the early Paul’s Boutique sessions, shortly before his death in August 1988. 

The book’s final note is Relic’s interview with Dike at his house in 2010, the last one that Dike would give. It is not an easy scene. Dike is wearing a greasy bandana and moth-eaten Public Enemy t-shirt, showing the effects of years of drug abuse. But Relic focuses on how childlike he remained; near the end of the interview, he offers the writer a root beer float like it was the greatest thing on earth. "Dude, I don't know if you can believe this," Dike tells him, "but I just wanted to always have as much fun as possible."

Legacy-wise, Dike may have been a perfect product of his moment – a DJ with a massive record collection and great ears who got to make sample-heavy records during the peak of that late-’80s moment, before everything got more litigious and more expensive. More than anything, though, Relic wants people to remember the root-beer-float sense of fun and the sneaky, joyful collisions in the music. 

“Matt Dike was not collecting records to be a hoarder,” says Relic, “He was collecting records because he realized that that's where life is."