Mark Ronson dominated 2007 with production work on Lily Allen’s Alright, Still and Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black, but his success didn’t stop there. His album Version took hits from days back and blended them with the likes of music’s most groundbreaking new artists, creating a style all his own. Before any of that happened, Mark Ronson was deejaying in New York during a time where Hip-Hop was probably the most accessible. Now, packing venues worldwide, Ronson brings his UK hot spot Yo Yo to New York (and eventually other cities in the U.S.). Here, Mark Ronson tells his favorite flashback of his early days as a deejay:“The time that I started deejaying a lot in the clubs and playing for people like Puffy and Jay-Z and Mos Def and D’Angelo was the time during music where most of the commercially successful stuff was actually the best stuff. You had that Def Jam era where you’d look at the charts and see Method Man, Redman, DMX. You had Bad Boy with the L.O.X and Biggie; you had Jay-Z and all the Roc-a-Fella releases, and yes there was also amazing underground s###, but those were the best records. You look now at the charts at what the most commercially successful records are and it f###### damn sure isn’t the best stuff artistically. I’m not even gonna name names. I think that was an exciting time to be a deejay. It was before the MP3 era, so you had to go up to labels and wait in the lobby and hope they gave you the new Shai remix with Jay-Z. Then you played it that night in the club and Jay-Z walks in. It was an amazing feeling.”
Check out some favorites that Mark Ronson was a part of:
“Stop Me” featuring Daniel Merriweather
Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”
Lily Allen’s “Littlest Things”
Nikka Costa’s “Like a Feather”
