Lost & Sound: DJ Klever's Sound Citizens mixtape (2005)

Ok, I have a confession. I am a packrat. My whole family is actually. For some reason we don't like throwing stuff away. We'll just move something or stick it in a bag or shoebox somewhere and then bury it in the closet. When you tend to do that you start thinking that you've lost things, when really all you did was hide it from yourself. Well in the midst of cleaning up and looking for something else, I found this gem of mixtape that I thought I lost forever.

About 4 years ago when I was working at Rolling Out, the homie DK was playing some soft rock in the office. Of course, the sounds of soft rock are going to stick out at an Black-owned, Black-staffed newspaper. But the songs had blends and scratches in them. I don't know about you, but I'd never heard rock music get cut and scratched on some Hip Hop ish. Of course (if you know DK, you already know) when I asked what he was listening to, he didn't want to tell me. But after I asked again he finally let me know what it was and handed me DJ Klever: Atlanta Sound Citizens. He wasn't about to let me borrow it though, haha. So I went down to Earwax and copped it the very next day during my lunch break.

Man, when I tell you I played the ish out of the CD man? I woke to it, showered to it, ate to it, drove to it, worked to it...I pretty much engratiated this mixtape into my daily operations. Mind you this mixtape came out at the crescendo of the mixtape game. Everybody and their mama had a damn mixtape. Many times with the same type of shit on there. You know, that "mixtape music" that's too rough or mediocre to go on an album for commercial mass consumption.

But this mixtape was refreshing. Mainly because it had absolutely no rap on it. It was for real for real Rock x Hip Hop in pure form. Klever was taking classic and soft rock records and scratching over them. Shit was dope as hell.

Steely Dan-"Do It Again"


Then of course, I moved around a couple times and the CD got lost in the mix.

I've been looking high and low for this CD for years now. I even accused my brother and a couple of friends of either stealing it or losing it when I let them borrow it. Crazy thing is around the time I lost it, it was right after the whole DJ Drama/RIAA bust. So Earwax, just like all the other music retailers, shut their mixtape sections down. So now I had no way of replacing it. I hit up Klever on myspace a couple times since we had some what of a rapport at the time because I interviewed him for Rolling Out (yes, RO features white people too sometimes). But dude never hit me back when I asked if he had anymore of these laying around. Which was understandable, he had just had a kid and was really starting to blow up globally at the time, shit, he prolly forgot he even did this damn tape.

But in the midst of straightening up this morning and looking for a piece of camera equipment...I found the CD, stuffed in a old shoebox in my closet.

Finding this CD is probably going to be the brightspot of my day, because there's a lot of annoyance going on in my life today. So, I figured I'd share the gift of dopeness in case you were feeling the same way.

DOWNLOAD: DJ KLEVER: Atlanta Sound Citizens