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And he was also DJing at the same time, but not with us. Also, Monique, whose deejay name was Nique D, was back, and she started going out with Bob Crafton, who had been the bass player in Thunderfunk. So anyway, ‘79, right about the same time everything is hitting in the parks, and the park jams are reaching a crescendo, I had met my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, Lady E (Yvette Cook), and she started MCing with the crew. We’d jump from Boston into “Love Hangover,” shit like that. We would do covers of rock and disco tunes, believe me, it was funny. We would do block parties and stuff like that. And then we started playing breaks, and the more hip hop-oriented – I mean it’s funny to say hip hop-oriented, because there was no such thing as hip hop at the time – but the stuff that works for hip hop like “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat,” and we started rhyming and all of that.Īt the same time, right around ‘76, ‘77, when I had just left high school, a friend of mine, Tony Flemings, was a drummer, and he started a rock band. But in ‘77 not long after Jam On Productions was formed, hip hop was coming down strong in Brooklyn, and everyone was taking on a name like “Master B,” “Frankie D,” and so forth, so I cut my name short to Cosmo D. My first name that I took, I had a comic book character that I created as a kid called “Captain Cosmo,” and one of my favorite records was El Coco’s Mondo Disco. People wanted to hustle to the disco, and people wanted to party to the funk. When we first started out we were spinning funk and disco, because that’s what was really happening in Brooklyn. What kind of stuff were you spinning back then? So it was 1977 when Dave joined and took Monique’s place that we became Jam-On Productions. And the next summer, my cousin Monique, she was going to go away to college, so we got my best friend Dave, who grew up in Park Slope with me.
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But by the next year we moved on up to Technics SL-23s, which are the best belt-driven turntables ever made period, and that’s what we really learned how to spin on. No pitch, no strobe – we didn’t know nothing about pitch and strobe anyway. Our equipment was nothing special: a BSR turntable and a Gerard turntable. We grew up as brothers and sisters, basically. Though the Cenacs and the Craftons continued to record sporadically until 1989, they didn't hit the R&B charts after 1986.It started out with my cousins Monique and Pete Angevin. Without a single as noteworthy as "Jam on Revenge" or "Computer Age", and with the advent of Run-DMC's organic, rock-influenced approach to rap music, Newcleus faded quickly. The first Newcleus LP, Jam on Revenge, was a bit of a disappointment, and their second album, Space Is the Place, did even more poorly upon release in 1984. "Computer Age (Push the Button)" was a more mature single, with accomplished rapping and better synthesizer effects, and it also hit the R&B Top 40. The single hit Top 40 on the R&B charts in 1983, and its follow-up, "Jam on It," did well on even the pop charts. A huge street success, the track became known unofficially as "the Wikki-Wikki song" (after the refrain) when it was re-released later that year on Sunnyview Records, it had become "Jam on Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song)". The track, "Jam-On's Revenge" impressed producer Joe Webb more than the other Newcleus material, and it became the group's first single, released in 1983 on Mayhew Records. With several minutes left at the end of the tape, Newcleus recorded a favorite from their block parties, with each member's vocals sped up to resemble the Chipmunks. By this time, Cenac had begun to accumulate a collection of electronic recording equipment, and the quartet recorded a demo tape of material. (The foursome named their group Newcleus as a result of the coming together of their families). Many members - MCs as well as DJs - came and went as the group played block parties all over the borough, and by 1979, the group centered around Cenac, his future wife Yvette "Lady E" Cook, Monique Angevin, and her future husband, Bob "Chilly B" Crafton. The origins of Newcleus lay in a 1977 Brooklyn DJ collective known as Jam-On Productions, including Ben "Cozmo D" Cenac, his cousin Monique Angevin, and her brother Pete (all teenagers and still in high school). Although they recorded only two albums, Newcleus contributed one true electro classic in "Jam on Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song)," which has been immortalized on hundreds of hip-hop mixtapes and often included in even techno DJs' sets.