Raw Returns

In 1991, Raw used some of the proceeds to open DJ Raw Records and Tapes at NW Seventh Avenue and 49th Street. The store carried just about anything hip-hop related (music, magazines, videos). During the same year, Raw started DJ Raw Studios after miraculously "discovering" a slew of DJ equipment. "Sean, one of the KOP members, calls me up at 4:00 a.m. and is like, 'Raw, bring the truck and bring the boys!' So I'm thinking, Man, this better be good! So I'm going down Second Avenue around Flagler, and there was some jam that was ending, people packing up, and I see all this equipment — video cameras, crates filled with records — just sitting outside.... So I quickly bring the truck, load up, and get out. I heard some old lady screaming that she's gonna call the cops, [so I] crunched a few cars in the [getaway]."

Then one day, while messing around with the stolen equipment, Price picked up a microphone and began to rap. The rhymes weren't world-changing, but Raw came up with a plan. It was simple: Get more equipment! He bought high-end recording gear ("Half I didn't even know what it was for!") and then a trailer to house his musical laboratory. He conveniently parked it behind his record store, which became a meeting place for up-and-coming talent.

Carlos Miranda, a 28-year-old Cuban hipster who sells pricey Swedish furniture in the Design District, recalls the hip-hop landmark. "It was like a hip-hop information hub," he explains. "There were flyers for upcoming parties, radio shows, Zulu Nation meetings.... Plus you'd find all the newest joints coming out of New York back then. I bought my first Wu-Tang Clan album there, on cassette."

Among the latest hip-hop records was DJ Raw and the KO Posse's first release, Lunatic State of Mind, a grimy, bass-driven hip-hop album filled with lyrics of the everyday ghetto struggle: hustling, violence, and the all-too-familiar police brutality.

The album was released on Raw Records in 1992. One venue for Raw's music in fact belonged to him: the legendary WJHH-FM (91.7) ("We're Just Hip-Hop"), a pirate radio station with a 50-foot antenna. "We had it inside a school bus," explains Raw, "and called it the 'Old Skool Bus.' A buddy owed me some bread and he ran a garage; he told me I could have anything I wanted."

From 1994 to 1997 was the golden era of pirate radio in Miami. "I had to blow out a couple transformers to get it right," Raw remembers. "But eventually everything worked out of the bus and we were always on the move."

Once Raw even parked his WJHH bus right in front of WEDR-FM (99 Jamz), which back then wasn't known by its contemporary title of "South Florida's Only Station for Hip-Hop and R&B." There he took over the station's channel feed for an hour, playing everything from De La Soul to NWA.

"They started it," Raw fervently declares. "They said something on the air that was like, all guys that ran underground radio stations were drug dealers and thugs!"

Well, wasn't it true?

Raw pauses. "Yeah, but I didn't want anyone else to know about that!"

In fact he admits to using WJHH to advertise the price for a kilo of cocaine. "It was like a cell phone back then. We'd reach right into your car and we'd scream on the mike: 'Five seventy-five, suckers!' which stood for how much the price was for a stack for that day," he explains.

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The afternoon sun is brutal. An ice-cream truck sings through the neighborhood as four teenage boys pound their Nikes on the sweltering basketball court. Then, when a break is called, 15-year-old Oscar, his lean body lost in an oversize G-Unit T-shirt soaked in sweat, takes a swig of water and starts to rap, holding his Zephyrhills bottle as a microphone:

Wynwood fo' life, where true hustlas be hustlin',

We in da hood tonight, making somethin' outta nothin',

Wynwood, nigga, we in da hood, nigga!

One of the boys, sporting an Afro the size of the basketball, shouts, "Your rhymes are wack, just like your free throws!"

Oscar responds with a middle finger. Asked about his lyrics, he shrugs and says, "We always call this place Wynhood — this is the hood right here."

The boy has heard about Hoodstock from older relatives. "My cousin went one year and saw all these people, like Busta Rhymes, Fat Joe, Ice-T.... Oh and he met his baby mama there too." Oscar then pauses and sheepishly asks, "Yo, if Hoodstock is coming back, you think I can get up onstage and spit?"

On October 13, 1994 — Columbus Day weekend — Roberto Clemente Park was filled with live music, dance, and art. Approximately 1000 people, from teenagers to grandparents, were in attendance. For admission, concertgoers were asked to bring cans of food, which would be donated to a local food bank.