Chatting With the Chairman: An Interview with ego trip's Jeff Mao

It's a quirky coincidence that two of the most renown scribes and chroniclers of hip-hop have been 40-something Chinese American guys named "Jeff." APA has already interviewed one. The other is the focus of this profile: New York's Jeff Mao, aka Chairman Mao -- erstwhile filmmaker turned DJ, writer, and TV producer.

In 1996, the Los Angeles-based magazine Rap Pages commissioned a special "DJ Issue" co-edited by both Jeffs. I had likely seen Mao's byline earlier than that but this was the first time I really took notice. Almost all the Asian American rap writers I knew were on the West Coast and Mao was the first prominent East Coaster I'd encountered (though, as I would quickly learn, hardly the only).

It was around that same time that I discovered ego trip, the short-lived but highly influential magazine that Mao helped edit alongside Sacha Jenkins, Elliot Wilson, Brent Rollins, and Gabriel Alvarez. As "the arrogant voice of musical truth," ego trip took a strident, sardonic tone that cut sharply against the conventional style of major magazines such as The Source or Vibe. It made ego trip the favorite publication amongst a small but intensely loyal group of fans, especially other rap writers for whom a byline in the mag was a mark of privilege. Even 10 years after its end, ego trip is still widely considered by many to be the best hip-hop publication ever.

After the magazine's folding in 1998, the ego trip staff began to embark on assembling a budding multimedia empire which has included two ego trip books: 1999's brilliant, dense Book of Rap Lists and 2002's tongue-in-cheek Big Book of Racism!; an album compilation, 2000's The Big Playback; and more recently, two reality TV series on VH1 -- last year's The (White) Rapper Show and this year's Miss Rap Supreme which debuted on April 14th.

On his own, Mao has led an immensely successful other life as one of New York's leading soul/funk DJs and collectors. He currently hosts the monthly Bump Shop party along with DJs Mr. Fine Wine, David Griffiths, and Jared Boxx. Records have been a passion since his teen years and his reputation as a music chronicler is only matched as a record expert. (He also continues to write the independent hip-hop column "Chairman's Choice" in XXL Magazine).

APA recently spoke with Mao about his route into hip-hop, records, plus the secret lives of sousaphone players.

Interview with Jeff Mao
Interviewed by Oliver Wang
Transcribed by Christine Chiao

APA: You grew up outside of Boston right?

Jeff Mao: I grew up in a suburb called Newton. My parents were both immigrants from the Mainland [China] originally, and they moved to Taiwan to go to school when the Communists took over. They wound up coming to the States to go to school as well and work in the late 50s.

APA: Did you grow up in a musical household?

JM: No, not particularly. I mean, my dad was a music fan. He didn't play any instruments, but he would sing with a choral group in the greater Boston area. He used to listen to opera and classical music and really cheesy American pop music as well. Like I remember listening to Harry Belafonte in the car and David Cassidy and things like that when we went on road trips.

APA: My dad liked Simon and Garfunkel.

JM: Oh, okay. Well, your dad was pretty hip then. [laughs]

APA: I never thought so at the time. [laughs]

JM: You know it's funny 'cause my friend's family was really into The Beatles. And I remember thinking, "alright the Beatles are cool... kinda corny though." But thinking back, it's like, whoa these guys were really pretty hip for some Chinese immigrants raising their kids on The Beatles.

APA: Did you have requisite piano or violin lessons?

JM: I went to UMass for a year and a half. I was in the marching band, playing the sousaphone. It's funny 'cause that was known as the wild party section of the band...sousaphone players were always the ones who had booze in their uniforms and did all the weird routines. The band would march in formation and then the sousaphone section would basically just do its own thing. Just run wild.

APA: How did your taste in popular music evolve?

JM: I started reading about music at a certain point. I don't know how. Maybe it was through my sister. She used to have a subscription to Rolling Stone. When I started playing [in school], I tried to listen to jazz. Miles Davis was a jazz trumpet player... so let's find out something about him [in] a jazz record guide or something at the bookstore. Just read about it and find out something. I remember going to people's houses and hearing things. Like my friend who was into The Beatles.

APA: When did you start buying records?

JM: The first record I think I bought was the Jackson 5's Goin' Back to Indiana television soundtrack. I must have seen the TV show, the cartoon, and everything. It was really big. And I would just catch things. I remember Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street demonstrating dynamics with Grover. My sister was an influence...she'd listen to rock music. Elton John, Boston were really big. I remember she had "More than a Feeling" by Boston on a cassette -- she recorded the song on an entire cassette so she didn't have to take the needle off the record. 40 minutes!

APA: Boston excepted, between the Jackson 5 and Stevie, it sounds like you had a decent exposure to soul growing up.

JM: I always liked Motown and always heard it on the oldies station. Motown was the sound of young America, right? I think there's a universal pop appeal to their material -- or at least, their classic material. Plus, you're a kid, you see, hear a name like Stevie Wonder. "Wow, that sounds like a big superstar name," and he's got big sunglasses. Even when you're a kid, you start to sense, "oh this is kind of cool."

APA: Were you collecting already?

JM: I was still into collecting baseball cards and sports memorabilia and things like that. [Records] weren't on my radar yet. If you're a kid, you've only got room for one hobby you really immerse yourself in at the time. When I got to high school, my sister -- she went to Barnard [College] -- and her boyfriend at the time collected records. When he'd come to visit with her, he would just hit all the used record stores. It was a foreign concept to me. When I figured out there were used record stores, it opened up a whole new thing. It's like a caveman seeing fire for the first time.

APA: Do you remember when you first heard any hip-hop?

JM: I first heard "Rapper's Delight" in the lunch room. It was like, "Oh, this is something else. [The beat is] Chic's 'Good Times'... but what is this?" It was crazy, you know? Couldn't get my head around it. So then you start tuning in to try to find out what the songs are on the radio. In Boston, the only black station was WILD, which was an AM station that only had a broadcast license [for] daylight hours. So at 4:30pm in the winter, when the sun went down, boom, over, the station was off the air. But the college stations like ZBC and WERS would play hip-hop. That's how I got educated, basically.

APA: Listening to the radio?

JM: Yeah...I remember hearing certain things on WILD like LL Cool J, Run DMC, "Planet Rock", things like that. Hearing "Planet Rock" on the radio? On the AM radio? It just kind of freaks you out 'cause it just sounds so otherworldly.

APA: Given how we now live in a world so suffused in hip-hop, it's hard to imagine what it must have been like when hip-hop was actually something new and novel.

JM: Every single thing is like, "Oh my god, this is the greatest shit I've ever fucking heard or seen." I don't know what it is specifically about hip-hop, but there was something that was magnetic about it. Maybe it was just the familiarity of hearing Chic [used as a loop] and hearing people talking over it in rhythm, but something about it was just cool. They're saying funny shit. It's clever. It's a story. You can follow it. But they're also using words that you've never heard before. 

Jeff "Chairman" Mao grew up in Boston but in the mid-1980s, transferred to NYU to attend film school. Immersed in the city's hip-hop environment, Mao learned the ins and outs of the DJ scene, where the best records were, and, oh yeah, made an Asian American short film too.

APA: What was the record scene like in New York at the time?

JM: At NYU, record-buying became this other preoccupation, the thing you really enjoyed doing all the time. You're downtown in the Village, you gonna make the circuit. You're gonna head to the West Side, you're gonna hit all those shops -- Subterranean, Venus, St. Mark's Place. You're gonna go up and down Sixth Avenue. If you're really feeling adventurous, go a little bit further. And then go back to circle to the East Side and then you'll hit all the stores over here. For a while, I lived a block away from St. Mark's Sounds. My senior year in school, every single day -- hit up St. Mark's Sounds. On your way to class or on your way back from class, you gotta go to St. Mark's Sounds. And sure enough, you'd go there the day [De La Soul's] Three Feet High and Rising came out and there's three copies in the bin, all $3.99. "Bam, let me grab these." Buying records became this huge focus.

APA: Were you just collecting only, or also DJing?

JM: Once I got out of school, I got turntables as a graduation gift and eventually started DJing. I'd bring my set-up to people's houses for parties and stuff. Some time in the early 90s, every single bar figured out, "Hey, if we stick turntables in here, we can have DJs every night." So then you had this explosion in the early '90s. Every single little bar in the East Village, in the Lower East Side had a set of turntables. There was this place called Sapphire, I remember, which was one of the first places. This tiny hole in the wall as big as your living room. I remember trying to get a gig there or sitting in. So I started DJing in all these little places.

APA: Were you spinning mostly hip-hop? Older soul and funk?

JM: In college, when I figured out  Ultimate Breaks and Beats -- that was a whole 'nother thing. That was like, "Okay, hip hop and all the [soul, rock and funk] I was into before, there's this connection." Your mind is completely blown. Technology has made it possible. It's literally connected now in this way and they're just creating this entirely new level of something that you already liked. It's like the ultimate Reese's peanut butter cup.

APA: Ha: "two great tastes that taste great together."

JM: It's like what Steinski says in Scratch: "this is the music I've been waiting my entire life to hear." That's why to me, the Golden Era of hip-hop in the late 80s -- nothing will match that in terms of excitement for me, personally.

APA: Yeah, I mean the potential seemed limitless.

JM: You're listening to the Bomb Squad and things like AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted. NWA's second album. From a production standpoint, this is just the craziest shit I've ever heard. At that point, I gave up on listening to rock. I think the Pixies' Surfer Rosa was the last rock album I bought at that point. That shit just became less exciting. All the bands that were on SST and Homestead signed to major labels and they started putting out inferior records and start breaking up. But hip hop: this is it. This is what it's all about now. For me.

APA: And breaks as well, it sounds like.

JM: And breaks. And yeah, finding old shit that people sampled. Or shit that's cool sounding. I started doing a party with friends of mine [Jeff Brown, Geo] and that's when I got really turned on to Brazilian and Latin stuff. Like, "Oh shit, you can play this? You mean, all these Latin records I see all the time? You mean, they're actually really good?" We play it at the party and, wow, people lost their minds and danced. There was this party in New York called Soul Kitchen, which was hugely influential for me. It was supposed to be a changed location every week so you didn't know [where it'd be]. You just had to figure out. We figure out, we get in there. I remember walking in and they're playing the first track from Chastisement by the Last Poets. And I just remember thinking, "Wow, this is the illest shit. I know this record. I have this record. They're playing it. And people are here, enjoying this shit. This is so cool." It made a huge impact on me -- another piece of the puzzle.

APA: You said you went to NYU for film school - did you make any films?

JM: I had done a short film at NYU that got picked up by this organization Third World Newsreel. It was a film about Asian American identity. It was a black comedy.

APA: What was it called?

JM: It was called Rest in Peace and it was about this Chinese American whose wife's uncle, the family patriarch, passes away. On his deathbed, he calls this younger guy and gives him his last wishes, but he says it in Chinese and the guy doesn't understand. He had to figure out what the last word, what the last request was. But he's too embarrassed to tell his wife. That's the premise. So I did this film and it got picked up by Third World Newsreel. And I'm up there once in a while and they're like, "You gotta meet Sacha. He does this magazine called Beat Down. He's our intern." Eventually, I'm leaving the building and one day, he gets in the elevator. He always describes it, "I see this guy, he's Asian and he's wearing a Carhartt [sweater] and I'm like, 'You must be Jeff'." [laughs] And, I'm like, "You must be Sacha." 

In the early 1990s, Jeff "Chairman" Mao met Sacha Jenkins, then running a hip-hop magazine, Beat Down. When Beat Down closed, Jenkins went on to found ego trip and invited Mao to join him and Elliot Wilson. Eventually Gabriel Alvarez and designer Brent Rollins would complete the five-man core team at the 'zine.

APA: When you started at ego trip, were you still in school?

JM: I was a PA at the time, working on commercials and music videos. You know, wasting my film degree. I was doing deliveries in the city and I'd take my cue from other PAs. We'd just disappear. You're driving a truck in the city that's got commercial plates so during the day, you can park anywhere. So I would drive to Rock'N'Soul and buy records and put the receipt in with my petty cash. It was just so many hustles, as a PA. You're working a 12 to 15 hour days and you're getting ordered around and you're like "I hate this. I hate ad agency people. I hate film people. I can't stand this process. It's just so stupid. I can't believe this is a commercial for diapers that I'm working on." I wasn't really into film anyways. I thought I was but I did my little short film and I realized this is not what I'm really into. I'd rather be buying records and doing something with music.

APA: ego trip came along at the right time then.

JM: I was ready to do almost anything. I started spending more time working on ego trip with these guys, and eventually they were just hustling, getting more work writing. I remember thinking when I first met Sacha he's like, "Yeah I gotta go interview Schooly D." I was like, "Wow, that sounds much more interesting than what the hell I'm doing." I started writing for The Source. I started writing for URB. And then eventually Vibe started. Sacha got down with Vibe, Elliot [Wilson] got down with Vibe, then they pulled me in. This was still the era where the music industry was really healthy. You get paid a decent rate, actually making money, and you'd get flown somewhere to interview somebody. The music was still pretty exciting.

APA: This is something I'm curious about. My memories of reading things like The Source, Rap Pages, URB, early Vibe is that the writing as a whole, was...raw at times. A little painful even.

JM: Yeah.

APA: But you could also say at the same time that's just the intensity of the enthusiasm and of the passion. And it's what you're talking about in terms of listening to hip-hop, in terms of limitless potential. Is that what the hip-hop journalism game felt like too?

JM: Well, I would certainly agree. It's funny because recently I started going through some of those back issues of ego trip. It definitely struck me that the intensity and passion was really, really genuine. But at the same time, it's just so funny because even then we're saying, "Wow, we're losing faith in hip hop." Back then, we were already complaining.

APA: Ha, hip-hop was already dead in 1995.

JM: You'd already gone through the Golden Era. And you'd gone through it as a fan. Once you cross the line and become a critic...yeah hip hop's an underdog, you're championing it. Then at a certain point, it doesn't need that necessarily. It needs alternate perspectives. The Source can't be the only game in town. It's not healthy. So you need a Beat Down. You need a Rap Pages or URB or somebody else you know to exist. But also you need some voices of dissent. You also need some critical tough love to exist.

APA: Hip-hop doesn't take to "tough love" so well.

JM: That's what made it interesting to do the 'zines in the 90s. Because you dared to say what other people weren't necessarily saying. But you had the insight and the credibility to be able to say it. I think that's the thing that was hard for the industry to understand. At first it was like, "Oh yeah, we're championing hip-hop at The Source. We're all on the same team. Hooray for hip-hop." Then all of a sudden, "Vibe, well, it's cool. We're getting respect. We're getting all these cool-looking magazines with great photography and bigger budgets." But then they don't understand [tough love]. "What do you mean you're going to diss our album?" It's always hard for the artist to take criticism but I think the thing with hip-hop -- I don't know if I'm articulating this thing well or not -- but I don't feel like the industry has ever respected the craft of writing about rap music. And now we've reached a point where it's meaningless anyway. The shit's in the toilet anyways.

APA: One of the things that stood out about ego trip was that, on the one hand, it's clear as editors and writers, you guys took what you did very seriously. But on the other hand, there was a lot of humor, both subtle and obvious, throughout the magazine. How did you guys learn to balance that out?

JM: It was checking out what other [magazines] were doing and seeing how seriously they took themselves. We were always ready to clown the competition. We had a chip on our shoulder, trying to outsmart and outwit and outwork everybody else. Very aware of what other people were doing. We'd read stuff in The Source and Vibe and say, "Oh, this is terrible." And, ironically enough, we started writing for those magazines as well.

APA: I always found that interesting: that you all were running one magazine but still working at others.

JM: I was working at Vibe. Eventually Elliot and Sacha took music editor positions -- Elliot was at Source, Sacha was at Vibe. We would get our freelance work, working for the magazines, and at night, come by the office, and we'd be working on [ego trip] issues. Seeing the corporate structure of how it works... it's great 'cause you get a full-time job and you have benefits. You're making some money, you have access to things, you're moving up in the industry. But at the same time, you see all the layers of nonsense that are involved in the whole thing. We used a lot of fake names because we didn't want to get in trouble with rappers and labels.

APA: Really?

JM: When you go back and look at the old issues of Rap Pages especially. There was a certain time before Gabe moved to New York (he was in charge of the review section), we'd be broke. We'd come in and divide the advance cassettes and get on the phone with Gabe and be like, "Gabe, we're going to do the reviews for you." And he'd be like, "Okay just do whatever you need to do. Just send it to me by Tuesday. I don't care who writes what." If you looked at the section, you'd see all these fake names. If we needed an extra 60 bucks, it was like, "Okay, let's do a Rap Pages review."

APA: At ego trip, you had fake staff members too.

JM: That's how we developed Ted Bawno, the phony publisher. He was a Robert Evans-type, old-school era guy. And Ted had a son Galen who was a self-styled revolutionary, super bleeding heart. We created this alternative world. I think it was probably just to vent. And I guess people eventually found it amusing. I don't know if I've ever told you this before, but when the magazine got more attention, people who didn't know who we were naturally assumed we were white.

APA: That's really funny considering that none of you were white. Why do you think they made that assumption?

JM: I think it was the style of humor. I don't think there was a lot of it at the time. I think people got used to reading hip-hop being covered a certain way.

APA: Speaking of race, your byline, "Chairman Mao" -- did that develop as a DJ name or writer's name first?

JM: Oh, it was just a nickname. I guess it was a DJ name. I used to have a business card that said "DJ Jeff Mao, Chairman of Funky Beats." I've always felt justified using it, since Mao is actually my government name.

APA: It stood out as a really memorable name, especially because, as you point out, it is a part of your "government name." Though, at the same time, as a historical figure, he's not exactly universally beloved, shall we say.

JM: I'm sure there are people who think it's weird. But it's funny. Sometimes I go by Chairman Jefferson Mao. But Jefferson is not my government name. But that was the nickname Sacha gave me.

APA: Jefferson is not your real name?

JM: It's not my government name, no.

APA: That's funny. On the West Coast at least, "Jefferson" is very Chinese American.

JM: [laughs] There's a skateboarder named Jefferson or something like that. And I think that's where he got it from originally.

Read part 2 of APA's interview with Jeff Mao here.