Mark Ronson

Yes, of course, when I started off DJing, coming from this nice family uptown with a stepdad who was a rock star and my mom who was just larger than life.

She was out in the parties, out in the scene in New York, sort of amazing rock and roll artist mom.

I was horribly embarrassed of all of it, but it's probably more in a teenage way when you're just like, oh, mom, do you have to come to the club when I'm DJing?

Meanwhile, everybody thought it was the coolest thing that my mom came to these hole-in-the-wall basements and clubs.

But yes, I think in a kind of immature way, I thought that that would make me quote-unquote other in this scene, where really the scene was just about...

showing improving i remember funk master flex in an early article in in the new york times and it was like it was i just remember being like this is the nicest thing anyone's ever said about me is like he know it doesn't matter who his family is where he's from he knows how to rock a room like blah blah blah and that was like you know obviously flex at the time is the absolute biggest figure in new york hip-hop but yes i did have advantages that other people

really didn't have.

Of course, my mom bought me the turntables for graduation.

I had a stepdad who was a musician who nurtured my musical, what I wanted to do as a kid.

Well, I absolutely didn't know it would work.

So obviously just listening to that song now, it's like anybody with a pulse knows it's pretty undeniable, that record.

It had been sampled by Rick Rubin for the BC Boys.

KRS had sampled it for Boogie Down Production.

It wasn't completely foreign to hip-hop, but nobody played that record in the clubs at that time.

I was at this club called Spy Bar one night, which was one of the first super trendy, exclusive, ultra VIP lounges.

I remember being at the door sometimes and watching Trump get turned away.

It was this place, Leonardo DiCaprio, whatever, the 90s.

that was like the place everybody wanted to be and the DJs there played a lot of rock and roll and half of the time I tried to get in and I couldn't get in but one night I'm in there and they play the song and everybody just starts going crazy and like dancing on the couches like it's the fall of Rome and I just remember being hit by how powerful that record was and this was a crowd that was dancing it was very unlike the crowds that I DJed for but I remember starting to think God I really want to play this at Cheetah which was the big party on the

Monday Night, which is where Mike Tyson and Janet Jackson and Missy Elliott, it really was the place.

So I worked out this mix all week where I could play The Benjamins by Lil' Kim and Puff Daddy, which was the biggest song of the time, and go into this rock and roll remix as a transition of that song and then write on the one as soon as Biggie's verse ended, play Back in Black and, you know, obviously like...