Representin’: Chicago
Sounds like: Just Blaze meets DJ Quik
DJ Fokis likes to joke that he’s old school. A 15 year veteran in the hip-hop game, the Chicago native has been called the “Funkmaster Flex of the Windy City.”
Starting out deejaying for college radio, battling other turnablists and doing graffiti around the city in the ’90s, Fokis caught the music bug early.
“Pretty much how I got down to it is I just felt the music – it goes way even before I knew what hip-hop was,” Fokis says. “I was buying LP’s when people were buying CD’s and stuff like that, so I felt like I had a bond with it.”
A self-proclaimed triple threat (turntablist, scratch artist and beat-juggling) Fokis has taken his turned this sonic relationship into a very successful career. Working with artists like Stat Quo and 9th Wonder and catching checks from companies like Red Bull and Bad Boy, Fokis seems to fit right in with 2009.
“I feel like nothing has really changed, just the politics of [the game] – the rules, the whole get in how you stay in,” he says. “You basically work your way through the pipeline to get yourself known, get the buzz going.”
With a mixtape and album set to drop later this year, Fokis knows will always remain intact because he fully understands the concept of what it means to be an artist.
“Everybody can put two words together that rhyme,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s about how you’re going to market yourself to separate yourself from this group or that group.” –gavin philip godfrey
