Dan Charnas: Hey brother, that record was around even before it was around. It was called "The 900 Number" by DJ Mark the 45 King. But that record actually was Def American - or no, it was American by then - American's first piece of what is now affectionately called "Research A&R", which is really the only kind of A&R that anybody does. Basically, instead of going to a club, and finding a new artist, it was looking at what's happening locally on the charts in other places of the country and snatching up properties, basically. So Rick had hired a guy named Dino Paredes, I think he was working at Priority before that, and Dino and his assistant Sam Wick - they zeroed in on this record and then we went out to Baltimore and met Steve at CLR Records and you know, vibed with Kool a little bit and signed it. Which was cool, because my parents lived in Baltimore so I got to fly back and see them from LA

SameOldShawn: And it's such a weird record in that it's not a song, exactly, right...

Dan Charnas: It would be called a rap or a chat, I suppose, if we were in Jamaica. Yeah, I mean it was very hip hop in the sense that that's what hip hop was. What DJ Kool was embodying was rhyming over somebody else's record. That was it! So what's more hip hop than that?