The legendary New York DJ duo of Stretch and Bobbito have reunited. After 19 years off the airwaves, Adrian "Stretch" Bartos and Robert "Bobbito" Garcia are back with a conversational, sometimes musical NPR podcast called What's Good With Stretch And Bobbito. On this edition of All Songs Considered we talk about their hugely influential music show in the '90s on WKCR at Columbia University, in New York City that helped launch the careers of artists like The Notorious B.I.G, Wu-Tang Clan, Jay-Z, Nas, Eminem and more.
"The show was birthed out of a friendship and a shared love of music—it was very simple," Stretch told me in our conversation. "Bob and I hadn't known each other for that long. When we started, when we were discovering each other [and] a lot of things happened very quickly. It was almost dreamlike. I think one of the beautiful things about our show is [that] we laid down this really organic foundation for people that would become producers, graphic designers, label owners, of course artists, store owners, website operators, also journalists, distributors, and booking agents as well."
The energy of Stretch and Bobbito is infectious. Over the course of this nearly 50-minute conversation, we talked about how cassettes were used to spread their fame in the pre-Internet days; we hear some late-night/early morning rapping from Lord Finesse featuring KRS-One; and we talk about Stretch and Bobbito's new NPR podcast, which includes a bit with Stevie Wonder recounting the birth of his song, "Golden Lady" (or is it "old little lady?").
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