The DJ widely credited with coining the word “turntablist” handed the microphone to North Carolina for one of his singles. DJ Babu’s “Fan Mail,” released in 2007, features Phonte and Big Pooh of Little Brother alongside Joe Scudda and D-Rock, a four-rapper lineup built around a Los Angeles battle DJ’s production.
It is a small record with a big set of connections, and it landed in the most turbulent year of Little Brother’s career.
Who DJ Babu is
DJ Babu was born Christopher E. Oroc in Washington, D.C., on September 17, 1974, and grew up partly in Oxnard and Camarillo, California, before settling in Los Angeles County. The Filipino-American DJ belongs to three crews at once: the Beat Junkies DJ collective, the hip hop trio Dilated Peoples with Evidence and Rakaa, and the duo Likwit Junkies with rapper Defari.
His reputation was made on the turntables. At the 1997 International Turntablist Federation world championships he won titles in both beat juggling and scratching, partly on the strength of a routine called “Blind Alley.” Under the name The Turntablist he had already put out Super Duck Breaks in 1996, a battle record that sold more than 10,000 copies and became a standard tool in DJ contests. The DMC World DJ Championships has called him the “godfather of turntablism.”
Where Little Brother were in 2007
Phonte and Big Pooh met producer 9th Wonder in 1998 as students at North Carolina Central University in Durham. They named the group as the younger siblings of acts they admired; in a 2003 interview, Phonte said groups such as Tribe and De La “were like our big brothers in the game.” That lineage still shows up on Badiyaa, from De La Soul’s 30th anniversary edition of Stakes Is High to A Tribe Called Quest’s final album, made in secret at Q-Tip’s home studio.
Joe Scudda was already in the extended family. He was the featured rapper on “Lovin’ It,” the single from Little Brother’s 2005 album The Minstrel Show.
A 2007 timeline
- January 2007: Little Brother announce they are leaving Atlantic Records and that 9th Wonder has left the group.
- 2007: DJ Babu releases “Fan Mail” with Phonte, Big Pooh, Joe Scudda and D-Rock.
- October 23, 2007: Getback comes out, selling about 9,600 copies in its first week and entering the US albums chart at No. 89.
- Late 2007: Little Brother tour with Evidence, Babu’s bandmate in Dilated Peoples.
Read in order, the dates show why the collaboration makes sense. With their producer gone and their major-label deal over, Phonte and Pooh spent 2007 working with the wider underground, and the Dilated Peoples camp was part of that circle twice in one year.
What happened next
Babu kept producing for Evidence, Defari, Sean Price and later Vince Staples, and in 2017 his crew launched a Los Angeles DJ school, the Beat Junkie Institute of Sound, with Babu as program director. In 2025 he joined the Hip Hop Studies faculty at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University to teach DJing at conservatory level, and the DMC made him an ICON inductee the same year.
Little Brother split after Leftback in 2010, reunited on stage at Durham’s Art of Cool Festival in 2018 and released May the Lord Watch in 2019. Their farewell run, Curtain Call: The Final Tour, played its last scheduled date on October 31, 2025.
Further reading
Image: Rohdd, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
