Last month Dan Kuypers, aka DJ Chester Copperpot, was at EV Productions in Evanston working on a track with one of his childhood heroes, KRS-One. They’d shared the bill at a release party for another EV artist, Single Minded Pros, back in October, where Kuypers handed the rapper a beat CD. KRS-One called back with an offer to record a couple vocal tracks for the next Copperpot solo album, and in mid-March the pair went into the studio.
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Kuypers was born and raised just a couple blocks from the EV studio, where he now works full-time. When he was a teenager his older brother David turned him on to hip-hop like Biz Markie and N.W.A, but music had yet to take over his life; in 1997, when he graduated from Evanston Township High, his first priority was to get out of town. He enrolled at Knox College in Galesburg, one of four universities he’d attend.
He majored in poetry writing and took a few music theory classes, but he also acquired several credit cards and spent most of his free time buying records. “Like 300 dollars’ worth of records a week,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was doing.” But by early 2000, about the time he returned to Chicago, he’d noticed a disappointing pattern in the new hip-hop he was picking up. “The music had gotten really formulaic,” he says. “So I said, ‘I’m gonna take this here credit card and go buy a sampler and make music that my friends and I would listen to.’”
DJ Rude 1 of Single Minded Pros told Kuypers to draw up a wish list of MCs and lyricists for his debut full-length and encouraged him to start making calls, even if he felt like he was out of his league. One of the first people Kuypers contacted was Ed O.G. “My brother put me onto him in seventh grade,” he says. “Ed O.G was my hero. . . . It was crazy for me to work with him.” Kuypers also recruited other east-coast undergrounders like Mr. Complex and Pace Won, Chicagoans like Akbar, Longshot, and Diverse, and Londoners like Verb. T and Kashmere.
