Roots Music

"Everybody in the drum 'n' bass clubs were there for the DJ and were all about the music and just getting crunk," he says. "I would do raves with 10,000 people, where I would stop the music and start scratching and people would go crazy. I got stuck into it for six, seven years, then moved to the Miami bass, and now back to my roots."

"It was like one of those sets where people were talking about it for the whole week, and I was like, maybe that's my calling," he says. "I started playing Miami bass at these drum 'n' bass parties around the world, and the party would go insane." Off that hype, Craze recently dropped the heavy Bass Sessions mix CD, which acts as both a 41-track history lesson and a party necessity, featuring booty hits from Poison Clan and 2 Live Crew, electro classics from Egyptian Lover and Cybotron, and everything in between.

He's also gotten back into the local hip-hop scene. Until recently, Craze was working on a full-length album with legendary local MC Mic Rippa. The project had to be put on hold, though, because Rippa is serving a three-year prison sentence. "Mic Rippa was always someone I thought of as the best in Miami. My crew, Blunt crew, which was made up of the Funky Lunatics, Last Strawz, and me as the DJ, used to hate him out of envy because we knew he was the best," Craze says. "About three years ago, I gave him a call since I was tired of not working on hip-hop shit in Miami, but now I've got to wait till he's out so we can try and represent again."

It's all part of returning to his roots. "The first thing I was influenced by was Miami bass and freestyle," Craze recalls. "Then in high school I got into hip-hop. And when I got into hip-hop, hip-hop and dance music were one.... Now it's all coming back to being one, and let's just go out and have a good time."