Shawty Pimp – Volume 1

In this interview with Icon Academy, courtesy of YouTube, Malik Jahmil Shannon, aka Shawty Pimp, details how the DR-660 came into his life.

At 20:07, Shawty relays a story about how Tommy Wright III took him to DLE's studio, where he saw the Boss DR-660 for the first time and decided he needed to get one for himself.

Shawty Pimp & MC Spade's 1993 "Solo Tape" uses the Boss DR-660 exclusively for every beat, no other synths, samplers or drum machines were employed, just this one little machine, a 4 track recorder and a microphone.

(yes there is some vinyl playing in the background for the intro shout outs, but once the tape gets started it's all DR-660 from then onward)

Update: I also uncovered a wonderful 2025 6-part series Torii MacAdams wrote for Medium. Part 2 is the best interview with Shawty Pimp I've ever come across:

When his peers were hammering out sparse, Stygian beats, Malik was sourcing lush soul and funk samples from his father’s vinyl collection. Others were pretending to be conversant with Satan and his sulfurous machinations; Malik was functionally conversant with the laid back instrumentation of artists like Roy Ayers and the Isley Brothers. When slightly older, more immediately successful dudes were making gestures toward professionalization, Malik was recording in the safety of his teenage bedroom with a microphone, a four-track cassette recorder, a Boss DR-660 drum machine, and a Gemini DS-1224, a sampler down-market from the comparatively expensive SP-1200. “I didn’t have no pre-made beats until after the cassette era,” he says, laughing to himself. “Before that I couldn’t save my beats. Recorded to tape, letting the drum machine play, hitting the loop, and rapping at the same time. I can’t imagine trying to do that shit now. That shit was crazy!”