Jesse Tittsworth definitely knows how to turn on the charm; his mother must be one proud lady. We sat down with Baltimore’s finest before his gig at the Butter Factory. And yes, for the last time, it’s his real name.

AO: So, you guys just got in from Manila?
JT: Yeah.

AO: How was that?
JT: It was good. We did Hong Kong as well.

AO: Yeah, I heard you were there with the whole Ed Banger crew too, yeah?
JT: They turned up the day after our show. The show was really good, there were mad people partying. There was Stretch Armstrong, Amanda Blank… It was really good.

AO: You just missed a huge music festival here – Diplo was here, M.A.N.D.Y. and all that.
JT: How was that?
AO: It was good, it was really good. I was just telling my friend how you were coming here for a gig, and he was like, ‘Tittsworth? Isn’t that a bit loose for Singapore?’ Like, ‘Singapore’s not ready for that.’ We don’t usually get Baltimore club stuff here, and he was just laughing.
JT: Yeah, believe it or not there’s even a lot of American cities where you have to sort of crawl a little bit at first, and then slowly win them over.

AO: So, it’s your first time here, right? Have you heard anything about our, um, reputation?
JT: The one thing I do know is that there was that American guy who got, like, reprimanded publicly? For graffiti or something?
AO: Yep, Michael Fay. He got caned.
JT: And then on the way over here I was filling out the customs form, and it said, like, ‘Drugs are punishable by death,’ or something like that. And I was like, yeah, okay, that’s not really applicable.

AO: I really liked ‘Titts’mas Time’ (cheeky Christmas tune from 2007).
JT: Oh, thank you!

AO: Do you have any plans for a whole festive mashup EP? We have some really, really bad holiday songs here that you could probably poach.
JT: [Laughs] I never thought about it, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be like, an oddball thing to do. So, yeah.

AO: What’s a surprising record that you love, that nobody will expect from you?
JT: Like, something old?
AO: Not Miles Davis. Something shocking.
JT: Hmm. Well, we were just talking about how the new Christina Aguilera record is pretty well produced. That’s pretty shocking.

AO: That is pretty shocking.
JT: We were talking about DJ Premier did a good job… I’m a big fan of Snoop, we were talking about him recently too.

AO: Have you seen Father Hood?
JT: Yeah. Yeah, it’s so weird that he’s such a positive role model on TV.

AO: I mean, ‘Ain’t No Fun’? Come on.
JT: [Laughs] That’s really old, but yeah, totally.

AO: You can’t really tell your kids what to do when you’ve got a song like ‘Lodi Dodi’.
JT: It’s so weird right? It’s like Ice Cube. He’s got his gangsta rap albums, and then he’s in like, kids’ movies.

AO: So, if you had to base an album purely on one sample, what would it be? Edan has Sound of the Funky Drummer (mixtape based on James Brown’s most famous sample) and you know Shitmat? He’s a breakcore, noisecore DJ.
JT: Shitmat? Hmm.

AO: He’s sort of like drum ’n…you used to be a drum ’n’ bass DJ, right?
JT: Yeah, yeah, I did.



AO: Well, he dedicated one whole album to the Amen break (the cornerstone of d’n’b samples, from The Winstons’ classic ‘Amen My Brother’). So what would you pick?
JT: Well if I could do it, I guess the one break that sums up all the stuff I do is the Sing Sing break that’s in Baltimore club (from the 1978 Gaz song of the same name). I think it would be cool to just do it with that dance break. It’d make a lot of interesting tracks. It wouldn’t be that hard to make a whole album out of, like, five or six seconds of that.

AO: I saw a picture of you eating, like, toilet paper with your buddy Dave Nada. What’s that all about?
JT: Ha! At photo shoots people ask you to do funny things. And Dave and I have a really silly sense of humour, so I guess that got brought out in it. That was shot in Baltimore at this place called Ottobar. We were doing a feature on the Baltimore club scene and all that. By the end of the interview I think we were in the bathroom, like standing in the bathroom, trying to stick things to the ceiling and splashing around with water.

AO: You once described having to sneak into Paradox (Baltimore club) with Diplo, because you didn’t want to cut the (predominantly black) line.
JT: You read about that, huh?
AO: Yeah. So now that you’re a bit more recognised, do you still feel the same way?
JT: I still feel the exact same way. That club is still very traditionally black and, like, what me and Diplo do doesn’t matter. I mean, there are certain people within that scene – like the DJs and the producers – who know and respect what we do, but your average Paradox club-goer has no idea what Hollertronix is, or anything. It’s kinda slowly starting to change now, but not so much in the black Baltimore scene – it’s mostly because of the hipster parties and stuff.

AO: Ah, I just moved back from New York, so I know what kind of hipster parties you mean.
JT: Right.

AO: What’s the news on your full-length album?
JT: It’s done. It should be out…mid-July? It’s got a real Baltimore club sound – and I’ve got Nina Sky on it, Pase Rock and Kid Sister…it’s about two years’ worth of hard work, and the first thing I’ve done that doesn’t have any samples.

AO [Mildly stunned]: Really?
JT: Yeah. It has, like, official songs – not remixes – it’s got vocals that haven’t been heard anywhere.

AO: That’s pretty exciting. Do you think the whole mashup genre is better represented in like, a series of short EPs as opposed to one long…
JT: The thing is for most of that stuff – remixes and all that – a lot of dancey things are made for the DJ. So they’re kind of released in formats that support that, you know what I mean? And also because all that stuff is kind of ‘here today, gone tomorrow’. So you’ve got to get it out fast. If you had to wait every time for a full compilation – like a full 15 tracks – a lot of those remixes would be out of date by then.

AO: How do you feel about online distribution as a way to get it out real fast?
JT: I think it’s great. I mean, most of my stuff is not very hard to find, and I give away a lot of the things I do for free. I mean I have a few songs on iTunes here and there, but by and large, just go to my website, and you can get songs for free. I think it’s a good way of getting music out there, and the blog culture turns music over so fast that you kind of have be real good about keeping up with it. But it’s really interesting because the album will be the first thing that I’ve done that I’ve become a little protective over. I don’t know if I could give it up outright because there’s been so much money that’s gone into it.

AO: Do you have plans to like, give it away, or…
JT: Initially I think what we’ll do is…well, simply because there’s been all this money I’ve invested in this project, so I can’t just give the thing out, you know what I mean? But I always manage to give away something. I was just talking to my friend yesterday about giving away a few songs over the next few weeks. But the thing about digital distribution is, it’s an amazing way to accomplish things that used to take for ever to do – things that required lots of money and lots of time. You can do it now with a few clicks, and it’s amazing, y’know? The flipside to that, it’s built up all this brawling – it’s changed the way people make money. It’s a strange time.

AO: That’s true. So after here, you’re headed off to Taiwan? Is your mother happy about that [Tittsworth is half-Taiwanese]?
JT: Yes, absolutely. [Until recently] I hadn’t been to Taiwan in 15 years. Last time Mike did a tour for me it was around Chinese New Year, and I did like, four Asian dates, and a bunch of Australian dates, and we hooked it up so I could have this big homecoming around Chinese New Year. It was great. It was intense, though, it was like five days trying to make up for 15 years.

AO: So you did the whole visiting, eating thing.
JT: Yeah, paying respect to dead relatives and all that.

AO: How’s your Mandarin?
JT: Functional! When I first got there it was just really broken. People would understand conversations with me, but they were kind of ugly and choppy. But after being there for about four or five days I was back in the groove.

AO: That’s cool. Do you have any plans to move to Taiwan at any point?
JT: You know, Mike asked me the same thing earlier, and a couple of people have asked me if I’d live in Asia, and I’d consider it. It’s part of the reason – one of the reasons that I enjoy travelling so much – I’ve been in DC for a good 15 years. I love it, but you never know, it could be time for a change in pace. Maybe, just maybe.

AO: Do it. For an Asian audience, do you think the little cultural tongue-in-cheek stuff you do – like the Jeffersons remix – it used to make me laugh because I’d watch it late at night – do you think it kinda gets lost in translation much?
JT: A lot of it does. But you know, that kind of stuff happens in the States, too. Like you’ll go somewhere where they won’t like a certain kind of hip hop, or they might listen to ’90s rap, or I mean, there are regional things everywhere you go.

AO: Have you heard any Asian rap? Like Japanese hip hop…
JT: Hmm, no. I’ve heard…let’s see…since I’ve been here I’ve heard some really dope Filipino rock, and a bunch of pop stuff.

AO: Japanese rap is blowing up right now.
JT: Really? You got any names for me?
AO: I could write them down for you.
JT: Yeah, that’d be good.

AO: Yeah that’d be cool, if you ever did a collaboration of some kind, it’d be insane.
JT: Yeah, I’d love it.

AO: You describe yourself as having a ‘retarded sense of humour’. What do you think people would do if you broke out, like Haddaway here or something?
JT: [Laughs] It’s hard to say. Sometimes people get it and sometimes they don’t. There’s a little trick to it, that you should have something in the back of your mind ready so you’re immediately ready to recover. I don’t know, it’s always hard to tell.

AO: What’s the best pick-up line you’ve ever heard?
JT: It’s gotta be in Manila. I was hanging out with my boy Rick, and this girl came up to him and said, ‘You are my religion.’
AO: What?
JT: Yeah. She said, ‘You are my religion’ and then he was like, ‘Uh, hi, my name’s Rick, do you wanna dance or something?’ And she was like, ‘You are my religion,’ and then kind of just ran off. That was kind of weird.

AO: So basically she kind of cockblocked herself, in a way.
JT: Yeah, right. I played in the South once, and this girl came up to me and was, like, being extremely overly critical of my set. You know, I’m always down to improve and learn people’s opinions, because that’s how you get better. But she was going on and on about like, ‘I don’t know why you started off so user-friendly’ and this and that, I was like, ‘No offence, look around, I’m in Arkansas.’ It’s not like I could bust out Diplo’s new remix right off the top. You gotta ease into it, right? So anyway, she was really leaning into me, going on and on and on, about this that and the other, and how she saw Diplo and he wasn’t ‘progressive’ enough. To cut a long story short, by the end of the conversation she was hitting on me. And I couldn’t for the life of me understand what her strategy was. It must be that playground thing where the girl walks up and kicks the shins of the boy she likes or something. I guess she never grew out of that. [Laughs]

AO: What’s your favourite way to get over jet-lag? Since you’re always travelling and such.
JT: Ah, cure jet-lag. Usually depending on…based on the time of the flights, I’ll stay up all night, or I’ll sleep for the whole plane ride and when I show up I won’t be as tired. Or I’ll just eat a really huge meal and put myself to sleep. It works every time.