Tony Touch hit my hands the way a lot of real rap did back then: unannounced, slightly damaged, and somehow more valuable because of it. Early 90’s. I’m prying a cassette out of a plastic jewel case and it lets out that long, ugly screech like it’s protesting being exposed to daylight. The J-card is black and white, basically a xerox job—big block letters shouting TONY TOUCH, a phone number underneath, and the familiar disclaimer: “for promotional use only.” The ink looks tired, like the copy machine was on its last breath. No question, this was a bootleg of a bootleg.
Hip-Hop didn’t travel clean. It moved through hands, through cousins, through mailers and corner stores, through things that weren’t supposed to make it past the block—let alone past state lines. I was in Michigan, hundreds of miles from New York, still catching the signal.
I lost track of Tony Touch for a while, life does that…the algorithm does that, but I recently ran back into his name after a decade or so, and it snapped something right back into place. Not just the sound, but the whole routine around it. Being the first one to the magazine store on Eastman Ave in Midland, Michigan, checking the rack for the newest issue of The Source, Rap Pages, and 4080 like it was a weekly report from headquarters. That era didn’t hand you culture. You had to go get it, early, and you had to recognize it in low resolution.
For your listening enjoyment, here’s Tony Touch at 214 Mulberry.
Thomas Dishaw is the creator of RapTherapy.co and founder of Artist Deserved, a platform built to help artists earn more. During his work at Royce da 5’9″’s Heaven Studios, he interviewed influential Detroit artists including Tee Grizzley, Babyface Ray, Payroll Giovanni, Royce da 5’9″, Icewear Vezzo, and Street Lord Juan.
A lifelong hip hop fan, Thomas launched his independent label Napalm Productions at age 20, releasing albums and mixtapes from 1998 to 2008.
