Hailing from Rochester, New York, DJ Green Lantern was a producer that, by his own admission, "fell into" DJing. At least that's how he described his experience on the most recent episode of the A Waste Of Time podcast. Talking to hosts Eric and Jeff Rosenthal, collectively known as ItsTheReal, about how he got started and sharing some stories about his vaunted career as a DJ and producer, Green Lantern eventually happened upon one of the defining moments of his career: being chosen from a pool of candidates as Eminem's tour DJ. Once the rapper's management team and the promoters who were organizing the tour had given their okays, it was time to meet Em himself, which the DJ/producer recalls being an especially memorable experience.
"I feel like I might've dissed him, on the low, without realizing it," he explained. "He was in L.A., [at] one of Dre's studios, [...] they were finishing recording The Eminem Show [...] I hear 'Cleaning Out My Closet,' and I'm like, 'Okay, instrumentation-wise, it sounded slightly similar, to me, to 'Renegade'.'" When they finally met later on in the day, DJ Green Lantern may have let the comparison slip, which almost made the rendez-vous go very poorly. "[Eminem] was like, 'Yo, you got to hear some of the album/" I was like, 'Yeah I really like that one that sounds like 'Renegade'.' He looked at me almost [like with] a scowl," continued the DJ. It didn't seem to affect Em's outlook on his new tour mate that much, since they ended up having a decent working relationship together.
When asked who the first artist was that reached out to him to do a mixtape that gave him creative control over the production sound, DJ Green Lantern offered up the name of Beanie Sigel. According to his recollection, Lantern says it was one of Beanie's people that reached out to him and supposedly communicated the fact that the rapper wanted to work with the DJ and no one else on his mixtape, which turned out to be the Public Enemy #1 release, a project that is still widely respected in the hip-hop community.
Check out the full interview below.
