In the late ’90s, Sparks started out with his own dreams of being a solo rap star. But, as a white man from Boston in a time when New York “was the quintessential hip-hop mecca,” he hit a wall: “The automatic response was: ‘If you’re white, we don’t fuck with you. If you’re from Boston, we don’t fuck with you.’ You were automatically Vanilla Ice.” So he moved into radio, where he observed the patterns of glad-handing and favor-trading firsthand. He studied the promo-run patterns of labels sending artists on interview circuits and got gigs hosting radio shows as a DJ in Boston, Connecticut, New York, and Baltimore. Then he did one of the most crucial things a wannabe industry heavyweight can do: He lied about his importance.

“I knew how far behind the industry was on the internet, so I fooled everyone by saying I have a super-cracking radio show online, because I knew they would never look,” he says, laughing. “That’s how I got Eminem, Common, Kweli, Wu-Tang: Whenever artists did promo runs in Boston, I would have them come to my mom’s house, which was basically where I did my shows in Boston.”

Those radio shows offered him plenty of chances to collect material—freestyles from rappers, exclusives, performances—that he put into tapes. In 2004, Sparks cofounded the site MixUnit, an online hub for mixtapes that took a formula established by early sites like Tape Kingz and refined it, selling shirts, hats, and DVDs along with the cheaply burned CD-R mixtapes. “We weren’t the first to do it, but we did it bigger than everyone else,” says Sparks. He claims that MixUnit forced an early competitor to close down their own mixtape shop—and launch the now-booming video site WorldStarHipHop instead.

He also had some ambitious ideas about what a mixtape could be. “From the beginning, my mixtapes were always way different than everyone else’s,” he says. He would take verses recorded at his house and pair them with new beats, or remix songs altogether. “Me, DJ Green Lantern, and G-Unit simultaneously invented [the idea of] one artist rapping over a bunch of different beats. Prior to that it was just compilations,” says Sparks. “We would go to artists that were coming up and say, ‘Yo, why don’t we just do a whole mixtape?’ They’d be like, ‘I don't understand. What does that mean?’ So I'd say, ‘We’ll just fuckin’ jack all your favorite beats and only you will rap on them.’”

At that point, Malice and Pusha T of the Clipse were deep into a now-fabled label purgatory. They found themselves cogs in a machine with no awareness of their existence, and flailed helplessly trying to procure a release date for the follow-up to their hit 2002 debut album, Lord Willin’. “I never did a mixtape before, nor was I welcomed in the mixtape world at that time,” Pusha tells me. “I was from Virginia, and the mixtape scene was all New York. I couldn’t get on a mixtape for the life of me.”

So he called up Clinton Sparks, the upstart kid with a famous show in his mom’s basement and the co-owner of the world’s biggest mixtape site, and pitched him a series directly. The two had a connection through the Philly rapper Ab-Liva of the group Major Figgaz, who had met Clinton in his basement days and was currently working with the Clipse on new material. Sparks and Pusha talked over the shape of the project: It was meant to be an echo of classic New York mixtapes, the kind of all-killer mix that DJ Clue and Doo Wop were known for in the ’90s. Except instead of featuring verses from dozens of rappers, it would be the four of them: Pusha, Mal, Ab-Liva, and another Philly local named Sandman. They would call themselves the Re-Up Gang, a reference to the drug deals that inspired their material as well as a hopeful nod to what the tapes might do for their stymied contract.

We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 1 came out in January 2005, with the crew freestyling over cuts by the LOX, LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, and more, addressing their industry woes along the way. The crew’s chemistry was palpable, but the release sounded wobbly, suffering from some dead air and questionable beat choices. Still, the energy was there.

“Pusha was totally in charge of the first one,” Sparks says. He remembers the tape’s cover—a neck-down shot of a woman cutting coke on a table—being a point of contention. “When they gave me that cover I was like, ‘This is not it, bro. You shouldn’t use this.’ He was like, ‘Nah, why?’ I was like, ‘Trust me, bro. Let me do the marketing and all that stuff.’ He was like, ‘No, we wanna go with this.’ That first cover was pretty cheesy.”

Vol. 1 arrived to muted acclaim. Pusha, unsatisfied, immediately wanted to do it again. “I was like, ‘Dude, you have to let me be in charge this time,’” says Sparks. The DJ came up with the concept—a cover literally coated in white powder, an object so dusted in sin and avarice that you would check your fingers for residue when you held the slim jewel case. The project was sequenced more tightly as well. “We were taking Wu-Tang beats and shit, because who the fuck is not gonna be down with that?” says Sparks. “All that’s played out now, but at that time it was like, ‘Oh shit! They took that!’”

The We Got It 4 Cheap mixtapes were recorded in a place of unimaginable luxury—Pharrell’s mansion in Virginia. In an ironic echo of their label situation, Clipse and company found themselves there alone, surrounded by the dynastic wealth of their benefactor and sole lifeline to the major-label machine.

“That was basically the compound,” says Ab-Liva. “We’re all staying in a super dope mansion on the water, all the cars there, the Ferraris, Rolls Royces.” Sleeping in the guest rooms, the four strategized every day over the tape’s sequencing, picking beats and writing together in the same room. Liva came from Philly, a scene with a much richer mixtape tradition than Virginia’s. “I was used to mixtapes,” he says. “I’ve been freestyling my whole life. But that was the first time I ever tried to make a mixtape sound like an album.”

The results blew up in a way none of them could have predicted. We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2, released in May 2005, lit up rap blogs, which were running at full capacity at the time, connecting hardcore fans from every market instantly. It scored them coverage from traditionally non-rap publications (like this one), bringing in a whole new audience. The Clipse hadn’t performed live in front of a crowd for three years, but the buzz from the tapes landed them gigs in New York—a market that hadn’t shown much interest in them since their hit single “Grindin’” put them on the map four years earlier. A 2006 show at the indie club Knitting Factory (capacity: 400) showed the rappers that they’d used the internet to step through a demographic keyhole, as they watched white, downtown twentysomethings chant every single one of their coke-kingpin punchlines back to them.

It unnerved Pusha at the time. “Vol. 2 was picked up in the blog world, and I remember having issues,” he explains. “I’d be saying, ‘Damn, this isn’t the avenue that I necessarily want it to be heard in—I can’t go buy it from the mixtape guy in the hood.’ ‘Grindin’’ was such a drug dealer hood anthem, and that's where I was seeing all the energy from. With Clinton’s tapes, we would have an energy, but it was one that I couldn’t feel out in the street. That was weird to me; I couldn’t feel it.”

With Clipse and the Re-Up Gang, Sparks found the ideal vehicles for his mixtape-as-album vision: These were deep-craft scholars, the sorts of rappers whose abstract love of the form—its tone, its feel, its particulars—rivaled that of any devoted online fan. They were quotable-collectors, bar counters, competitors—writers. “I’m so literary with it, you can tell how I write/The boy’s such an author, I should smoke a pipe,” deadpanned Malice on a Vol. 2 rampage over Juelz Santana’s “Mic Check” beat. With Sparks mixing and sequencing, they made the kind of long-player that could be fussed over lovingly. For the type of mixtape it represented—one DJ, one artist or group, beats pulled from everywhere—it was a high-water mark.

“I love the We Got It 4 Cheap projects,” Pusha says now. “You can hear the passion in those raps. We were fighting for our lives, and I feel like that set us apart.”