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I also had a copy of "Strawberry Letter 23" by the Brothers Johnson that Satan hid in my Sunday school classroom to tempt me with funk, plus a few new albums. The new records cost more than $2 and weren't riddled with spider eggs or haunted by jazzmen. They were mostly by rappers who chided other rappers for not being rap enough.

I really had no clue what I was doing. I didn't know any DJs. Given that my previous hobby had been Magic: The Gathering, the only parties I'd ever attended were pizza parties. In my idiot man-cub brain, the party solely existed for the DJ's edification. One day I'd swagger down to Ibiza and drop a He-Man audiobook over Kraftwerk, and Josie and the Pussycats-era Rosario Dawson would be so agog she'd let me see her butt from a few yards away and we'd kiss with no tongue forever.

Cloud Eight Films

"Dear 2001 Me, I have sent you a gift from the future. It is a DVD copy of director Danny Boyle's Trance.

You will not own a DVD player for another three years, so hang in there champ! Yours, 2014 You."

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Back then, a sliver of my record collection even nominally qualified as party music. You had one request, Mystikal's "Shake Ya Ass" (and by "you," I mean "my Labrador retriever, who didn't give a shit because music isn't hamburgers"). My heroes were producers like RZA, Prince Paul, and Dan the Automator, guys who had dismissible luxuries like "studios" and "a basic understanding of 4/4 time signatures." I, on the other hand, owned more than four Alvin and the Chipmunks records and worshiped Public Enemy during a period in human history when DMX was responsible for half of America's GDP.