True to its name, Power Play’s output packed a distinctive sonic punch. & Rakim, KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, Salt-N-Pepa, EPMD, MC Lyte, Biz Markie, Kool G Rap & DJ Polo, Redman, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, Kid ’N Play, Nice & Smooth, Main Source, Heavy D & The Boyz, Organized Konfusion, Grand Puba, Big L and many, many others. However, within a few years the studio would secure its spot within the music industry as the go-to place to record and mix hip-hop, riding rap’s rising trajectory and siring essential recordings by a fleet of the era’s finest artists: Eric B. He quietly opened Power Play Studios in April 1980 on 30th Street, buying ads in the Village Voice to land his first bookings. Tony Arfi was a telephone technician/journeyman rock drummer ready to retire his sticks when he took a flyer on a space in an industrial section of his home borough, about a ten-minute drive from where he grew up in Astoria. Culturally and commercially, then still-grimy Gotham was hip-hop’s undisputed capital, and its recording epicenter during the most glowing of these golden years was a fittingly unpolished outpost in Long Island City, Queens called Power Play Studios. New York hip-hop’s classic ’80s-’90s years are exhaustively but rightly celebrated as a gilded age of creativity – a halcyon period of inspired competition and accelerated vocal, lyrical and technological progress that yielded some of the music’s most influential artists and recordings.
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