The million-dollar question lately is, What happened to female MCs? But don’t sleep on the lady DJs, especially not DJ Diamond Kuts. Most of the country met DJ Diamond Kuts on BET’s late night show, The Deal, where she and her partner Mepmphitz host various up and coming rappers. However, she was slanging music since she got her first DJ starter kit as a child.
The Philadelphia native started building a buzz in college when she began releasing various mixtapes and as a result became the first and only female DJ to have a slot in the 8th ranked national radio market⎯Philadelphia⎯on Power 99. She now also DJs the station’s morning show, makes various TV appearances, has toured with Lil Mama and hopes to roll with Nicki Minaj when it’s time to promote Pink Friday. The popular mixologist is all about good music but more specifically, hip-hop, which is in her DNA (seriously, her father is Philadelphia hip-hop pioneer, Grand Tone), and she plans to use her powers on Serato to spread audio crack to the masses.
“I love music so much and as a DJ, I see why so many DJs are coming out with compilation albums because we know so much about music as far as how certain sounds should go together,” says the Philly native who plans to put out a compilation album once she finds time in her hectic schedule but in the meantime, she’s content with discovering the next big thing.
DJ Diamond Kuts was one of the first DJs to play Lil Mama, which resulted in her landing the gig as the “Lil Gloss” rapper’s tour DJ. However, by the time Lil Mama did less rapping and more judging of dance battles, Nicki Minaj was slowly building her buzz on the mixtape circuit and Diamond Kuts once again took notice. Instinctively, she knew that Nicki Minaj was going to blow and took a chance by spinning the burgeoning self-proclaimed Barbie’s mixtape cuts.
“When Nicki was dropping all her mixtape songs like, ‘I Get Crazy,’ nobody in Philly was playing her records so I started playing it. I love female rappers. I love the energy that they bring and the fact that they can hold their own on the track,” says Diamond Kuts. “Most female rappers are either too sexy or too hard and I felt like Nicki was that medium. She played the sexy role but she had fun with the music and then she would get hard and really spit when she wanted to. So that’s what I like most about her and the songs were on point, the quality of music that Nicki put out was great. And on top of that, being able to split up each personality that people love about female rappers, I think that is amazing. That’s what made me fall in love with Nicki’s music.”
Nicki Minaj, thankful for the love, reached out to Diamond Kuts and the pair developed a friendship. Kuts was supposed to be Nicki’s DJ during the Rihanna tour that Minaj pulled out of but there is a possibility that we’ll see the pair on the road at some point in the future. “The next time she goes on tour I might be with her. We still have to see what happens, but all she gotta say is, ‘Diamond you ready?’ and I’m like, “Let’s go!”
In the meantime, DJ Diamond Kuts still has her radio shows on Power 99, she’ll be making appearances on 106 and Park and is prepping for the return of The Deal tentatively scheduled to return January 2011.
