Compton. He built the G-funk blueprint before anyone called it that.
David Blake, known everywhere as DJ Quik, released Quik Is the Name on Profile in January 1991, almost two years before The Chronic. The whole G-funk vocabulary is already on it: the high synth lead, the rolling bassline, the live-feel drums, the party-first Compton perspective. He produced all of it himself at twenty years old.
He never stopped producing. Across Way 2 Fonky, Safe + Sound and Rhythm-al-ism he built a catalog that other West Coast records were measured against, and he spent the next three decades behind the boards for everyone from 2Pac to Jay-Z to Kendrick Lamar. Musicians who work with him tend to describe him as a bandleader more than a beatmaker.
The collecting case is straightforward: Quik has never carried the Death Row markup despite getting there first. Original Profile pressings turn up at prices that look like mistakes next to comparable West Coast titles from the same years. Condition is the real hunt, because these were records people played rather than archived.
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