‘Is This Supposed to Happen?’: How Matt Dike Dominated Eighties Hip-Hop Music

Set in 1980s Los Angeles, Peter Relic’s “Bust a Move: Matt Dike, Delicious Vinyl, and the Hip-Hop Hits that First Conquered Pop” chronicles the peculiar circumstances that led to the founding of independent record label Delicious Vinyl, and the creation of three of the biggest crossover singles of that era: “Wild Thing” and “Funky Cold Medina” by Tone Loc, and Young MC’s “Bust a Move.”

“The fact that those indelible hits — as well as Beastie Boys’ classic album ‘Paul’s Boutique’ — were created in Matt Dike’s dusty, second floor apartment using patched-together equipment makes this one of the great DIY success stories in music history,” Relic, a Rolling Stone and Vibe contributor says. “I had no idea how truly extraordinary this story would be going into it, never mind how the mystery of Matt Dike would drive my entire investigation.”

As the record label Dike cofounded with fellow nightclub DJ Michael Ross rose to global prominence, the charismatic producer was offered the chance to work with artists including Aerosmith and Brian Wilson. Instead, Matt Dike disappeared.

“All I had was his phone number, and the knowledge that Matt had not given an in-person interview to the press since 1990. What I never guessed was what was going to happen that night after he finally picked up the phone.”

In the following excerpt from the book, three of the key players find themselves at a miraculous, ridiculous tipping point in hip-hop and pop music history.

Tone Loc was stuck. Like a big, brawny genie trapped in a dusty bottle, the rapper in the wraparound shades needed to be freed to unleash his magic.

Here, onstage at the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood, California, with purple-and-gold Los Angeles Lakers championship banners dangling from the rafters and 18,000 teenyboppers baying for beats, the semi-reformed gangster could only blink through the tendrils of dry ice swirling around him, his heart thumping faster than the tom-tom turnaround of his big hit “Wild Thing.”

Out in the crowd, two young dudes passed a flask of Jack Daniel’s and guffawed at the sight of Tone jammed in a giant prop bottle labeled FUNKY COLD MEDINA. “Oh my god, this is so Spinal Tap!” gasped the tall gangly one, his lank blond hair tented beneath a tied-back bandana. His buddy with the impressively dimpled chin could only glug in incredulity: “Is this supposed to happen?”

The answer was no. None of it. Not the ridiculous prop malfunction. Not rap music made in LA beating New York to the top of the pop charts. Nor any of the extraordinary circumstances that had led Matt Dike, Michael Ross, and Tone Loc to this moment.

The date was Aug. 13, 1989. Two years earlier, Dike and Ross had been battering away at a primitive drum machine in a grungy apartment in the wrong part of Hollywood. With a $5000 loan, they’d started a record label called Delicious Vinyl, recorded a couple of mildly lascivious songs with unknown local rapper Anthony “Tone” Smith, and pressed up a few hundred 12-inches to hawk at swap meets and local shops.

Within eighteen months, their fledgling label had sold nearly ten million records worldwide. They had shocked New York, and battered down the barriers of a recording industry still largely intent on keeping hip-hop out. 

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Yet here was Tone Loc, headlining Club MTV Live Tour, a concert revue featuring a smattering of ready-to-serve stars of the moment: techno-poppers Information Society, funk goofballs Was (Not Was), dance queen Paula Abdul, and mime mannequins Milli Vanilli. No stranger to smoke inhalation, Loc had had enough of this guff, and in a moment of twin-fisted fury prepared to bash his way out of his Plexiglas coffin.

“We’ve gotta get up there!” Dike shouted at Ross. The two cofounders of Delicious Vinyl, ALL ACCESS passes gummed to their chests, began weaving their way toward the stage. 

Covering the show that night for the Los Angeles Times was journalist Jonathan Gold. Two decades later, Gold’s fearless gastronomy and appetizing prose as LA Weekly food critic won him the Pulitzer Prize, but throughout the 1980s, Gold’s primary beat was music. He had penned multiple admiring stories documenting Dike’s hot string of underground dance clubs and the subsequent rise of Delicious Vinyl.

In his review in the morning paper, Gold chided Club MTV host Downtown Julie Brown and the night’s other acts before singling out Tone Loc for special praise: “In only a few months, the good-natured rapper seems to have made the transition to headlining a sold-out Forum with astonishing ease. The beats, kind of distorted with the other Club MTV performers, sounded richer and funkier played really loud, as if they were supposed to be that way. He shook hands with the audience, bantered with the audience — acknowledged that there is an audience, which is probably contrary to Club MTV house policy, but what the hey — and made rap clichés convincing for the first time since 1982. And that voice — whiskey-warm, rasping, insinuating, funny — is the best instrument in rap, cutting effortlessly through cranked guitar chords and bongo beats and cowbells.”

Finally free of his prop bottle, Tone delivered “Funky Cold Medina,” go-go joint “I Got It Goin’ On,” and pungent weed ode “Cheeba Cheeba,” while behind him onstage, next to the turntable riser manned by DJ M.Walk, Matt Dike and Mike Ross peered out at the crowd, facing down their unlikely demographic: pale adolescents whose orthodontic braces were hooked on the antenna of MTV.

Then came the money shot, a roof-rattling rendition of the year’s hottest jam. “Wild Thing” had been recorded on a patched-together tape machine in Dike’s apartment, with samples of a failed, decade-old Van Halen single, its accompanying video made for barely $400, but now Dike and Ross, dancing and deliriously drunk, were thinking the same thing as Jonathan Gold: This sounds awesome.

The moment was momentous. It couldn’t get any better.

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And then, sensing the profound nature of the occasion, Matt Dike turned his back, bent over, and mooned the crowd.

Excerpted from Bust a Move: Matt Dike, Delicious Vinyl, and the Hip-Hop Hits That First Conquered Pop. Copyright © 2026 by Peter Relic. Published in the United States by Citadel Press, an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.