Above: Greg Watkins says he’s always been fascinated with discovering how devices worked.
By Christine Kempista
Photos courtesy Greg Watkins
A consummate student of emerging trends and a serial early adopter, Watkins has always pushed the boundaries of norms and expectations, leading him to co-create AllHipHop.com, which has become a global online authority of hip-hop news and culture. The company celebrated its 25th anniversary in October, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of hip-hop.
Standing at the intersection of technology and hip hop, Watkins was ahead of his time, fully understanding the juggernaut that could be created when you combine the two. But what makes Watkins’ story such a model for young entrepreneurs is not just his work ethic, but his innate ability to connect with people and give them what they want before they know they want it.
“Greg is one of those unheralded geniuses we all need to recognize,” says Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur, Watkin’s business partner and co-founder of AllHipHop.com.
Early Days
Born in Albany, New York, one of Watkins’ earliest memories is of a cassette tape recorder his parents gave him around the age of 2.
“I just remember being so captivated by the music coming out of this little machine and pushing all the buttons,” says Watkins. “From that point forward, I was into gadgets.”
In 1979, his family moved to Newark’s Brookside neighborhood for his father’s job at ICI. Fascinated with discovering the way devices worked, Watkins spent endless hours of his childhood analyzing and dismantling gadgets of all shapes and sizes. Simultaneously, he occupied himself with his parents’ record collection, devouring the written content on the album covers as soon as he could read.
“I was just thrilled by it all,” says Watkins.
‘Game Over’
Serendipitously, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, hip hop’s cultural movement out of New York City took off like wildfire and started to spread to the suburbs.
“One day, I rode my bike around back of the Kimberton apartments, and I saw a big circle of people,” says Watkins. “I squeezed my way through to see what was going on, and they were breakdancing. They were windmilling and popping, and there was a big boombox playing music. Game over. That’s what I wanted to do.”
From that moment forward, Watkins and his friends became hip-hop devotees, adopting its fashion trends and breakdancing moves, listening to artists like Run DMC, the Boogie Boys, and UTFO on repeat, and honing their own rap skills. For Watkins, Creekmur, and countless kids across the country, hip-hop wasn’t just a passing fad; it became a way of life, helping them find their sense of self and their voice.
“Hip-hop was a voice of the youth, the voice of the voiceless,” says Creekmur. “It was very revolutionary in its look and substance, challenging conventional thought, challenging the government sometimes, challenging fashion sometimes. And the component that really spoke to me was hip-hop’s opposition to racism.”
‘Neighborhood House’
Watkins’ family home in Brookside became the epicenter of this hip hop groundswell in Newark.
“Our house was the neighborhood house,” says Watkins. “My mom always embraced us doing hip-hop, and she knew it was better for us to be in the house than out on the streets.”
The house served as a hip-hop incubator for Watkins, his siblings, and their friends with aspirations of musical fame and fortune. In sixth grade, he was rapping, and by seventh and eighth grade, he was laying down tracks, starting to produce his own music, and DJing.
Realizing his passion for production, he cold-called recording studios in the area, asking to come in and check out their spaces and equipment.
“It was a second epiphany where I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is where I want to be,’” says Watkins.
By ninth grade, he and his groups were recording at Target Recording Studios in Newark, which satisfied both his musical ambitions and his innate love of technology.
“He came in with this high stovepipe haircut, and he just seemed really young,” says Marc Moss, who, with his late brother Keith, owned Target Recording Studios. “But Greg gave me as much education as I gave him because I didn’t know that much about rap music and sampling.”
Simultaneously, he started building his own collection of professional recording equipment, embracing the most cutting-edge technology on the market. In 11th grade, when given the choice between a down payment for a car and a $3,000 keyboard, Watkins chose the keyboard.
“Best decision of my life,” he says.
In the ensuing years, Watkins worked closely with the Moss brothers as he launched his own record label, Oblique Recordings, and emerged as a producer for local hip-hop artists, including his younger brother Marcus Watkins, who performs under the name Marchitect.
“Everything fell under the umbrella ‘The Outfit,’ and it was amazing to make music with everyone in the recording studio and Greg’s home studio, affectionately known as the 49,” says friend and collaborator Dr. Harun Thomas, professor in the School of Communication at Daytona State College.
Focused on his career as a hip-hop producer, Watkins enrolled at the Art Institute of Philadelphia to augment his engineering and marketing tool kit. To describe this point in his life as busy would be a gross understatement.
According to Creekmur, “Greg was the first person I knew personally that was really taking it seriously as an artist, as a musician, as a producer.”
While his days were consumed with classwork, internships, performances, production, and recordings, he also launched his label online.
“I had been on computers, mind you, almost all my life,” says Watkins. “My dad bought us our first TI-99/4AA in 1983. By the time the Internet came around, I was like ‘I get the concept, but what is it?’ My dad for Christmas bought us a Compaq computer. And that’s when I got it. Game over.”
Filling the Void
While he worked tirelessly to get artists he was working with noticed by major players in Philly and New York, he ran into a problem he couldn’t solve. Everyone was moving away, which in turn presented an absolutely lifechanging opportunity for Watkins.
When he first launched his label online, Watkins had registered a number of domains, including AllHipHop.com, to hedge his bets on what would be most memorable for early Internet users. He eventually jettisoned ObliqueRecordings.com and started selling his music online solely through AllHipHop.com in 1996.
At the same time, Creekmur, a journalism graduate from UD who was working as a freelance writer for various regional and national publications, had launched Tantrum Magazine, a lifestyle website dedicated to hip-hop music, fashion and culture. Creekmur had an idea.
“I started talking to him. And somewhere in that mix, we met up and decided we’re both doing similar things,” says Creekmur. “We should just work together.” It was October 10, 1998.
Quickly, they realized they had found an open lane on the Internet that was theirs for the taking.
“There was a void. We were tech guys, and we were real hip-hop guys,” says Watkins. “In the early days, people associated the Internet with nerds behind their computers. And neither of us were that. We were deeply involved in hip-hop on all levels.”
They brought hip-hop online, merging their love of the culture with their appreciation for what the Internet was doing for mass communication. It was something no one else had thought to do, and they did it in the revolutionary style of their hip-hop idols.
One of their most notable innovations was their use of “alpha paging” to send news alerts to two-way pagers — think of it as an early form of push notifications. And like many of Watkins’ ideas, it spawned out of his innate curiosity of and interest in technology.
According to Watkins, “I was sitting on the beach, unemployed in between jobs. And Diddy came walking down the beach. At the same time, I got a message from Yahoo on my two-way pager. I was like, how are they sending me stock tickers? I went up to my hotel room, typed in my phone number with my @sprint.com, and a message came directly to me. The two-way messages became our force multiplier.”
Once they realized the potential benefit of sending news alerts from AllHipHop.com directly to people’s hips, they hustled to gather lists of phone numbers from friends and industry contacts. Eventually, they were sending news alerts twice a day to hip hop’s biggest names, including Russell Simmons, Jay-Z, members of the Wu Tang Clan, Run DMC, and even Diddy himself. This innovation put them on the map and, for the first time, brought hip-hop fans to the Internet.
Technology Legacy
AllHipHop.com became an unstoppable force for hip-hop and the dissemination of its culture on the Internet.
“For years, Chuck had spent his time trying to make inroads with journalism, and I had spent time trying to make inroads in the music business,” says Watkins. “And within two years, we had created the biggest shift in our culture. It exploded.”
Now, more than 25 years with the success of the website and his well-deserved reputation for embracing new technological innovations, Watkins has become a hip-hop tech guru, sharing his knowledge as a national lecturer on emerging trends in ad tech and the use of AI.
He is also cultivating his own legacy here in the First State.
For years, Watkins has been involved with Delaware State University’s (DSU) mass communications department as a guest lecturer and a resource for student internships.
“He has a generosity of spirit,” says Ava Perrine, mass comm instructor at DSU. “I cannot say how much I appreciate that because it does make a difference in what resources I’m able to offer the students.”
In 2022, Governor Carney appointed Watkins to serve on Delaware State Arts Council, which advises the Division of the Arts (DDOA) on matters of arts policy, funding, and general support for the arts in Delaware. In this role, he was instrumental in the creation and coordination of the recent celebration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop at the Delaware Art Museum.
“Greg is a pioneer and a legendary innovator when it comes to uplifting and amplifying hip-hop music and culture,” says Jessica Ball, director of the DDOA. “Greg’s expertise in the artform, along with his entrepreneurial and business acumen in general, have been an invaluable add to the State Arts Council.”
Attempting to measure Watkins’ impact on hip-hop culture and its growth across the globe is a nearly impossible task; however, the longevity of his partnership with Creekmur and the reverence he receives in hip-hop circles is a start.
“Greg and Chuck need to be recognized like a Mark Zuckerberg,” says Marcus Watkins. “They were innovative. And they were minorities with no backing, no connections to Silicon Valley, no startup money. It’s an amazing story. Now, people respect that whole process of building a company out of nothing. They’re pioneers of that.”
