It seems everyone makes a stop at South by Southwest these days, and Seattle native and tech geek Sir Mix-A-Lot is no exception, making his first trip to Austin, Texas, for the Interactive conference.
According to this interview with TechCrunch, he couldn’t be happier to be there. The site sat down with Mix to talk all things tech and music.
So what gets Mix excited about tech these days?
“It’s what I do anyway before it was even cool,” he said. “When I was 13 years old, I built my first DC-powered amplifier. Ever since then I was always really into hard electronics, but I’ve taken a liking lately to embedded projects…technology independent of a phone, a stand-alone piece that can be controlled externally.”
Mix also gave his totally right-on take on the music industry: “The music industry did this to itself. A lot of us artists were begging the labels to lower the costs of CDs…That gave birth to Napster. That model was very effective, not legal but effective, and Apple took that model and ran with it.”
Mix, who’s been a longtime hometown hero-geek, even attending the GeekWire launch party in 2011, and was involved with Seattle startup Giant Thinkwell (now called Haiku Deck), also cited his love to connecting via Twitter: “I’ve cut so many deals from a damn tweet, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Take a mini-break down memory lane and watch Mix’s “Baby Got Back” below, still a stellar song and video btw: