Supa Dupa Humble

In hip-hop, being boxed into something no longer serves as a limitation—you don’t have to be just a DJ, producer, or rapper. You can be all-in-one.

Supa Dupa Humble, best known as a budding DJ from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, realized after DJing professionally for more than five years that he needed a change. “There was so much more that I was holding in being a DJ,” Supa Dupa Humble says. “You get to mix music, you get to play music, you get to control the crowd. But then I always looked up to guys like Steve Aoki, Diplo, and Calvin Harris and I always asked myself: ‘What makes these guys different from regular club DJs?’ It is simple—they produce their own music.” And so, he broke one of his glass ceilings, leaving Djing to try producing by making a sound that fits his personality: fun, carefree, and energetic.

Supa Dupa Humble creates rhythms native to the Caribbean islands and Jamaican culture, with a dash of trap. Tarique St. Juste, 26, was born in St. Lucia, where he grew up listening to reggae and Calypso music. When he moved to New York at the age of 6, he continued to seek those sounds growing up as a teenager, digging on dancehall blogs for sound clashes and party audio from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Supa Dupa Humble was heavily influenced by clash gurus like King Addies, Tony Matterhorn and Fire Links, as well as anything from Chinese Assassin DJs and DJ Amazin. And he grasped the formula of mixing through a software called Virtual DJ.

Becoming a DJ was just a natural progression. To get started, he bought his friend’s GLI Pro belt drive turntable and his father helped by purchasing a laptop and a Serato box for him. He built his following through broadcasting on UStream from his bedroom in Crown Heights, where he usually went live from Monday to Thursday, 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. “It was like an online party, just me in my room, going. No shirt, sweating, my AC would be high and I’d be going,” adding he had up to “800 people come through the chat.”

“This is before the whole thing got mobilized and everything moved to cell phones. People were way more active on their laptops. And that actually connected me to people in Canada. People overseas, especially Turks and Caicos. That’s how I built my fanbase out there. All different islands. That gave me the boost to start DJing in Brooklyn,” he says.

While Supa Dupa Humble’s DJ run included stints in Club Gravity and The Buzz Nightclub in Crown Heights and DJing internationally in Japan, China, and Europe, being an artist was his true calling. By this time, he quit DJing in 2015 to transition to a producer, focusing on his craft and creating a sound intuitively off his tastes. Eventually, he met Daz Leone, one of his co-producers, while they were attending Kingsborough Community College for a few semesters.

“I would send him the beats and I’d be like, ‘Yo bro, I’m making beats now.’ He knew me from DJing. ‘I know you’re over there in the studio writing and stuff. Let’s link up and try to make some music,’” he recalls. “He was like, ‘Yo, let’s do it.’ It’s funny, we linked up to develop and produce for other artists. I had a record that I let him hear. He was like, ‘Yo, what are you doing with this? Put it out.’ So we decided to put it out, and it did really well on SoundCloud.”

That record ended up being “I’m Michael Jackson,” released in October 2016, a danceable banger featuring Supa Dupa Humble’s catchphrase-heavy flow (“bitches fainting at my shows, I’m Michael Jackson”) over a piano-driven, glittery beat. According to him, the song did over one million streams on Soundcloud and its official YouTube audio has over 390,000 plays. The viral success gave him the confidence to create more songs as a solo artist.

“At first, I wanted to be a producer and I wanted to be behind the scenes. Maybe I am limiting myself again. Maybe I am being a producer only when I know I can do both. So here I am now. I dropped that and it was lit,” he says.

With his team of co-producers Daz Leone, DJ Biinks, and Perry, Supa Dupa Humble stayed consistent with energetic songs, releasing “Steppin’” in June 2017 – his biggest hit to date –- and its video, which has over two million views, in October. In it, Supa Dupa Humble is literally bringing the eggplant emoji to life, dancing in a construction site with Mills Supreme, and wearing a “Make Gohan Great Again” hat. At first sight, it seems extremely bizarre, but it’s all entertainment.

To date, Supa Dupa Humble has released a seven-track EP called Humble Gardens, which is named after his love for Chinese food. The songs are mostly about sex, drugs, and partying, paying homage to Project Pat (“Project Pat”) and shouting out a couple of his favorite destinations (“Aruba,” “Osaka”). His hometown of Crown Heights, Brooklyn is a major inspiration, as Supa Dupa Humble uses Jamaican slang throughout the project to give it that extra sauce. When life gets stressful, Supa Dupa Humble wants to remind you to not take everything so seriously.

“With my music, it’s more about enjoying your life,” Supa Dupa says. “You have a lot of people who don’t get to enjoy it. You have people who don’t enjoy their life because they think it is way more complex than it is. Life, to me, is very simple. I take it day by day.”