The Producers
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
That was in 1989, when Panik and his pals Mixx Massacre (aka Alberto Espinosa) and MC Vakill (aka Donald Mason) were calling themselves the Dead Poets Society. In 1991, Panik, then 19 and in his fifth year of high school, dropped out and retreated to the basement of his parents’ house in Logan Square to teach himself hip-hop skills. Around this time Vakill rechristened the group the Molemen, after a race of underground villains from Marvel’s Fantastic Four comics. “In my own mind it was an investment,” Panik says. “My whole life has been about instinct, and I felt something inside of me even though I didn’t know what it was. It was weird to my family and everyone around me: ‘This guy’s crazy, he’s in the basement all day, he has no job.’ They thought there was something wrong with me, and I can’t blame them. Eventually they started seeing things happening.”
The group started out making mix tapes, which they sold in area record shops that specialized in hip-hop. “We would sneak our own tracks onto the tapes,” says Mixx Massacre. In 1995, they invited a fellow local mix-tape maker into their ranks: PNS, aka Juvenal Robles, who’d been hearing from fans that his “blends sounded like the Molemen.” Panik credits PNS’s business acumen and networking skills with raising the Molemen’s visibility to its current level. By 1996 the Molemen had been enlisted to produce a 12-inch by local MC Rhymefest, and PNS managed to get some Molemen tracks into the hands of Rasco, who used some of Panik’s beats on his 1999 release, The Birth.
