In the Lab 30 BLog

On Hip-Hop's Birthday, DJ NABS Keeps a Promise to His Little Brother 

Thirty years In the Lab, a debut album that reads like a family tree, and a first Old Skool Sundays at Spaceman built to honor the DJs who made Old Atlanta — beginning August 16.

August 11, 2026 – The date August 11 has always belonged to the culture. It’s the day, in 1973, that a back-to-school party in the Bronx lit the fuse on hip-hop. What fewer people outside Atlanta know is that the date belongs to somebody else too: Chris “Mac Daddy” Kelly of Kris Kross, born August 11, 1978. For DJ NABS, those two…

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The ONLY DJ IN HIP-HOP TO TOUR WITH THE KING OF POP

In the spring of 1992, Arrested Development's Headliner made a phone call that set off a chain of events nobody saw coming. Manager Michael Mauldin — who was overseeing both Arrested Development and the newly exploding teen rap duo Kris Kross — needed a DJ and music director to take Kris Kross on the road with Michael Jackson's Pepsi-sponsored Dangerous World Tour. Headliner had a name: DJ NABS, a Durham, NC-born DJ he had been working alongside on the Atlanta University Center campus circuit, the same man who had already cut a turntable remix of Arrested Development's career-defining single "Tennessee." One recommendation placed a 23-year-old Southern DJ at the center of what would become a $100 million global touring operation.

she labeled the sound

In recognition of Women's History Month, NABS has something to say about the women who helped build The Lab Legacy.

Before the platinum plaques, before the industry co-signs, there was a group of women who believed in the lab before the lab had a name.

The Icey Girls were DJ NABS' first chapter — the young ladies who proved that what was being built inside those sessions and performances was real. Over forty years later, that chapter still opens the book. Women's History Month isn't a campaign here. It's a catalog. 🖤
#SheLabledTheSound #InTheLab30 #WomensHistoryMonth #TheIceyGirls #DJNabs #WomenInMusic  #RnB #HipHop #NC #MusicHistory #WomensHistoryMonth2026