One Year Later… March 16, 2020: After A Stressful Day, D-Nice Launches Club Quarantine

(Photo by John Parra/Getty Image –
D-Nice launched his Club Quarantine on March 16 after a rough night. A year later he’s up to 2.6 million followers and counting with superstars and legends constantly stopping by to get their swerve on. Here performing at 1/ST Preakness Home Drive-InField Fest benefiting First Responders Children’s Foundation at Gulfstream Park on May 16, 2020 in Hallandale, Florida.

On the night of March 15 I’m sitting in a cigar bar, because I went live for the first time on the 16th. The night of the 15th we were quarantined. You had to be home by midnight. I went to dinner. I was stressed out because I wasn’t prepared for a pandemic because I was never home. So I had no toilet paper. I had nothing. Everything was gone. I had no food. I literally had to buy canned goods because people had broken into – I live in downtown Los Angeles – people had broken into all of the stores, all of the supermarkets. Because remember, everyone was just going crazy. There was no food, no paper towels, nothing. There’s nothing in there.

And I was stressed and I was like, “All right, I’m going to go to dinner. And I’m going to go and meet up with my buddies and smoke a cigar since this is going to be the last time that we see each other,” for what? They said, three weeks, two or three weeks, whatever that was. I went to Avra in Beverly Hills.

After dinner, I went to the cigar spot and there were a few of my friends. One of my buddies is in marketing. One is an ex-NBA player, Jimmy Jackson. He’s an analyst now. It was about four of us. And we were sitting there and we were all trying to figure out what to do. Everyone talked about what they were going to do. And I was like, “Hey, there’s this feature on Instagram where you can go live. So I think I’m just going to go live.” In 2007, I started a web series called True Hip Hop Stories, where I would interview my old school hip hop friends. Like Heavy D. I did B-Real from Cypress Hill. I just wanted people to tell the story behind the making of one song. So “How I Could Just Kill a Man” from Cypress Hill or Heavy D, I think it was “The Overweight Lovers In the House.” Also Kwame, he was the first one that I did and then Master Ace and a bunch of my old school hip-hop friends.

So what I decided in 2020 was that I was going to revisit that with Instagram Live, which I had tried out at the Essence Festival in 2019. They had a live feature and no one was really using it. So I called Big Daddy Kane up. I called up Black Thought from The Roots, like, “Hey, I’m going to do this on Instagram. There’s a live feature. All you got to do is, just when I’m live, just click into it.”

And it was fun. It had nothing to do with DJing. And it had everything to do with telling stories. When I woke up the next morning, I was sitting on my bed and I’ll be honest with you, I was extremely sad. I was really sad. It really hit me that all of our gigs were being canceled. I was booked for Essence Fest. I was booked for South by Southwest gigs. I had Mind The Music week gigs. I had Miami Music Week gigs. I was opening for Jill Scott. Live Nation booked me for four dates to open for her in June. Everything was being canceled and I’m like, “Wait. So we’re in March right now and they’re already canceling the June dates?” I was like every other artist, like, “Wow. They’re canceling in June and July. Man, this thing is going on longer than what they’re telling us.” And I started to get nervous. I have kids in school who I take care of, I take care of my mom. And I was like, “Man, this is scary.” Who knows when we will get back?

So when I woke up that morning before I did my first D-Nice Live, I was sitting there and I was afraid. I was like, “Man, this is scary.” Like what do you do? All I wanted to do was to feel connected.

I was missing the music. I did 400,000 flight miles last year for DJing. So I was missing the music. So when I was sitting on the edge of my bed I started to tear up a bit, thinking about family, thinking about everything. Like, “Wait. What would potentially happen if this thing continues on for people?”

And I got up and I went into my kitchen. It was a kitchen where a center aisle separated the kitchen from the living room. So I was on the living room side and I sat my laptop at the edge of the counter, had a couple of tears, a little stressed out. Opened up my laptop and I sat my phone on my computer, opened up Instagram, and I just started playing music from my computer into the phone.