‘Wild Thing’ Was Made for $400: The Matt Dike Story Behind Hip-Hop’s First Pop Conquest

Peter Relic's new book Bust a Move: Matt Dike, Delicious Vinyl, and the Hip-Hop Hits that First Conquered Pop opens on Aug. 13, 1989, with Tone Loc headlining a sold-out Forum in Inglewood, California — and ends the section with a mooning. Published by Citadel Press, an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp., the book reconstructs how a $5,000 loan became nearly ten million records sold worldwide in eighteen months.

The excerpt centers on the Club MTV Live Tour stop at the Fabulous Forum, where 18,000 fans watched Tone Loc get stuck inside a giant prop bottle labeled FUNKY COLD MEDINA. Two onlookers passed a flask of Jack Daniel's. One gasped: "Oh my god, this is so Spinal Tap!" The other asked: "Is this supposed to happen?" Relic's answer is blunt: no. Not the malfunction, not the prop, and not Los Angeles rap beating New York to the top of the pop charts.

Who was Matt Dike?

Dike was a charismatic Los Angeles producer and nightclub DJ who cofounded Delicious Vinyl with fellow DJ Michael Ross. Two years before the Forum show, the pair worked a primitive drum machine in a grungy Hollywood apartment. They recorded Tone Loc — born Anthony Smith — pressed a few hundred 12-inches, and hawked them at swap meets.

"The fact that those indelible hits — as well as Beastie Boys' classic album 'Paul's Boutique' — were created in Matt Dike's dusty, second floor apartment using patched-together equipment makes this one of the great DIY success stories in music history," Relic, a Rolling Stone and Vibe contributor, said. "I had no idea how truly extraordinary this story would be going into it, never mind how the mystery of Matt Dike would drive my entire investigation."

The mystery is real. As Delicious Vinyl rose, Dike was offered work with Aerosmith and Brian Wilson. Instead, he disappeared. "All I had was his phone number, and the knowledge that Matt had not given an in-person interview to the press since 1990," Relic writes.

What did the Forum show prove?

The economics were improbable. "Wild Thing" was recorded on a patched-together tape machine in Dike's apartment, built on samples of a failed, decade-old Van Halen single. Its video cost barely $400. That track closed the Forum set as the year's hottest jam.

The Los Angeles Times sent Jonathan Gold, the future Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Weekly food critic, then on the music beat. He singled out Tone Loc: "In only a few months, the good-natured rapper seems to have made the transition to headlining a sold-out Forum with astonishing ease. The beats, kind of distorted with the other Club MTV performers, sounded richer and funkier played really loud, as if they were supposed to be that way." Gold also praised "that voice — whiskey-warm, rasping, insinuating, funny — is the best instrument in rap."

The takeaway in plain words: hip-hop crossed over not through industry machinery but through two DJs, a drum machine and $5,000. Relic's book arrives from Citadel Press in 2026, promising the first full account of a producer who chose vanishing over Aerosmith.