JUSTO FAISON
THE ADVOCATE
Before anyone in the industry would say it out loud, Justo Faison said mixtape DJs mattered. In 1995, working out of his own pocket and leaning on relationships he'd built as a label executive, he founded Justo's Mixtape Awards — the first and only national awards honoring the DJs who were breaking records from their bedrooms while the industry tried to shut them down.
He didn't do it for a cut. He did it because the DJ is the backbone of the culture and nobody was saying so.
WHAT HE BUILT
Justo's Mixtape Awards ran for a decade and became a staple of hip-hop culture. Clue, Kay Slay, Green Lantern, Envy, Ron G, Tony Touch, Doo Wop, Mister Cee — the roll call of DJs he recognized reads like the history of the mixtape era itself. Careers turned on that recognition. Record deals followed it.
He held positions at Nervous, Atlantic, and Epic, and used that leverage to open doors for the people he called hip-hop's underdogs. In March 2005, he released *Justo Presents: The Mixtape Documentary* on DVD — mixtape culture, documented on physical media, by the man who championed it.
Two months later, he was gone.
THE LOSS
On May 14, 2005, Justo Faison died in a car accident outside Richmond, Virginia. He was 36 years old. The mixtape community lost the one person who had spent a decade insisting it deserved to be taken seriously
WHY THIS ARCHIVE EXISTS
This archive preserves the physical artifacts of the mixtape and DVD era — the tapes, the discs, the artwork, the documentation — from the last generation of hip-hop that lived on physical media and could actually be lost.
That mission started with Justo. He was the first person to say this culture was worth honoring while it was still happening. Everything preserved here stands on what he built.
*We're not collecting memorabilia. We're preserving history.
HIS LEGACY CONTINUES
The Mixtape Museum, founded by Regan Sommer McCoy, continues Justo's work as a research and archival institution. Learn more at mixtapemuseum.org.
PUBLIC RECORD — DOCUMENTED ERA CONTENT
The following clips are publicly available on YouTube and are included here for historical reference only. They represent a fraction of what the archive holds.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER
This is an independent historical archive documenting the mixtape era. This page is a tribute and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the estate of Justo Faison, Justo's Mixtape Awards, or the Mixtape Museum. All names are used for historical identification purposes only.