Summer Jam 2016: Dougie F, former stadium employee, becomes main event

Dougie F grew up in Orange and sold concessions at Giants Stadium before starting a career in music. On Sunday he'll be returning as a performer at Hot 97's hip-hop festival. Watch video

Until he was 19, Douglas Ford worked as a porter supplying the concession stands at Giants Stadium. When he left the job, he said he would only come back to the venue under one condition.

He would return, he said, if he could perform at Summer Jam, the region's biggest annual hip-hop festival.

Ford recently called his mother, who still works at what is now MetLife Stadium as a foodservice supervisor, to tell her to take a day off. He would be back this Sunday, he said, and not in the stands. You might say he did that bit on purpose. 

"On Purpose," the exhilarating dance song whose chorus approximates that sentiment -- switch out "bit" for the similar-sounding expletive -- is the name of Ford's hit song. Performing as Dougie F, the Orange-bred artist has made his name off being a purveyor of party music steeped in Jersey Club, the body-shaking sound born in Essex County that has been conquering global dance floors for years. 

In the genre-bending tradition of artists like Paterson's Fetty Wap, Ford, now 25, sings but he can rap, too. In 2014, an impromptu freestyle session at Hot 97, the radio station that has hosted the annual hip-hop fete in East Rutherford since 1994 -- when Queen Latifah and A Tribe Called Quest were top acts -- demonstrated that he is never without a verse at the ready. Now Ford is among the startup talents on the bill at Summer Jam's festival stage, the show before the show at the Bergen County festival devoted to the year's biggest radio acts in hip-hop and R&B. Last year, the pre-show featured Fetty Wap just months before his debut album debuted at No. 1.

Dougie F: the party-rocker storyteller. (Courtesy Dougie F/Stragg Records)
 

The significance of the show is not lost Ford, who last worked the festival when Kanye West was a headliner. 

"Summer Jam is huge, being from Jersey, it being in our backyard," he says, preparing for his big moment at his apartment in Jersey City. The onetime stadium worker has been busy -- he's fresh off a tour of the U.S. and Canada as a supporting act for Houston artist Travis Scott, who played the same festival stage in 2015 and is a Summer Jam headliner this year. 

TT Torrez, music director and on-air personality at Hot 97, asked Ford if he would join the festival lineup after he performed at showcases hosted by the station. 

"I just fell in love with his music," she says. "I love how he engaged the crowd." She says "Birthday," Ford's latest song in the station's rotation, maintains the Jersey Club vibe. "It's fun. It's easy to dance to. It's not a complicated record." 

Ford grew up in Orange's 108 Projects living with his mother, younger sister and older brother Akili, a battle rapper who was always freestyling. Hip-hop and all its energetic lyricism was never far from his mind. He watched with wide eyes a VHS tape of his father, who lived nearby, opening for East Orange's Naughty By Nature. But music wasn't his first impulse.

"I didn't know I could make music until I was in college," he says.

The first in his family to attend college, Ford played basketball in high school and majored in mass communication at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Va., where his roommate was a budding producer who tinkered with beats until the wee hours of the night. Ford, a fan of Kanye West, Drake and the storytelling of the North Carolina rapper J. Cole, would craft lyrics to go over the tracks and ended up making a name for himself in the college scene, eventually opening for rappers Rick Ross and Jadakiss at the university's homecoming concert. 

"I knew I could tell a story," he says, and the college party culture provided plenty of inspiration. His earliest club banger was the 2010 track "One Cup," a party soundtrack with a Jersey Club beat ("All I need is one cup/bartender fill it up").

"In my head I wanted to be an artist," Ford says. He left school and went to work for FedEx.

"I hated it," he says. "It was good money but I couldn't do it." Through a mutual friend, he met studio engineer Bilal "Bizzy" Joseph, and they started the independent label Stragg Records.

Ford enjoyed his first widespread exposure in 2014 when EDM (electronic dance music) maestro Diplo noticed "Back Up On It," his party track with DJ Fire -- now Sean Will -- on SoundCloud.

"I didn't even know who Diplo was," Ford says. "I just see this verified guy (on Twitter) playing in front of millions of people on YouTube." He now compares the producer's "co-sign" to the moment when Kanye West brought Fetty Wap out at a New York show and proclaimed "Trap Queen" his "favorite song out." 

Diplo released "Back Up On It" and an accompanying video through his Mad Decent label, feeding the ever-expanding appetite for Jersey Club among fans in the United States and Europe, ensuring Ford would be heard on radio in New York as well as BBC radio in London.

"There's kids out there that don't know what it is," he says of the local genre. "It's just music to them." But something was connecting. "The stars aligned and we made it happen," he says. Suddenly 90,000 plays became 2 million, and Ford found himself playing a huge festival in Coney Island -- wearing a Devils jersey with his name on the back, naturally. 

In 2015, Stragg released Ford's mixtape "Block Party." His next success arrived in the form of a brush with the mainstream. Party rapper Pitbull heard "On Purpose" and wanted to buy the song. In an effort to make more inroads as an artist, Ford instead collaborated with him for a remix. The beat, which paid homage to '90s dance, was initially crafted by the producer DVLP and polished by production duo 40 Cobras. The song made it to No. 35 on the Billboard rhythmic chart this year, catapulting the Orange performer back onto Hot 97.

Dougie F has toured with Travis Scott, another Summer Jam artist. (Courtesy Dougie F/Stragg Records)
 

Both the track's lyrics and the sound embrace the freewheeling feeling of a club night -- and how the fallout affects a relationship. ("Left my phone unlocked that night/I did that [expletive] on purpose. I ain't come back home last night/I did that [expletive] on purpose.")

A black-and-white video for the song, released early this year and conceived after the triumph of marriage equality, follows one half of a lesbian couple on a night out, sans partner. 

"I wanted to have an international look to it," Ford says. He's played shows with English emcee Skepta and Louisville's Bryson Tiller, another Summer Jam artist. On June 17, he will perform at GameChangerWorld in Howell before touring the U.S. with the Canadian rapper Belly, who has collaborated with The Weeknd and is signed to Roc Nation. 

Ford is hoping to parlay his success with club hits "Back Up On It" and "On Purpose" into more attention for other songs including "Birthday," a track from his 2015 mixtape.

"It has a commercial appeal but it can be played in clubs," he says. 

Ford is currently working with Orange producer Lurtz Olivier -- an acquaintance from his school days -- and Los Angeles-based producer Dez Wright, who was drawn in after seeing a video of him freestyle on Hot 97. Wright says he's trying to put a fresh spin on the usual Jersey Club dynamic -- what you might call "New Jersey," he says. 

"He never gave up," Olivier says of Ford, even when he had to sleep in cars to pay for studio time. "You could already see that he could be something great." 

Ford's mother, Felicia Tate, is getting ready to see her son take the Summer Jam stage alongside other upstarts like Chicago's Chance the Rapper, Brooklyn's Desiigner ("Panda") and Los Angeles-based Post Malone ("White Iverson"). She never expected her youngest son to be the one known for his music. But it's fitting that he plans to wear a vintage New Jersey Nets jersey.

"I thought Doug would be on the basketball court," she says, harking back to the days when her son played for St. Mary High School in Rutherford. 

"She believed since day one," Ford says of his mother. "She'll hear me on the radio, she'll tear up." He hopes he can keep the party going for summers to come.

"We have a window open now," he says. "Let's pry it open and get through it."