My first encounter with Sami Ibrahim was a complete accident. My original plans for the day were to make a quick stop by sQecial Media to grab a small gift for my girlfriend, when I caught a glimpse at the open door leading to the building’s basement. I had heard about the hip-hop and soul-oriented record store that shared its building space with sQecial and the Korean restaurant next door, but I always made my trips to CD Central and sQecial in between my late morning classes, so I was never late enough to catch Sami’s shop opening up at 2PM. Except for this fateful day. The sounds of the instrumental to the Wu-Tang Clan’s iconic hit single “C.R.E.A.M” hovered up the staircase, enticing me like the fragrance of a freshly-baked pie on a windowsill may attract a mischievous cartoon animal. I froze in my tracks and realized, within my heart (and within my wallet), that today was the day I was going to go down those stairs and spend a lot of money.
When I first entered The Album, I was greeted with a big friendly grin and a dap by perhaps the nicest individual in the world that was ever on the other side of a cash register, Sami Ibrahim. Right off the bat, he greeted me and made me feel welcome to his store in a way that just felt so genuine, nothing like those canned robotic niceties you get served with at places like Chick-Fil-a. I felt seen. I told him I was new to his store, but a big fan of hip-hop, and Sami gave me some of his backstory, along with some very detailed personal music recommendations of his. In an era of depersonalized and digitized self-checkout stores where you could do laps around the aisles for hours without anyone even acknowledging your existence, stores like The Album are the definition of rare gems. Once you meet Sami, you know him, and he knows you. Everytime you come back in, he’ll greet you like an old friend. He will remember your name, and, arguably even better, he will remember your favorite artists and favorite genres, and is always jumping at the chance to special order your favorite tunes to the shop for you.
In the course of some of our conversations that we had while I was browsing through his shop, Sami told me that he and Tommy Mizla (of WRFL’s Old School Hip-Hop show) used to be roommates when they both went to UK together in the ‘90s. However, I didn’t know that Sami used to host his very own hip-hop show on WRFL until I saw his name in a super-old RiFLe program guide. Having just finished up my interview with Tommy Mizla himself (which you should definitely go read if you end up enjoying this one), I knew that I wanted to reach out to Sami and chronicle his story, in order to make our grand portrait of WRFL and its history just a little bit more more detailed.
So, on the evening of Thursday, July 24, 2025, I walked over to The Album and asked Sami if he wanted to do an interview with me. I apologized for my forwardness, and assured him that we could schedule out a good timeframe to do the interview, perhaps when he wasn’t singlehandedly managing his business. He just smiled and said, “Let’s do it right now.” I felt a surge of admiration come on for his willingness to put up with my shit, and we carried out an (in my opinion) amazing and incredibly enlightening interview right across the register, stopping at occasional intervals so he could help whatever customers required assistance.
Author’s note: This interview has been edited and paraphrased at certain points for the sake of brevity and clarity. My questions will be labeled as CJ and Sami’s answers will be labeled as SI. This is not an endorsement of The Album nor an official statement on behalf of WRFL itself, but rather the personal opinions and life experience of the interviewer and the interviewee respectively.
CJ: Hi Sami! Thanks again for doing this. It really means a lot. So could you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself?
SI: Yeah, no problem! My name is Sami Ibrahim. I’m the owner of my own record store called The Album on 371 South Limestone Street. I went to UK back in ‘92 after finishing at Henry Clay High School. I was born in Chicago originally. I got a wife, three kids, four cats, and I love music, as you can tell, but I also like travelling and collecting hip-hop cassette tapes, and I’m sadly addicted to YouTube.
CJ: How’d you end up living in Lexington?
SI: We moved overseas to Kuwait when I was a kid after my father got a job in the oil industry, and we lived there for ten years. Then we moved back to Chicago for a few months before my older brother started going to UK. So I wound up transferring and going to Henry Clay, then to UK. So both of my brothers ended up going to UK along with me!
CJ: When did you start getting involved with WRFL, and what kind of stuff did you do while you were involved with the station?
SI: I worked at WRFL from ‘95 to ‘99. At first I was the assistant to the music director, then I became the hip-hop music director, and then finally I became the actual music director. I also had a hip-hop show called Street Intellect. It was a nighttime show, I think it was like… from 9PM to midnight, or from like 11PM to 2AM. It kind of changed. You know?
CJ: Awesome, awesome. So did you get started with this place during your time at the station or was that a post-graduation project of yours?
SI: That was after WRFL. I first opened up my own shop in 1999.
CJ: Oh, cool, was that here?
SI: This is actually the second location. The first location was called Sami’s Music, and we opened up in January of 1999 right over where the Local Taco is. After I graduated from UK and left WRFL, I got some money for a loan—I forgot how much, maybe $10,000 or so—and I opened up my own store. That was my first location, and we were there for five years. But rent got really outrageous, and the landlord over there was really greedy, so we moved to this spot in 2005. sQecial Media is our landlord now. They’re awesome. Good people.
CJ: So, you know, as someone who’s also really big into hip-hop, I know, like, everyone has their story of how they got into it, how they discovered this amazing genre. And I was wondering what yours was.
SI: So mine started back in the ‘80s, when we were living in Kuwait. My teenage years. There was this store downtown [in the city of Salmiya, Kuwait] called Swan Lake, and they had a bunch of hip-hop tapes. So I would go there and buy cassettes in the ‘80s. I remember buying like LL Cool J albums, stuff like that, and the tapes were only three bucks. So I would go down there to buy a cassette like once a week.
Then we moved back to the States, and ended up living in Lexington, like I told you. There was a new radio station in town called U-102 [officially known at the time as WCKU-FM, now known as WLTO, aka HOT 102.5 FM]. U-102 would play like a top five, or a top ten of all the new hip-hop songs and I would record it off from the radio to blank tapes, yeah. And I would make my own tapes to listen to. So mostly like radio and stuff like that. And then Yo! MTV Raps was really big like in ‘90, ‘91. So I would watch the videos and bump the radio, and it eventually got me really big into collecting.
In ‘91, I found a place called Cut Corner Records, which is where CD Central is now. And it would have like, all the stuff I like, y’know. All the hip-hop stuff. They had a bunch of used CDs. So I would go there and buy stuff from them. Bought my first vinyl there, a 12-inch single by Too $hort. By ‘94 I was a full-on collector. They actually offered me a job because I would go there almost every day and buy something. Also, the UK bookstore across the street used to sell hip-hop tapes and reggae tapes.
CJ: Oh shoot, really?
SI: Yeah, yeah, new releases and stuff. So I would go there and buy, like, Bob Marley cassettes and stuff. So then I worked for Cut Corner (then CD Central after Cut Corner closed) for four years, and that gave me the chance to buy a lot of stuff, really build my collection. And they would give me some of the stuff that they got in the mail from the record companies, like free CDs and stuff.
Also, while I was working for WRFL, we got a lot of free stuff too. Like the record companies would send the station extra copies, and they’d even put my name on it like: “For Sami,” like an extra copy for me to listen to and keep for myself! So, say the Roots would come out with an album. They would send four copies to the station. They would send a radio station copy, a clean copy for the DJs on the day shift, a copy for the music director, then sometimes maybe one for like a giveaway or something. So all the major labels would send at least two CDs and two vinyl. Minimum. Sometimes four and four. Sometimes they’d keep sending them, like they just sent out so much promo back in the day. Yeah, so you know, we had so much music. Sometimes they would send out a whole box of promo copies. And all the station would really need is a couple CDs and a couple of records. So we’d give the rest of it away to the staff to take home. After about three years I personally accumulated 1,500 CDs, maybe a couple hundred records. So yeah. I got really into hip-hop because of all the collecting I ended up doing, for sure.
CJ: That is such an amazing story! Now, I have a very cliche question to ask, but I think it’s important for this interview—for the sake of establishing your taste at least. If you had to make a list, like, top five artists of all time, dead or alive, who are you going with?
SI: Yeah, no, that’s easy.
[Sami stops to think for a second, scratching his chin]
SI: But not in any order though, right?
CJ: No order.
SI [visibly pleased]: Okay. For favorites I would have to say: MF DOOM (rest in peace), Big L (rest in peace), Biggie (rest in peace), Nas, Wu-Tang, and let’s throw Nirvana in there too. Now I like other people too. Kendrick, absolutely. And I like Guns and Roses and Alice in Chains and Nujabes too. That’s just the like, top of my head, you know. De La Soul, Black Star, Madlib, of course.
CJ: Your answers to that question, and just everything about this store demonstrates that you clearly have a fantastic taste in music. I was wondering, like, how do you keep up with new releases?
SI: There’s so much out there, it can be really tough to keep up, but there are ways. For example, all the music that we order from our distributors. We get weekly and monthly updates on new releases and stuff like that, so that makes it easy to stay up-to-date with the latest in the scene. But then, customers come through and ask me for things that I’ve never even heard of sometimes. And that’s how I learn about some bands that I’ve never checked out before.
CJ: Okay, so next question, which you may have touched on a little bit already, but I just wanted to know the backstory of how you first got interested in being a DJ on WRFL. Anything you can tell us about that?
SI: Yeah, that’s a pretty cool story, actually. It was my freshman year, and I was in a biology class, and this girl next to me was being kinda flirty. After class was over, she came up to me and said “Hey, do you wanna walk with me to the student center and get some food?”
I lived off campus, so normally I would just go home and like, eat a hot dog or something. But I was like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll walk with you!”
I wasn’t really that hungry, but we were walking together, and she seemed pretty into me, all giggly and chatty and stuff. But right before we walked into the student center, WRFL had this big table right outside, and this guy, Todd Hyatt, was sitting there. I think he was a production manager. Or something like that. He was recruiting students to come apply for WRFL. So we walked past him, and I was kind of looking, and he was like, “Hey, would you like to fill out a form?”
I forgot her name, but I asked the girl I was with if she cared if I stopped and checked it out. She was like “I don’t care. Go ahead. I’ll just go and get some food myself.”
So then she left and I filled out this form, and they told me to come back the next day so I could get familiar with the radio station and everything and get trained. So that’s what happened. It was just a big coincidence. I just happened to be walking by. And yeah, it turns out that the girl was pretty mad. She didn’t really talk to me after that. If I saw her in class, she’d just look away. But hey. It worked out in the end.
CJ: A lot of shows on WRFL go through a lot of evolutions over the course of their time on the air, y’know, whether that be in sound or identity. When you finally got a show, was it pretty consistent with sound and theming? Or did it kind of change over time?
SI: Well, what happened was when I first joined WRFL, there wasn’t really a block show available. There were only spots for their fill-in shows, so if you wanted to play a block show you had to wait to fill in for someone who needed it covered. So I played as a General Format show for months. Yeah. But then eventually, what happened was the hip-hop show [aka The Fresh Test]’s DJ at the time—his DJ name was DJ Jughead Suede but his real name was Park Picket—started dating this lady, and I guess he needed more time for school… and the lady. So he would leave his hip-hop show open for people to sign up to cover. So since I was really into hip-hop, I was like, oh, I’ll cover it for you, I’ll do it!
So I did it for a few months. Sometimes I would do it like, weekly. It almost became mine. He was just not coming in. And, I think after that semester was over, I was approached and asked if I wanted to take over his block show. And I said yes. So then I became the official hip-hop DJ for WRFL, and started hosting Street Intellect. It was three hours of just hip-hop. And I would still sub for other people sometimes. I’d do a blues show, a jazz show, whatever people needed me to. I filled in for the metal show one time and that was tough. I didn’t know much about metal, so I played some terrible stuff.
But yeah, once I started doing the 11PM-2AM spot, that was pretty much my show for the next three years, I’d say.
CJ: Everyone at WRFL has their own style as far as actually playing music goes. Some people play exclusively on vinyl, some folks like to stick to CDs, and some people are strictly digital. I’m curious, when you hosted Street Intellect, how exactly did you perform your show?
SI: It was mainly the 12-inch singles that we’d get in the mail, the ones with clean versions on the B-sides, which we would always need. You know how hip-hop records are. So yeah, it was kind of tough before midnight. We had to keep it clean until after midnight, which was Safe Harbor [the timeframe in which broadcasters can play explicit material], but yeah I would usually start with the clean 12-inches that we got from the record labels, and you know, I would have like four or five new ones every week. Sometimes I’d have CD singles with instrumentals and radio edits to use too. So I’d play those, and then I would play something that people have missed out on those past few weeks, just for the first hour. And then from midnight to 6AM, we could do more curse words and stuff like that. So I played more CDs, regular full album vinyl, and cassettes too. We had it all. We had two turntables, so there were always two records spinning on my show. We had a CD player and a cassette player, too, but we all mostly stuck to the vinyl and CDs. Mostly.
[At this point in the interview, Sami gets some customers to ring up, so we take a quick break from the interview and I sort of hover around the counter awkwardly…]
CJ: Whether we admit it or not, a lot of us DJs definitely have our favorites when it comes to the artists we play on our show. Were there any artists that you found yourself keeping in consistent rotation on your show?
SI: I definitely played a lot of Wu-Tang, yeah. A lot of Ice-T, too. And underground east coast hip-hop too, like Biggie, Black Moon, Big L. And then I got into more of a west coast g-funk vibe after I listened to The Chronic, for sure. I was always playing a lot of Dr. Dre and gangsta rap after midnight, of course. And all the other classic groups from back then like Outkast and Public Enemy. You know. Gang Starr, KMD. I played them a lot. Alkaholiks, De La Soul, lots of Cypress Hill. Cypress Hill, man. Oh my God, they were so big. We had some KRS-One too. Stuff like that.
CJ: So how long did your show last? And what was behind your decision to hang it up? Were you just ready to move on with your life?
SI: Oh, well, when I first joined WRFL, there were already DJs doing the hip-hop show, back when it was called the Fresh Test. The show had been established already for about three years or something like that. So when I took it over in the mid ‘90s, I ran with it ‘til around ‘99, and the reason I had to quit the show was because I opened up my shop and I couldn’t keep up with the radio stations and the new releases and all the stuff like that. So one of my friends named Sharif took over the show in 2000 and changed the name from Street Intellect to The Black Fist. Sharif was doing it from 2000 to 2003 or 2004 and then, another friend of ours Carlos, who was going to UK in ‘05 ended up taking over the show. So anyways. It was just time to move on, y’know? There was new blood, and I felt like my show was getting stale compared to the newer DJs, like I was just playing the same old stuff over and over. So it was time for something new.
CJ: I don’t know if you give yourself this much credit, but a lot of people say that you helped keep hip-hop alive in Lexington during the ‘90s. Do you think that’s accurate?
SI: Damn, that’s a big thing. Wow. That’s beautiful, man. I hear that a lot, but you know, I was just doing what I love. It just happened that the hip-hop show was really popular at the time. I think there was a night I was playing where WRFL was the number one most-listened to station in Lexington that night. We beat all the big radio stations with commercials like WKQ and all the big names. The ratings were so high and there were so many people calling and tuning in and listening. It was a super popular show. But I also attribute that to the fact that hip-hop was blowing up. There was a lot of good hip-hop music coming out. I was there at the right time, so really I was just a vessel. I was playing what came out and people loved to hear the new songs from cats like Biggie, Big L, Wu-Tang, Outkast, the Pharcyde, stuff like that. I just played that and people loved it because you really couldn’t hear it anywhere else. And yeah, I really soldiered for the show and for hip-hop music in general at WRFL. I tried to pressure the music director to put hip-hop into the playbox because it was always just rock, jazz, indie rock in there.
CJ: I’m still doing that, man. Hip-hop is so underrepresented, everywhere you go, even in alternative scenes like WRFL. That’s why what you’ve done is so special.
SI: Yeah, like we were getting so much clean and edited hip-hop music, and I was fighting so hard for it to be in the playbox. Like at least three or four titles, I was always saying. So finally, they cracked and we got some hip-hop albums in the general playbox. It started out with like one or two and then it grew from there.
But WRFL also sent us to New York for panels to, y’know, put WRFL and Lexington on the map as far as the national music scene and stuff like that. So that was good. At the same time, I was DJing, I did gigs on campus, and I worked at Cut Corner. Like I said, CD Central now, of course. And so a lot of people that would listen to the show would come to Cut Corner and buy what I played, because it was always the newest hottest releases and stuff like that. So that helped the small businesses spread the word. And in ‘99, I realized that we don’t have a hip-hop shop in Kentucky at all.
CJ: I’ve still never been anywhere like this in Kentucky.
SI: Right? There’s still no hip-hop shops. But especially back then, there was nobody selling hip-hop vinyl in general. There were a couple places in Louisville that had a section for it. But other than that, you would have to go to Cut Corner and special order A Tribe Called Quest album or special order a Beastie Boys album. Like they wouldn’t ever have it on hand, you know? They just never ordered it. And I saw the demand. So I was like “I’m just gonna do a hip-hop shop.” That’s where it all started. January ‘99. It was just like, everything I had in there, I would say… 90% of the vinyl was hip-hop, and 90% of the CDs was hip-hop. We had a small rock section. One crate full of rock vinyl, and a couple stacks of rock CDs. Everything else was hip-hop. And people were like “Are you sure you wanna do this? I mean, you’re not gonna sell Jimi Hendrix or anything like that?”
I was like, “You can find that anywhere, man, through the mall, the peddler’s mall, CD Central, anywhere.” I wanted hip-hop, y’know? So I stuck with it up until 2005, and I mean, it was amazing. It was just like, we made so much money selling hip-hop, CDs and vinyl. And then I moved to this location in ‘05 and it continued on, but I noticed the trend starting to fade. I noticed that people weren’t buying vinyl anymore, they were buying CDs more, yeah. ‘05 and ‘06 were really tough for vinyl. So I started getting the new thing, which was hip-hop mixtapes. Yeah, those were huge. From like 2007 to like 2015, we were doing so many exclusive mixtapes. G-Unit mixtapes, DJ Clue, DJ-this, DJ-that. There were a lot of DJs. Everything was an underground mixtape. $5 mixtape CDs were selling like crazy. People were eating those up, and vinyl was still kind of selling, but not as much. Yeah. And so we kept with the mixtapes until they started dying out around 2015.
Then it was like, what’s the next thing, y’know? For a couple of years it was kind of stagnant. A little vinyl, a few mixtapes, some movies, this and that. Nothing was really ticking. Until Record Store Day really took off around 2016 or 2017-ish. Then vinyl had a big comeback. Records were suddenly just it again. So I went with it. I expanded the record section, that whole room there [Sami gestures to the expansive shelves of vinyl to our left]. First it was mostly hip-hop records, then I started getting some soul and jazz stuff. Rock started coming in because people would come in to special order rock records and other people would come in and sell me their used rock albums. So I was like, “Yeah, I’ll get some rock.” That was about the time when I started really diversifying, and now the shop has everything. Y’know, rock, country, classical, soundtracks, metal, all that. 2018 was also really good for vinyl. Like I said, Record Store Day brought in a ton of business here, so many people came in here for those exclusive vinyl records we had.
And then 2020 hit. The pandemic and stuff. Things went south, but around 2021, things started picking up again. I think 2022 was the peak for vinyl. And it’s been pretty groovy since then, man. Last year was a little downturn because of a lot of things. The wars that broke out, the presidential election, the economy. Everything went up. Housing, groceries. So last year, record sales went down for the first year in a while, and it affected some record labels enough to the extent that they raised the prices on us to buy vinyl from them. So it affected a lot of small businesses last year, and I know a lot of my friends that owned record stores that shut down because it was just too expensive. It was a money pit. Like all you gotta do is order forty new records a week from a distribution center and your bill is $1,500. And y’know, if you’re a small business, you’ve gotta sell that. You can’t just not spend $1,500 because on top of that you have your rent, you have your payroll, and you’ve got to have money for you to live, especially if it’s your only gig.
So… yeah. That’s not easy. Record prices went up. But things picked back up around November or December last year with the holidays, I guess. We noticed a lot of people who were coming in wanted T-shirts and vintage things, stuff like that. So we added the vintage room, which has been a good addition. We’ve got clothing now and it’s definitely helped. It has been a solid year so far, and it has been an above average summer. Last summer was brutal, honestly. Big losses every month. June, July, August, all losses. This year has been the opposite so far, so I hope it continues. It’s been good.
CJ: This next question is a kinda obvious one for you.
SI: What’s up?
CJ: How has, in your opinion, being involved with WRFL shaped your professional and personal skills, your ambitions for life and stuff? Do you feel like it’s changed you significantly as a person?
SI: Oh, man. The best things that ever happened to me in Lexington was WRFL and my wife, man. Best thing, bro. The connections you make? The friends you make? I made some friends here back in ‘92 and we still talk. 23 years later or something. We’re still friends. Also, you learn a lot about music, which is good in the real world, y’know. You can relate to people. Someone can come in looking for Violent Femmes, Iggy Pop, E-40. I knew who all of them are because of WRFL. I learned a lot there. Reviewing records, doing CD reviews, subbing for people playing different genres. I learned a lot about blues, metal and jazz.
CJ: That would definitely help you run a record store.
SI: Yes, yes, the knowledge, y’know, you soak all that up. You make connections with customers, with people that last for years. First those people are your customers. Then they become your friends. And you grow from there. So that’s huge. I highly recommend for anyone who likes music to join WRFL for a couple years and make some friends, learn about music, work for a record store, see if that’s what they wanna do, y’know?
CJ: Do you have any standout memories from your time as a DJ?
[Sami begins to scratch his chin again, staring wistfully off into the distance. He is lost in thought for a moment.]
SI [as mysteriously as possible]: There are some. Those are stories I can’t tell you. Raunchy ones, bro.
CJ [as understandingly as possible]: Naturally, naturally.
SI: We used to have staff meetings, though, those were pretty fun. And the WRFL concerts we did were cool. We really did a lot of stuff. Just being there was a good time. Some of the DJs used to kick it at Tally-Ho across the street a bunch. That was nice.
CJ: I have one last question. It’s kind of a big one, though.
SI: Yeah, go for it!
CJ: If you wanted fellow music lovers of Lexington and DJs of the future to remember a few things about you, your show, and what music means to you, what would that be, you think?
SI: Oh, just that we connected, that we had a good time with some good music and that it was all real. I don’t know. I hope that they’ll be able to say that I was helpful with finding music, with my taste, and that I was a good friend and listener and that I influenced everybody in a good way, y’know?
[After the interview concluded, Sami and I talked about WRFL and hip-hop for a little bit longer. Eventually, the topic turned to new music. A few minutes later, I left his store with a cassette tape of “Nosthaigia” by French-German beatmaker Onra, an instrumental hip-hop record built entirely with samples from traditional music of Thailand. It was a personalized recommendation from Sami. He told me that I would love it, and he guessed right.]