What is efn favorite drink?

Miami-based DJ EFN is the co-host of Drink Champs (alongside Noreaga), the founder of. DJ EFN talks about launching the "Drinks Champs" podcast with N. He is currently best known as the co-host (with the rapper Noreaga) of "Drink Champs," a weekly podcast carried by.

“Drink Champs” is one of the most popular music podcasts around, despite the episodes’ exorbitant length. Its success flows partly from its A-list guests, who are drawn from hip-hop history: Grandmaster Caz, Lil Wayne, Snoop Dogg. N.O.R.E. gets interviews that most people can’t. In November, Kanye West, amid intensifying rumors about his mental health, appeared on the show for more than three hours, talking about creativity, the paparazzi, his family, and criminal-justice reform. N.O.R.E. pressed him on politics—his relationship with Donald Trump—but also gave him room to riff on dinosaurs, the beauty of humans (“We are God’s ultimate iPhone,” West said), and which of his twenty-four Grammys he’s peed on. N.O.R.E. has been releasing records since the nineties, and his guests tend to shed their personae in his presence. After DMX’s death, in 2021, fans turned to his buoyantly happy “Drink Champs” appearance, where he cracks jokes and reminisces about his childhood dog.

The show began in 2016, several years after N.O.R.E. and his co-host, DJ EFN, did a program on Sirius XM. EFN, a longtime Miami promoter, producer, and mixtape d.j., balances N.O.R.E.’s tipsy zeal with a calming energy and basic, context-setting questions. At its best, the show recalls the nineties and early-two-thousands heyday of radio, when hip-hop stars would head to the nearest station to air grievances or set the record straight, in the few minutes available. Today, in the era of Instagram Live and YouTube, the tendency is to go long, share secrets, and let one’s guard down—things that artists such as N.O.R.E. rarely had the chance to do.

N.O.R.E. is well suited to the meandering rhythms of a podcast. He naturally speaks in an off-kilter purr but grows more animated as an episode progresses. He senses discomfort and defuses it; the show’s tone is somewhere between “Fresh Air” and “SMACK,” the two-thousands DVD series that featured uncensored artist interviews. And he knows how to draw out a story, delighting as a guest wriggles and swerves through an anecdote. In one episode, the rapper Ghostface Killah leans into his words as he shares a story of transporting the Delfonics, the seventies soul group, to a studio session—and getting into a shoot-out on the way there. In another, the singer T-Pain describes the time he spilled Hennessy on Beyoncé. N.O.R.E., in disbelief, keeps repeating fragments back to him, stressing how wild the moment must have been. “I’m so fuckin’ awkward, bro,” T-Pain says, laughing.

Many of the most successful podcasts exist in a state of permanent nostalgia. The past is fun to talk about; there’s always a movie or an album turning some nice round number. But hip-hop has long had an uneasy relationship with history. It has endured as a globally vital form precisely because it’s so forward-looking, each generation rendered irrelevant by the next. Like Verzuz, the song-battle Webcast in which artists compete to see who has the best back catalogue, “Drink Champs” is the rare successful attempt to celebrate the genre’s past without romanticizing it.

When N.O.R.E. began rapping under his original stage name, Noreaga, the industry was figuring out how to turn hyper-local tales of hustling and drug-dealing into the stuff of global stardom. There was a cocky sizzle to his voice, and his jagged delivery attested to the fact that he was raw, unpolished, grimy. “The War Report,” the 1997 début he released as half of Capone-N-Noreaga, stands as one of the best albums of the decade. But it took him years to realize that other artists were embellishing their tales, not just narrating experience. “I didn’t know how to exaggerate,” he tells the imposing Philadelphia rapper Beanie Sigel in one episode. Often, the most affecting material in “Drink Champs” involves N.O.R.E. and his guests recalling long-forgotten rivalries, brushes with danger. They are veterans of conflict, thankful to have survived.

The Sigel episode is particularly moving. Sigel’s voice is raspy and strained, the result of a 2014 shooting that led to lung damage. He’s had a tumultuous career—multiple prison sentences, a patchy relationship with Jay-Z, who once vouched for his character in court—and N.O.R.E. asks him difficult questions with a gentle, playful curiosity. “I’m a changed man,” Sigel says with a chuckle, as N.O.R.E. tries to pour him a shot of Japanese whiskey. Sigel enlists his cousin to drink on his behalf, and emanates a serenity that evaded him during his years as a bullying, street-loyal rapper. “I’m the perfect example of when keeping it real go wrong,” he says.

The episode feels cautionary but never moralistic. In its most mundane, digressive moments, “Drink Champs” becomes almost journalistic—an oral history of how the industry used to work, and of how young Black artists tried to figure things out as they went along. In 2017, N.O.R.E. hosted an interview with the Atlanta producer Jermaine Dupri, who has collaborated with Usher, Mariah Carey, and Destiny’s Child. At first, Dupri comes across the way he does in most interviews: cool and passive, even uninterested. But after a few hours—and one too many shots of a Chinese drink called tiger-bone wine—he’s convulsing in laughter, telling off-color stories about a trip to the Dominican Republic that he took with one of his protégés, the rapper Bow Wow. “I’ve seen so much, since I was twelve, that nobody ain’t ever seen,” Dupri says. “It’s crazy that you have to keep all this shit in your body. You gotta give it out.” N.O.R.E., by now extremely drunk, meets this moment of candor with his own confession: “I been holdin’ my pee” for more than an hour.

As N.O.R.E.’s career evolved, and he experienced success with the production duo the Neptunes, he adopted a goofier, more fun-loving approach, less committed to the glowering affect of the past. One of my favorite moments in his career came on “Invincible,” from the 2000 album “The Reunion,” when he rapped about having made a “half-ass” record the year before. It seemed a strange confession. But it was also a moment that had to do with ambivalence and disappointment, rather than pride or pain. It’s the kind of gray-area emotion, expressed with casual frankness, that emerges organically on “Drink Champs,” where friends and enemies talk for so long that they inevitably stumble onto the truth.

DJ EFN (born Eric Fernando Narciandi on May 28, 1975) is an American record label executive and DJ, based in Miami, who specializes in hip-hop. Since the early 1990s, operating most often under the banner of Crazy Hood Productions, EFN has worked in the hip-hop industry in a variety of capacities, including as a mixtape producer, album producer and A&R consultant, radio host, marketing and promotions specialist, clothing retailer, artist manager, and film producer. He is currently best known as the creator and co-host (with the rapper Noreaga) of "Drink Champs," a weekly podcast carried by Sean "Diddy" Combs's Revolt TV network.

Born Eric Fernando Narciandi in Los Angeles, California to parents of Cuban backgrounds, DJ EFN moved with his family to Miami, Florida in 1986. He graduated from Miami Sunset Senior High School in 1993, and received an Associate in Arts degree from Miami Dade College in 2002.

A fan of the mixtapes emanating from New York City, DJ EFN began producing mixtapes of his own in Miami. "There was no consistent mixtape DJ in Miami, no one who ever really played the music from Miami," he said in an interview with Julia Beverly of Ozone magazine. "Everybody listened to DJ Clue or Tony Touch. It was good music, but I didn't want to hear shouts to Brooklyn or the Bronx. I wanted to shout out Miami and help to put on the local cats."

EFN's first Crazy Hood mixtape was issued in 1993. During the next two decades he produced 42 volumes of the mixtape, featuring hip-hop artists such as Outkast, Redman, Capone-N-Noreaga, KRS-One, Wu-Tang Clan, Bun B, Ja Rule, Sean Paul, Joe Budden, Lil Jon, Ghostface Killah, Keith Murray, and David Banner.

EFN founded Miami's Crazy Sounds Record Pool in 1997 (it operated through 2007) and Hood DJs, an international coalition.

In 2002, DJ EFN was named the Best New Mixtape DJ at the 7th Annual Justo Awards. In 2003, he was named Best Mixtape DJ at the First Annual Miami Urban Music Awards.

The effectiveness of EFN's street promotion for his Crazy Hood mixtapes eventually attracted the attention of various national brands in search of help with their products in the Miami market. Founded in 1997, CHP Marketing and Promotions has numbered Tommy Boy Records, Slip-n-Slide Records, Loud Records, Epic Records, Coca-Cola, and Eckō Unltd. among its clients over the years. Between 2001 and 2004, Crazy Hood ran Def Jam Recordings's street teams in south Florida. Today, the firm counts Bad Boy Records, Ciroc Entertainment, Sean John, and YMCMB among their most consistent clients.

In 2002 EFN was named a member of Eckō Unltd.'s hip-hop dream team, a special feature of that year's edition of EA Sports' "Madden NFL" game. His teammates included De La Soul, Xzibit, and A Tribe Called Quest.

During the 1990s, EFN deejayed on local pirate radio stations and at the University of Miami's WVUM. Between 2009 and 2011, he teamed up with the rapper N.O.R.E. to host a satellite radio show for Sirius XM called "Militainment Crazy Raw Radio," a title that gave equal weight to N.O.R.E.'s Militainment brand, to Crazy Hood, and to 66 Raw, the channel on Sirius XM which carried the show. In 2015, EFN began hosting a weekly show called "OG Radio" for the Dash Radio digital broadcasting platform.

In 1997, with the opening of the Crazy Goods store in West Kendall, EFN ventured into the world of hip-hop clothing and retailing. It thrived until EFN shut it down in 2000, allowing him to concentrate more fully on his musical activities.

Under the aegis of Crazy Hood Productions, DJ EFN has long been active as an artist manager and label executive. In the 1990s, Crazy Hood managed and made records for Da Alliance (a/k/a Da All)) and Poetik Symbolz. Today the firm manages and records Da Alliance (of which he is a member), Garcia, Heckler, ¡Mayday!, and Wrekonize, as well as the producers Big Drain, Hazardis Soundz, and Beats-N-Da-Hood.

EFN was executive producer of Who's Crazy? by Da All, and Anti-Social and Life Unscripted by Garcia. He produced Norealilty by N.O.R.E., and performed A&R chores on Take Me to Your Leader and Believers by ¡Mayday!, The War Within by Wrekonize, Channel 10 by Capone-n-Noreaga, and Student of the Game by N.O.R.E.

In March 2015, EFN issued Another Time. Not a mixtape, but an album of all original music, the DJ has described it as "a passion project." It features production by DJ Premier, Buckwild, Nomadic Trackz, BeatsNdaHood, Hazardis Soundz, Miami Beat Wave, Nonms, The Guild, Big Drain and Matt Harris, and rapping by Bun B, Gunplay, Scarface, Talib Kweli, Redman, King Tee, Mc Eiht, Trick Daddy, Dead Prez, M.O.P., Denzel Curry, Inspectah Deck, Sizzla, Sean Price, Milk Dee, Killer Mike, Umar Bin Hassan, Juvenile and others. Jacob Katel, writing in Miami New Times, praised the album for matching "the best underground talent in America with some of the godfathers of the genre to make an indelible classic." Chosen as one of "The 15 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2015" by Ambrosia For Heads, EFN's work on Another Time was praised for deftly showing that "the walls and categories used to separate MCs due to age, era, region, and style are self-inflicted."

In collaboration with Miami-based Dre Films, EFN established EFN Visual Mixtapes in 2010, when it became clear that the artists with whom he was working needed music videos to promote their recordings. The firm proceeded to produce videos featuring ¡Mayday! Ras Kass, Gunplay, Tech N9ne, and N.O.R.E.

In 2012, doing business as the Crazy Hood Film Academy, EFN and Garcia produced their first feature film. A documentary account of the hip-hop scene in Cuba entitled "Coming Home," the film was named Best Documentary at The People's Film Festival in 2013. Q. Salazar, writing for The Hollywood Shuffle, described it as "a powerful film that displays the influence hip-hop has given a people who are oppressed and suppressed. The film also illustrates how hip-hop has given Cubans an avenue to express their pain, their struggles and their dreams."

"Coming Home (Cuba)" turned out to be the first in a series of documentary films devoted to local hip-hop culture in countries other than the United States. It was followed in 2014 by "Coming Home: Peru" and "Coming Home: Haiti." Writing about the series for atlantablackstar.com, Jasmine Nelson suggested, "Much like Anthony Bourdain, EFN brings people to unlikely places, exposing them to different cultures, but in this case through the eyes of hip-hop rather than food." The series has found a home on Revolt, the TV network founded by Sean Combs.

Crazy Hood Film Academy has also become involved with short theatrical films. In 2014, the firm produced "Avaricious," a film written and directed by Michael Garcia. The next year Crazy Hood produced "Siblings," also directed by Garcia.

EFN began hosting the "Drink Champs" podcast with the rapper N.O.R.E. in March 2016. "Special guests like 50 Cent and Rick Ross come on, stories about the old and new days of hip-hop are exchanged, and drinks are consumed," noted Variety magazine's Oriana Schwindt. "The podcast now has more than five million listens per month." Since November 2016, the show has been carried on Revolt.