Super Producers – A Double Edged Sword

The super producer. The super producer is one who is well known for his aptitude at creating dope beats and can usually be heard on nearly every album that comes out during the window in which his or her beats are considered hot. This is great for the producer, but troublesome for Hip-Hop. There’s an old saying that too many cooks spoil the broth and that’s exactly what’s going on with rap albums today thanks to the advent of, yup, you know where I’m going with this, the super producer.

No one is going to deny Pharrell, Timbaland, Kanye West, Just Blaze, DJ Premier, etc. are fantastic at what they do behind the boards, and no one can fault them for trying to sell their beats to as many people as possible, but as an artist it’s time to take a look at your own work and see if those producers really fit in with your project. Unless you’re using one of them for your entire album they probably don’t. Unfortunately we’ve gotten to the point in Hip-Hop where people are reading liner notes like they’re the gospel, making sure that saints Timbaland and Kanye are listed as producers before even thinking of picking up a CD and this is extremely damaging to the craft.

Take a listen to the albums that are universally considered classics and you’ll find they all have one thing in common no matter when they were made or what coast the artists are from; they’re all sonically consistent and cohesive. The Chronic, 36 Chambers Of Death, ATLiens, Paid In Full, Straight Outta Compton, these are all albums most of us know by heart and one of the reasons is that they were created by a few folks who were unbelievably tight with each other. When purchasing a beat from someone who may or may not know your style there’s no soul behind the eventual finished product. Yeah, you can sound really dope rhyming over a RZA beat but there will be a disconnection with it. No matter how dope you sound you won’t sound as dope as GZA would, or Ghostface would, because they have the history of working together with him. You can buy the beat, but without that time spent in and out of the studio together it’s just that, a beat. Beats can be bought, soul is something that’s created over time. Who’s going to create a better beat for you, a guy who you call up and pay a chunk of money to or a guy who’s been with you through thick and thin and knows you inside out? You know the answer to that.

Another issue with using beats from a large number of producers is your voice gets lost and you don’t have a sound of your own. Artists have asked me “who do you think I sound like?” And the fact of the matter is if I can answer that question you’re not going to go far in the music world. A lot of people can rap, not a lot of people can create rap music. What I mean by this is put on any of those albums listed above, when you hear a song from those records you instantly know it’s that artist, you don’t even have to hear the first lyric, you know from the first thump of the bass “that’s Outkast” or “that’s Wu-Tang,” there’s never any question in your mind. Now turn on the radio today. You’ll know who produced the track instantly, but the artist on the track… that may take you a line to figure out. By using a bunch of super producers artists are essentially making themselves secondary in their own music. Isn’t this the opposite of what you want to do?

Albums today are a mess, but there’s an easy cure for this, go the way of the classics and work with just one or two producers. The Rolling Stones didn’t switch guitarists and drummers every other song, so why would you switch producers so often? Look at the Gnarls Barkley and DangerDoom projects. Those albums became so popular so quickly because they were consistent, they made sense from song to song. One can also look at what Justin Timberlake did with Timbaland. Justin’s previous solo effort was very mixed, there was no clear idea of what he wanted to do. All of a sudden he comes out with an album he worked on almost exclusively with Tim and BAM he gives birth to something creatively different that people latch on to. You can play any song off of that album and know it’s a Justin Timberlake song as soon as the beat comes in. The same can be said for any Atmosphere album, and isn’t that what you’re looking for as an artist, instant sonic recognition?

So artists, before you pick up that phone to dump a hundred grand on the latest beatsmith du jour, take a minute to think about what it will do to your album. Remember, in the end it should be about who you are, not how many people you can work with.