In hip-hop, beats do the talking

MUSIC producers Marcello “Cool” Valenzano and Andre “Dre” Lyon never intended to set off a tug of war among East Coast hard-core rappers. But that’s precisely what happened.

Known professionally as Cool & Dre, the pair created a 60-second hip-hop beat they felt perfectly distilled their signature sound: aggressive synthesizers, moodily propulsive drums and an instantly memorable chorus. Then they went looking for a rapper who’d add words, and with luck take their work to the charts.

The trouble began when each, unknown to the other, pitched a different rapper the same “beat” -- as the sequenced combos of drum tracks, synths and recorded samples are known. Lyon sent the track to Fat Joe at the same time Valenzano presented it to Jadakiss.

“Both fell in love with it,” Lyon remembers. “Next thing you know, we got a situation.”

The producers persuaded Jadakiss to give up the beat. But after two months, Fat Joe decided not to use it. So Lyon and Valenzano shopped the beat to a third rapper, Ja Rule. His manager, Irv Gotti, bought it; then, in a stranger-than-fiction twist, Gotti called Jadakiss and Fat Joe to rap on the song.

The resulting single, Ja Rule’s “New York” (featuring Fat Joe and Jadakiss) became a radio hit and club smash in late 2004. And the song’s ubiquity into this year was largely credited to its anthemic sound -- its beat -- bringing the beat’s exalted status in hip-hop into sharp perspective.

According to a number of top-selling producers and industry observers, the beat has largely superseded the rapper performing over it as the driving force of the industry. And the music’s true core today is the instrumental track -- that is, everything but the words.

“The most important elements of a hit in hip-hop are the beat and the chorus,” says the Bronx’s Fat Joe, who is known for his gritty street-smart rhyme style. “The role of a rapper is getting less and less.”

“Sometimes, if you have great lyrics and not a great beat, the people won’t pay attention,” says Neysa Camacho, manager for beat maker Justin “Just Blaze” Smith, and project manager on hip-hop kingpin Sean “Diddy” Combs’ upcoming album. “On the other hand, if you have a great beat and bad lyrics, you can have a hit.”

While much of the media have kept their eyes on the faces in the spotlight and rappers’ gangsta dramas, the industry and artistry have moved on. If Camacho is right, producers like Cool & Dre are hip-hop’s new kingmakers -- and kings.

A burgeoning class of superproducers typified by Kanye West is crossing from behind the mixing board to become top-selling artists in their own right, largely for their ability to build beats with mass appeal.

One of the most highly anticipated albums of the winter is from Pharrell Williams of the dynamic producing duo the Neptunes. And Cool & Dre, who have already been touted as the “next Neptunes” by hip-hop pundits, are following a similar trajectory. Lyon will release his solo album on Violator/Zomba Label Group next year.

“It’s gotten to the point where producers are responsible for about 90% of what goes into a record,” Smith says. “So a lot of times, the producer is already like an artist themselves.”

The image of Eminem verbally battling to the top of the rap heap in “8 Mile” may be lodged firmly in the public imagination, but the real hip-hop action takes place in a much less cinematic setting: an underground market for backing tracks that’s governed by strange rules and personal connections. In this seldom-mentioned beat bazaar, 60-second to four-minute beats are bought and sold like so many baseball cards, shopped to different artists and changing hands in the hopes they’ll propel a hit.

“You used to write the song and then hire the producer to make the song around it,” says Dallas Austin, a platinum-selling producer who has worked with Gwen Stefani, TLC and Michael Jackson. “Now it’s flipped on the record industry: beat first, song second.”

But that intense focus on hip-hop’s most elemental unit, he cautions, may not be a good thing. “The bad part is when you start looking at records as a product like soap or cereal, as mass-produced sounds,” Austin says. “You start putting it on the shelf, then at a certain point, it’s got nothing further that people feel is special.”

Back in the day

ONCE upon a time in hip-hop, the beat was an uncomplicated thing. Before there was a “Hot Rap Tracks” chart and before Run DMC became a household name, DJs mixed together instrumental break-beats from their favorite funk and soul records -- think Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1981 hit, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” -- and boomed the do-it-yourself music from outsize speakers.

Listeners responded by dancing -- or didn’t. Making real money wasn’t even an option.

In the early 1980s, when hip-hop began to go mainstream, record companies booked studio time for producers, rappers and DJs to work together closely, the same song craft employed by most other musical forms. “Then it turned around,” Austin says. “They would make tracks with instrumentals and then write the songs.”

Braggadocio is part and parcel of hip-hop, so it’s no surprise to hear a beat maker claim that the beat reigns supreme. But in the last five years, record-label heads and artist and repertoire executives admit that to reduce overhead costs they have come to rely on the voluntary submission of “beats CDs,” containing dozens of unfinished musical snippets. Sounds range from the minimalist finger-snap percussion of “intimate club” music to the baroque electroclash soundscape of crunk.

Producers, as the beat makers are called, usually work isolated from the input of artists, creating music at their home studios and submitting their beats to well-connected friends, label execs and performers.

“[Executives] got smart,” Cool & Dre’s Valenzano says. “Instead of flying us out to wherever an artist is recording and paying for the studio time, they’ll get beats CDs from every producer out there. They’ll pick a beat and then they’ll call you and say, ‘Hey, remember us? We want beat number blahzity-blah off the CD.’ ”

Some rappers, such as OutKast and Eminem, have become highly adept at making many of their own beats. But with beat-making software cheap and widely available, the ranks of aspiring producers have mushroomed. Their sheer numbers have driven down the price of beats by all but a few brand-name super-producers whose names are linked to hits. Lyon and Valenzano, for example, received a relatively generous $1,000 in 2001 for the first beat they ever sold. (Their current asking price, by comparison, can be $60,000.)

“[The market] has become so over-flooded with producers,” producer Austin says, “they say, ‘Just listen to my tracks and if you hear a beat you want, pick it.’ They do the beats hoping artists will say, ‘That one sounds like me!’ ”

Chris Lighty, chief operating officer of hip-hop label Violator Management and Records, says that current market conditions are simple economics: an industry response to costly overruns in the past. “At some point, producers were starting to price themselves out of the game,” he says.

Although elite producers such as West, Dr. Dre and the Neptunes are known to employ live musicians more often than they use just electronic musical snippets -- and can command up to $200,000 per beat for their efforts -- such production methods have grown increasingly rare in an industry fixated on the bottom line.

Individuality squeezed out

FAT JOE, who was heading into the studio in New York last week for a “listening session” to sort through beats CDs for an upcoming album, says the beat always dictates the resulting rap. “The music actually tells me what to do. Like the dog told the Son of Sam to kill people? The music is telling me, ‘Yo, you wanna rap about girls here. You wanna rap about this there.’ ”

But the fundamental disconnect between performers and the process of creating their music has helped squeeze the individuality out of hip-hop. Famously, in 2003 one beat was sold twice -- to both a rapper and a singer, who, making the case for the beat’s power, took their songs to the Top 10.

Lil Jon, an Atlanta producer specializing in crunk -- a Southern hip-hop sub-genre that takes its musical cues from synth-heavy Eurodisco -- was hired by R&B; singer Usher to produce a song for his album “Confessions.” Lil Jon had been creating tracks for another rapper, who picked two of 15 tracks the producer had given him, leaving Lil Jon free to sell the remaining beats elsewhere.

Jive Records passed one to North Carolina rapper Petey Pablo without Lil Jon’s knowledge. And the rapper refused to sell it back. Instead, he turned it into “Freek-A-Leek,” which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the spring of 2004.

“It comes down to business, about getting the proper paperwork in,” says Elliott Wilson, editor in chief of the hip-hop magazine XXL.

Meanwhile, the producer had retooled the “Freek-A-Leek” instrumental into the 2004 single “Yeah!” (featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris) for Usher. The song debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 200 and held the top spot for 12 weeks.

“Yeah!” -- driven by a siren-like beat associated with the Dirty South -- functioned as the musical equivalent of an extreme makeover for Usher. Gone was the huggable man-child R&B; fans knew from his previous album, replaced by a sultry new persona as a streetwise sexual provocateur.

“When you’re at this level, people aren’t just coming to you for a beat,” says Cool & Dre’s Lyon. “[A producer] can completely change the direction of an artist and give them a whole new identity.” Even if it’s destined to be shared.

Once a producer creates a hit with a certain beat, it’s likely to become that person’s signature sound. West, a prolific producer, is known for using R&B; vocal samples to create the choruses for his songs (rather than recording live singers) and has applied the formula on tracks for diverse artists such as Ludacris, Common and Jay-Z. As in the movie business, if it sells, it spawns a sequel, or in this case, many.

Austin sees this as a tactic that’s contributed to a dumbing down of creativity in hip-hop, citing the ubiquity of tracks by the Virginia-based Neptunes.

“I’m sure at one point there were 15, 20 Neptunes records for different artists that you couldn’t tell apart,” he says. “If you’re gonna buy that, fine. But it’s not for the artist anymore. It just sounds like everybody else’s music.”

Trying on beats

INDUSTRY attention is currently focused on the efforts of label owner-rapper-producer Combs, who has enlisted a team of established and emerging beat makers for his 2006 album. For months, he has been trying on their beats like so many hats.

“He’s really trying to come back hard,” says XXL’s Wilson. “Career-wise, he’s been in a slump and he’s hungry to get his hands on the best possible music.” Notably, the conversation has very little to do with what Combs might have to say in his new work. It’s all about whose sound he’ll choose.

According to manager Camacho, the genre’s never-ending need for fresh material is its governing impulse. “You can’t structure hip-hop,” she says. “In this game, turnover is so quick, you’re always looking for what’s hot, everybody’s always waiting to hear what the next, hottest track on the radio or mix-tape is going to be.”

“Just Blaze” Smith, though, feels the beat’s prominence as the focal point of the music marks a return to the DJ’s historical significance. “In the beginning, the DJ was spinning break-beats on records in the park and the rapper was just there to supplement the DJ,” he says. “He was an ‘MC.’ His job was to get people excited about the beats. In a sense, hip-hop has come full circle.”