Khaleel in Billboard Magazine

WORLDS COLLIDE Rap Producers Are Taking On Pop Projects. Will Their Street Cred Take A Hit? BY SOREN BAKER DJ Premier was surprised when he got the phone call last spring. It was RCA Records, saying that Christina Aguilera wanted the producer, best known for his gritty work with rap heavyweights Gang Starr, the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, Nas and KRS-One, to work on the pop singer's forthcoming album. "It was kind of a shock because I was like, 'How the hell does she know about me?' " DJ Premier says. "I'm one of those guys that really doesn't expect pop artists to really be up on me. My first question was, 'What does she know about me?' " It turns out Aguilera wanted her forthcoming album to re-create and pay tribute to the music that inspired her: soul, jazz and blues from the 1920s, '30s and '40s. She was familiar with some of Premier's jazz-influenced work with Gang Starr in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially the song "Jazz Thing." "It had elements of Miles Davis and Billie Holiday and little horn pieces," Aguilera says of the tune. "The way he combined that, I was like, 'Hm. I bet he would get where I'm trying to go with this record.' It was taking a chance. God knows if he would even do it because it was kind of his first time, I think, even venturing into the 'pop' world. I knew that it would be a different and new thing for him." DJ Premier ended up producing five songs slated to appear on "Back to Basics," Aguilera's new album, which is scheduled for a June release. The seemingly unusual pairing between DJ Premier and Aguilera is the latest combination of rap producers and pop artists working together, a trend that is becoming increasingly commonplace. The Neptunes' Pharrell Williams and Gwen Stefani have recorded several songs together, most notably "Hollaback Girl," after Williams became famous for his production work with hardcore rappers Noreaga and Ol' Dirty ....; Jermaine Dupri logged several hits with Usher and Mariah Carey after establishing himself through the pop-minded rap of Kris Kross and Da Brat. Scott Storch parlayed working with the Roots, Dr. Dre and others into collaborations with Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé. But rap producers making the leap to pop can be a dicey proposition in a world where credibility is paramount. "The moment you stop being the underdog, when you get 'on' in people's eyes and you're that dude because of the record you did with Britney, that's when the sellout aspect of it comes, when they'll say, 'Oh, he forgot where he came from,' " says Mr. ColliPark, who scored hits for the Ying Yang Twins, David Banner and others before testing the pop waters with Jamie Foxx last year. "I'm a living testimony that people are genuinely happy for you at first—until you get out of their reach, until you actually make it. Then all that hating and s**t comes in." Dancing the fine line between making street-certified songs and crossover smashes is what makes the work of the Neptunes, Dupri and Storch so impressive. But they could be seen as being on the brink of going too pop. In Williams' case, for instance, his work as a producer with Stefani has been much more successful and acclaimed than, say, his beats for Houston rapper Slim Thug, or even his rap song "Can I Have It Like That," which featured Stefani on the hook. The single did not explode at radio or video and Williams' solo album was pushed back from its fourth-quarter 2005 release date to a spring 2006 bow. "What rap and hip-hop fans are really not accepting is when you start to gear all your music towards pop radio and singers as opposed to breaking new rappers and focusing on hip-hop," says Kevin Faist, director of A&R for Capitol Records. Faist has worked Mack 10, Westside Connection and others during his 13 years in the music industry. "Hip-hop fans get offended by that and eventually you'll lose your hip-hop pass, so to speak," he continues. "Eventually, people will be like, 'Oh, that dude does that and I'm more into this.' It's a really fine line. Hip-hop is very cold to people who turn their back on it and they very seldom let them back in." This reality makes "Crunk Rock," the debut solo album from Lil Jon due on TVT Records later this year, all the more ambitious. After establishing himself as the king of the hyper, energized crunk music that he helped popularize through his hits with his group the East Side Boyz, Petey Pablo, Lil Scrappy and YoungBloodZ, and later such pop artists as Usher and Ciara, Jon says he wants to expand his reach as a producer. "They put us in these boxes, and they think you're not supposed to go outside the box," he says. "When I grew up, you listened to the radio [and] you heard everything from Run-D.M.C. to Led Zeppelin. It was just radio. I grew up on all this different types of music. I should be able to make all different types of music." "Crunk Rock" is scheduled to feature Jon working with Good Charlotte, Rick Rubin and Williams. "I'm doing some industry-changing s**t that'll have ghetto motherf**kers in the South listening to some rock s**t," Jon says. Jon wants to have a similar impact with Samantha J, a teen singer from Australia signed to Jive Records. He says that he worked to produce a "ghetto edge" for the pop singer. Jon says he is able to traverse the pop and hip-hop worlds by giving clients different sounds and feels than what might be expected of them. "What I do with the YoungBloodZ or with Lil Scrappy is totally different than what I do with a Samantha J," says Jon, who is keeping his rap résumé thick with 2006 releases from E-40, Trillville, Lil Scrappy and Bo Hagon, among others. "With Samantha J, I did a ballad with her, but I did a ghetto ballad. It's 808s [deep bass sounds, made by the Roland TR-808 drum machine], not something that you would normally hear a pop artist sing over, a joint with heavy 808s and a slow joint. That's when you come up with the magic, when you experiment a little bit. The top part of the track is guitars and piano. That would be the normal pop side, but then the drums are heavy 808, like crazy booming. That's my side. We're bridging them together and we got what we got." The irony in these established rap producers working with pop acts is that they tend to be more open than rappers in trying new sounds. "What makes working with a pop act exciting is that today you don't have too many Run-D.M.C.s, or in today's times [artists] like Ying Yang Twins, who are rap artists but they're not afraid to go out and make music, as opposed to being stuck into making street records," Mr. ColliPark says. "I think that's part of the reason I want to branch out, because I can't experiment with these rappers because they're scared. They're street people before they're artists. So the streets dictate what they make, as far as their music is concerned. I think it winds up hurting them in the long run because they might make two or three albums and then it's time for them to make their big breakout record but they've typecast themselves by not experimenting from the jump." Aguilera says that her work with DJ Premier is new territory for both of them and continues her legacy of taking creative chances with her music. Likely single "Ain't No Other Man," produced by DJ Premier and Charles Roane, clocks in at 127 beats per minute—most pop and rap songs rarely exceed 100—and features energetic horn blares. Another song, "Thank You (Dedication to Fans)," features DJ Premier slicing up pieces of Aguilera's first hit, "Genie in a Bottle," and pairing them with voice-mail messages from Aguilera's fans. These songs gave Aguilera the sounds she desired and allowed her to fulfill another one of her mandates. "The thing that I try to do with each record, I don't necessarily go to the main people that are the No. 1 chart-toppers in music," she says. "I really like to go left field, think a little bit out of the box and go with someone, maybe a little bit more obscure, that I really respect. Not to say that Premier is that, but just to say that I'm not going to go to the obvious person, say, the Neptunes, Pharrell or Lil Jon. I really like to go someplace different that people haven't approached." As for Premier, he is proof that, sometimes, a storied producer can be branded as not being pop enough. The producer has a full slate of upcoming projects, including production for such rap acts as Nas, the NYGz, Blaq Poet, Khaleel, Teflon and Fabid. But Premier, who has voiced his displeasure with watered-down rap in magazine interviews and on his albums throughout the years, wonders if his work with Aguilera will result in more steady A-list production offers. "The industry turns their back on me now anyway, which is why Christina is really a blessing, because she's re-emerging me out there," he says. "It's like, 'A lot of y'all forgot about me, but I've still got the funk.' I'm so glad that she even gave me the opportunity to connect with her and do something different. She even told me, 'You know, when this record drops, your whole life is going to change.' I said, 'Well, so is yours.' She said, 'I know.' " Premier has no fear that his work with Aguilera will tarnish his reputation. "Every song that we did is totally in the Premier light," he says. "No one will be disappointed. No one will say, 'Oh, he went soft.' I don't like any producer letting me down when it comes to what they make, so the last thing I want to do is let down my fans." •••• --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TEXAS LONGHORNS

Longhorns have new theme song 12/22/2005 5:17 PM By: News 8 Austin Staff Longhorn football players have a new favorite song for the locker room. Some local hip-hop artists released a Rose Bowl tribute on the radio Thursday. The song "Game Day" opens with UT wide receiver Brian Carter talking about the Rose Bowl and goes on to include the chant "Throw them horns up." WATCH THE VIDEO Song clip Listen to snippet of 'Game Day.' The entire team has become big fans of the song. "They have a CD and this is No. 1 on the track. So, they get all riled up and get the adrenaline flowing, ready to go, right before game day," musician Mic' Rich said. Game Day debuted on AM-1300

Throw Them Horns Up

Throw Them Horns Up UT's national championship and the rise of Texas rap – coincidence or symbiosis? By John Nova Lomax Underachievers and perpetual disappointments -- for years you could describe both the Texas rap scene and the Texas Longhorns football team as such. In the last year, that's all changed, and I believe the Horns couldn't have done it without the rappers. The athletes fed off the confidence of the rappers, who imbued them with a swagger seldom seen in AustinYou could see it in their composed play on the field January 4, and you could hear it in their confident words before the game. During the long layoff between the Big 12 Championship and the Rose Bowl kickoff, someone asked superhuman Texas quarterback and hometown hero Vince Young if the Horns were a little "intimidated" by Southern Cal and their 34-game winning streak. After all, the school was located in one of America's toughest 'hoods, and many of its players came Straight Outta Compton and South Central, the same areas that produced the Crips and Bloods, Suge Knight and N.W.A. VY was having none of it. "Intimidated by what?" Young said. "We have guys on this team who are gangsta. You see their guys [talking trash] to other teams and the other guys aren't talking back. Our guys will talk trash from beginning to end." That wasn't the case 15 years ago, when Texas faced Miami in the Cotton Bowl in 1991. There, the apparently resurgent Longhorns rode a nine-game winning streak all the way to a matchup with the fourth-ranked Miami Hurricanes, and these 'Canes were quite likely the most gangsta team in that most gangsta of program's history. The Horns, meanwhile, were coached by good ol' boy David McWilliams, a protégé of Texas legend Darrell Royal, whose 1969 squad was the last all-white team to win a national championship. For the next 25 years, with a few notable exceptions like Earl Campbell, black Texan high school athletes often shunned Texas for programs where the color line had broken earlier, schools like Oklahoma, Colorado and Notre Dame. Thus the 1990 UT squad was still a whiter team than most -- certainly much whiter than the 'Canes -- a Garth Brooks bunch going head to head against the hip-hop Hurricanes. And the Horns were thoroughly intimidated. The 'Canes racked up two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties before they even touched the ball. Faced with first and 40 on their opening possession, Miami converted with ease and went on to taunt and trash-talk all the way to an opening-drive touchdown. And they continued to brawl and mock the Horns all afternoon, en route to a 43-point victory that came in spite of an astounding 200-plus yards in penalties (many for taunting and/or cheap shots). That game was like an early Mike Tyson fight: ugly, unfair, brutal and the bad guys won. This spectacle of Miami vice so alarmed the NCAA that it promptly enacted most of the anti-taunting and celebration rules that are still in effect today. But Miami did demonstrate complete physical and, more important, psychological superiority and showed that the Horns were most definitely not ready for prime time. They had fallen way behind in the gangsta stakes. Meanwhile, at about the same time that the NCAA was legislating against the 'Canes' hooliganism, Tipper Gore and the PRMC were railing in Congress against the team's unofficial musical mascot: Miami's raunchy 2 Live Crew, whose front man Luther Campbell had a sideline pass to all their games and who allegedly paid players $500 for each big hit or touchdown. Gangsta indeed. While the 'Canes have since toned it down just a little, they still contend for the national title just about every year, much to the chagrin of every non-psychopath outside Miami. At least the day of 2 Live Crew's wack beats and weak rhymes has come and gone -- hell, the players on the Miami team themselves outdid them by actually making a song called "The Seventh Floor Crew" that was as sleazy as anything Luther and his boys ever came up with. Texas limped away from the Cotton Bowl like a beaten mutt and whimpered in mediocrity for another decade. Meanwhile, after the limited success of the Geto Boys in the early 1990s, Texas rap did much the same. The Horns always choked in the big games, and our rappers were content to remain underground legends on the Gulf Coast. Texas was a football and hip-hop backwater -- chock-full of talent and regional forces, but unrecognized and disrespected by the nation at large. All that changed this year. Vince Young -- the first UT quarterback born in the age of hip-hop -- brought not just his freakish physical gifts to Austin (instead of Miami, where he almost signed up) but also a southside swagger and H-town strut the ever-rigid Horns had always lacked. Already the tales have become legend -- how Vince talked coach Mack Brown into letting him be himself on the field (where Brown installed a more freewheeling offense better suited to Young's talents) and off, where the team was allowed to have hip-hop "flow sessions" in the locker room and during pregame warm-ups. Out went the old-school, stoic, Vince Lombardi ideal of grimly scowling in your locker, "putting on your game face" -- and in came what looked like deleted scenes from Hustle and Flow. (You can see Young leading the team through one such session at www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2681600.) And the players even persuaded Brown -- a fiftysomething native of small-town Tennessee -- to fill up his iPod with rap. "I don't think I was out of touch, but when we were kids, [our parents] were talking about Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash being rebels and cussing, 'They're ruining our music!"' Brown told a reporter last year. "Now, we're saying some of the rap music is so vulgar and so awful and they're ruining our music. It's no different, it's the times. "What I needed to do was a little better job staying up with their times, not just my times," he said. "It's made a difference in my happiness and enjoying them more. I think they probably laugh at me more." Whatever -- it worked. The hip-hop Horns have won since October 2004, and they have done so with both confidence and class. While Young is right when he says they are "gangsta," they are most decidedly not the cheap-shot thugs that made Miami infamous. They are gangstas who fight fair. But what were they listening to? Since I couldn't get ahold of VY or any of the players before or after the game, I had to guess. I would say that both Paul Wall's "They Don't Know" and Bun B's "Draped Up" would have been hits in that locker room, and if I was Vince Young I would certainly be feeling his southside homeboy Z-Ro's "Respect My Mind," since the national media did their usual quasi-racist number of crediting the white Matt Leinart with being the more "cerebral" of the two signal-callers, even though Young's quarterback rating was second to none. But those are just shots in the dark. One jam I know they were blasting was "Game Day," by Austin's Mic'Rich. Late one night outside KPFT studios just before their appearance on the underground rap show Damage Control, I caught up with the eponymous Mike Richardson and the track's producer Tim Curry. As "Game Day" blasted from an SUV's speakers, they told me the story of how their song became the Longhorns' theme. "I was riding in my car one day and it just hit me like a phenomenon," Richardson said. "I like Texas music and I'm from Texas, but everything I hear is about Houston. I'm from Austin, over in the other part of Texas, but still in Texas. So let's do a song about Austin. But what does Austin have? We don't have no major-league football team or basketball team, so what do we have? The Longhorns. And we are all die-hard Longhorn fans, so I thought, 'Hey, let's do a Longhorn song.' " Richardson met up with Curry in mid-December, and in two days they had the song, which features verses from Nealio, Be Be Kids, Krumwell and Silky Black and an intro from Longhorn receiver Brian Carter. There are also snippets of "The Eyes of Texas," UT marching band drum cadences, faux rednecks hollering "yee-haw," rhymes touting Vince Young, Jamaal Charles and Mack Brown, and shout-outs to many of the team's stars. The chorus is simple: "When you see us on Game Day throw them horns up." While "Game Day" might not be hip-hop's finest moment, it does beat the hell out of "The Super Bowl Shuffle" and certainly is a must-have for any Horn fan that is also into rap. (For now, the best place to track down a copy is to visit the Web site micrichmusic.com/home.html.) The track found its way to the team in Los Angeles and back in Austin, where commentator (and former Longhorn star) Brian Jones gave it a push during his local and regional TV and radio appearances. Then Austin's rap station got on board, and the tune blew up simultaneously with both the team and the city of Austin. "That was the song that was playing at the Rose Bowl on the big speakers," Curry says. "When you saw them on ESPN and they were dancing around, that was what they were dancing to. We're friends with Brian Carter, and he told us the .... was bigger with the team than we could ever imagine. It's on Mack Brown's iPod." A lot of things have grown bigger than we could have ever imagined a couple of years ago -- not least of them Vince Young and the Texas Longhorns and the Texas rap that took

This song has a lot of potential...good flow, good beat, nice lyrics. Overall a very nice piece of work> The only thing I would tweak would be a little more production. Keep up the good work.

One Sound,

The Kid