Robinson may have ended up as “one of the most reviled businesspeople in hip-hop,” but her story didn’t start that way. It’s the kind of thing that’s rightfully being made into a movie: The woman from the Dirty Dancing song teams up with a mobster and a kid from a pizza parlor to-by a combination of timing, luck, forethought, and stolen lyrics-start a revolution. Enjoy.ĬREDENTIALS: “Rapper’s Delight” (The Sugarhill Gang) Most of all, it’s meant to compel you to go back and (re)discover some of the most exciting, moving, challenging, ubiquitous, and important music of the last four decades. This list is meant to spark debate (we know you’ll tell us where you think we got it wrong) and to give credit to the people who inspire us to dance and nod our heads to the beat. We tried our best to account for all meanings of the word in the list you’re about to read. Today, it most frequently means someone who composes a ton of music and shares their signature sound (and producer tag) with a variety of artists. Other times, it was the mad genius who searched through endless records for the perfect beat, or the collective that spent months in the studio side by side. Sometimes it was the person whose name was on the record, or the record contract. In the early years of rap, it was often the person who paid for the studio time or, alternately, the person who wrote and arranged the music. So, what exactly does it mean to be a producer? The term has meant different things to different people in different eras. It’s that, during any given 12 months, there was always someone who edged them out, either due to volume of standout work (see DJ Quik’s astounding 1991, with four albums that paved the way for West Coast dominance to come) or to influence (in 1992, Dre delivered The Chronic-an album that gives him the prize as he faced perhaps the stiffest competition of any year on this list) or to ushering in a sound that was all of a sudden everywhere, all the time, and came to define its era (take one look at Lil Jon’s 2003 output and try not to imagine yourself in the middle of a Chappelle skit). All-time greats like DJ Premier, Diamond D, Just Blaze, and Pete Rock-GOAT-level producers by any measure-don’t win a single year. Great producers, like rappers, have specific moments when they’re controlling the game, making classics, and setting trends seemingly at will.Ī few notes before we begin: Being the BPA in a given year doesn’t mean that you’re the best producer, in whatever qualitative way one might decide these things. Producers are, in the words of the old Maoist slogan, holding up half the sky-giving rappers a sonic canvas on which to paint their pictures. It was only fitting to extend this concept to producers, as well. From Grandmaster Caz in 1979 to Kendrick Lamar in 2017, we chose who had the alchemical combination of quality, momentum, and historical importance at every moment in the genre’s development. Instead of making the list about how someone stacks up against the entire canon of hip-hop, we narrowed in on who, in any given year, was unbeatable.
It was an exhaustive list inspired by a simple idea: a new way to take on the inevitable Top 5/GOAT discussions that dominate the hip-hop conversation. Thus, they are equally subject to hip-hop’s sixth element: making lists.īack in 2015, we chose The Best Rapper Alive, Every Year Since 1979. The producers who create these beats may not be as glamorous as the rappers who spit over them (at least, most of the time), but they are equally important. Great production can make even the most objectionable or cheesy lyrics sound great. But very few bars would be as memorable if not for the music that accompanies them. Rap lyrics pop into our heads at inappropriate times, end up as our yearbook quotes, and work their way into our everyday conversations.
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