Live Wire
May 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
It's good to be the king — especially if you're Tim “Timbaland” Mosley. For well over a decade now, the 36-year-old producer has spun his quirkily deconstructed beats into gold, crafting a steady string of hits that has changed not only the face of modern hip-hop and R&B, but also of pop music in general. Hang around any dance club or tune in any radio station for a half-hour or so, and you're sure to hear Timbaland's touch — and if it isn't him (or a protégé from his closely knit clique), it's quite likely to be someone biting him.
Of course, when you're banging out tracks at a furious clip for such pop and hip-hop icons as Justin Timberlake, Nelly Furtado, Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Ludacris, Brandy, LL Cool J, the Pussycat Dolls and dozens more, as well as harvesting platinum records as easily as most people curate their wardrobes, you might also feel entitled to a little immodesty. “Dude, that's why I'm the best there is,” Timbaland says matter-of-factly, referring to his uncanny ear for the post-mod hooks and futuristic, tricked-out rhythm sequences that have been the grit-and-gristle of his most memorable songs. “The answer is just to use what's around you. I listen to everything, from a person's voice to the sound of a car to a soda can to, when you sit down, even when you fart. [Laughs.] Everything around me is music. It all has a rhythm, and you can take that and turn it into a song. That's how my mind works. It's not about what you have [for equipment] — it's about what you're blessed with.”
Given the unbelievable breakout year that Timbaland had in 2006, there's really no arguing with him. It started with Nelly Furtado's Loose (Geffen/Mosley Music Group), which put the Canadian-born singer back on the map in front of Timbaland's aggressive, almost industrial, synth-funk production stroke (an approach that recalls the way The Neptunes — longtime friends of Timbaland from their shared home turf of Virginia Beach, Va. — handled the controls for Kelis' first two albums). By the time Timberlake's monster FutureSex/LoveSounds (Jive/Zomba) dropped in September, there was no denying that the year clearly belonged to Mr. Mosley.
Fittingly, Timberlake and Furtado helped grease the wheels for Timbaland's latest and perhaps most ambitious project — the star-laden Shock Value (Geffen/Mosley Music Group, 2007), which sports a guest list as wildly diverse as the imagination that inspired it. After all, who else could get Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Missy Elliott, Fall Out Boy and Elton John together on one album, and do it while tapping musical sources as diametrically opposed as retro-'80s pop, punk rock, Bollywood and acid blues, all with a hip-hop feel?
“I set out to make this like a Volume 1 of where I'm at now,” Timbaland says. “It's almost like a greatest hits, but we don't know if they're hits yet. There's something here for everybody, though, and one thing I'm proud about is that I'm stepping my rap game up. Even though I don't really want to do rap like that, I'm loving how I can sit in a track when I take my time. You know what it is? It's the confidence. I'm just more confident now.”
STOMPIN' THE (JUNK)YARD
The music on Shock Value has its roots in studio experiments that go back almost three years. At the time, as Timbaland recalls, he was trying to move toward a new sound that would not only put style-biters on notice, but would also intentionally flip the script on his method of making beats and therefore fuel a fresh creative burst. The answer turned out to be deceptively simple: Instead of relying exclusively on his signature blend of obscure samples, synthesized elements and programmed beats (many of them crafted on a workhorse Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler/keyboard), the moment was ripe for Timbaland to start incorporating live, organic sounds — drums in particular.
“I call it the junkyard sound,” he explains. “It's about just taking it back to where I'm having fun, you know? I used to try to imagine how James Brown did it when he went into a jam session, and I made that my approach — mix in a little of the new electronic stuff, but keep it sounding live, too. And it started with all these types of drums that I've collected from different countries. I just got in the room at my studio and played them.”
The mad-hypnotic single “Give It to Me” (with Furtado and Timberlake joining Timbaland on the mic) is straight out of the junkyard. The song opens with a tribal beat laid down with sticks on what sounds like a handful of African drums and woodblocks; the drums are soon joined by a whistling sci-fi synth line (in the video for the song, Timbaland can be seen playing this on a Minimoog Voyager) and a low-end synth bass line that shadows a dry-sounding kick. By the time Furtado struts her sinewy stuff on the first verse — a weirdly syncopated melody that jumps off in the middle of the measure — it's clear we're into something far-out to say the least. Even crazier, the main rhythm comprises only two or three continuous passes of Timbaland's live performance, edited and spliced into minute-long chunks.
The track is a marvel of what has long been crucial to any Timbaland production — the artful and economic layering of sounds, but with strict attention paid to the spaces between them, which adds a weird feeling of looseness to the rhythm. The effect is almost like thinking you've reached the bottom of a darkened flight of stairs when you actually still have one more step to go — for an instant, the floor seems to slip out from under you until you regain your balance. Lend some drive time to “Bounce” — a menacingly dark slow-groove jaunt with Timberlake, Dr. Dre and Missy Elliott (whose priceless rhyme “Hold up/Hell no/Like Britney Spears/I wear no drawers” speaks unexpected volumes) — and you'll feel a similar sense of disorientation.
“There's really no method to the madness,” agrees Demacio “Demo” Castellon, who has risen through the ranks to become one of the lead engineers at Timbaland's Thomas Crown Studios in Virginia Beach (see the sidebar, “Crown Jewels”). “I think that's what gives Tim the edge. Any sound is open game to be put in at any measure. It's like a free-for-all. He's taken sounds from the weirdest places, and I've seen him make stuff out of it. I mean, dude took a baby crying and put it in a track [Aaliyah's “Are You That Somebody?” from 1998], so there you go.”
“Give It to Me” and “Bounce” weren't the only jams that emerged from the free-form junkyard ethos. “Release,” again with Timberlake, swivels on a lowdown Prince-style funk riff that incorporates live drums and live bass stacked with a Korg Prophecy. Meanwhile, “Scream,” with singer Keri Hilson and the Pussycat Dolls' Nicole Scherzinger, is a reverb-drenched, almost psychedelic synth-pop throwback that derives much of its '80s flavor from a subtly placed Yamaha DX7 played by Nate “Danja” Hills (an ascendant producer in his own right and, for now, Robin to Timbaland's Batman). Finally, “Board Meeting,” with Magoo, pairs live drums and claps with a few different synth patches — possibly from an E-mu PK-6 Proteus and a Proteus 2000, both of which Timbaland has confessed to having in his keyboard arsenal at one time or another.
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