Protect and Defend
Feb 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Will Johnson
OG producer Pete Rock preserves and progresses the boom-bap and champions the lost art of dynamics on NY's Finest
Who says you can't teach old dogs new tricks? For the 36-year-old Peter Phillips, aka Pete Rock — the producer known for pioneering New York hip-hop's golden era — it's not that he can't learn new tricks; it's just the old ones sound better. “I'm not mad at producers who use handclaps and snaps on everything,” Rock says diplomatically before adding, “but that's just not me. That's not Pete Rock.” It's true. With a love of plush horns and animated drum breaks, Rock was always “more interested in making something real, something soulful.” But in an age where cheap presets trump rich samples, is there any place for the producer who prefers soul to Soulja Boy? Pete Rock thinks so.
Having begun producing in the mid-'80s during the height of electro-rap, the veteran beatsmith is no stranger to the minimalist tendencies of hip-hop today. At an early age, the Chocolate Boy Wonder made a clear choice to break from hip-hop's sparse drum machine aesthetic. For Rock, the robotlike music “flowed through [his] body” but never “really stuck” to him. “My problem with that type of music is that it always sounded mechanical, it always sounded effortless, and it was usually all about money,” he says. “I'm a real dude, and I value the art of my music, so I wanted to make something that sounded like that.” And so he did, and after unleashing a bevy of sample-drenched arrangements for tag-team partner, C.L. Smooth, Rock rose to prominence in the midst of hip-hop's formative years, providing sonic backdrops for Public Enemy, Nas and the Notorious B.I.G. In 2001, Rock released the critically acclaimed, Petestrumentals (BBE, 2001), an instrumental album that was equally meditative as it was lively. For Rock, that album was governed by a formula that he feels was inherently a “New York thing.” It was a formula the producer couldn't abandon for NY's Finest (Nature Sounds, 2008), the producer's latest production/MCing outing, which features a posse of NY-minded rappers such as Jim Jones, Papoose and Redman.
STREET AND SOUL
Rock's studio formula, a bipartite mélange, self-described as “part-street, part soulful,” was conceived as a teen in the midst of the Reagan years. Informed by his father — a Jamaican DJ with an immense record collection — Rock sought to imitate the music that he felt pumping through his veins. The influences were vast, from Johnny Mathis to the Doobie Brothers, but one thing that remained throughout was soulfulness. “Soul” as defined by the self-proclaimed Soul Brother No. 1 is a musical characteristic that “takes over your body and sticks to you. It's a force,” Rock says. He first experienced it with hip-hop when listening to KRS-One and productions by his early mentor, Marley Marl — music that despite its reliance on technology managed to capture the essence of the human soul.
But the other element in Rock's formula is street savvy. Rock's ability to re-create the energy of New York's streets earned the producer recurrent dap from his core audience of hardened urbanites. A native of Mount Vernon — the predominately black and West Indian community that lies just north of the Bronx — Rock learned from the characters that populated his community. Feeding into their taste for steep bluesy melodies and concrete, hard cadences, Rock would drive around Mount Vernon with fresh productions, conducting impromptu listening sessions. “If people on the street feel it, then it's good,” he says of his unorthodox hot-or-not rating system. A tastemaker for New York's infamous brand of razor-sharp boom-bap, the OG producer has recently become a liaison for artists like Ghostface Killah, Talib Kweli and The LOX.
NY's Finest is Rock's attempt to do the same. With an emphasis on forgotten samples, chopped and spliced to make new grooves, the album marks Rock's latest attempt at bridging the gap between soul and hip-hop. But unlike previous releases, this one was made entirely on Rock's MPC2000XL, a machine that Rock calls “the upgraded SP-1200.” With his new MPC swing, some exclusive Stax sampling rights and borrowed ears from engineering wizard Young Guru, it's fair to say this old dog's learned a few new tricks.
FEELING THE FREQUENCIES
The 15 tracks that comprise NY's Finest were created in between Rock's 2001 solo effort, Petestrumentals (BBE) and late 2007. For the prolific PR, they represent his favorite few among the several hundred he's created since purchasing the MPC in 2001. Unlike Petestrumentals, made entirely with his prized SP-1200, this release strays from filtered, ethereal washes and aims for a pristine, distinctly MPC sound. For the forward-thinking producer, that was an intentional decision.
“When I started putting this record together, I found myself listening to [hip-hop] radio a lot more. I wanted to get a better sense of today's sound so I could hopefully mix that with my own. It's important, especially when you're associated with a certain era, to update your sound.” Chief among Rock's observations about today's hip-hop is the attention it pays to the higher frequencies. For Rock, this resulted in the music's newfound presence. “Hip-hop today sounds bright, like it's right in your ear. It's clean.” Rock sees the change as, in part, attributable to the Akai MPC's predominance in the world of bits and bytes.
“The main difference I noticed when I switched from the SP to MPC was the MPC has a thin, clean sound. The SP's gonna give you that raw, gritty hip-hop feel. The SP just makes your sound fat.” For the erudite E-mu scholar, one who admits to once downgrading sampling rates for the sake of increasing sample time, adapting to Akai's model was a mixed blessing. While it gave the producer a superfluous three minutes of high-rate sample time, it also meant parting from his signature bandpass filters that yielded famous horn lines like the opener for “T.R.O.Y.” “It's a tradeoff; you gotta give up some of that boom-bap-buh-boom-buh-boom-bap,” Rock says as he breaks into a deep-voiced beatbox pattern. But, in response to the MPC's less warm, slightly dead sound, the producer implemented two strategies that preserved the boom in his boom-bap.
“Before I sample anything into the MPC, I always EQ my sounds first,” Rock says. “I just use an old GLI Pro mixer that I got hooked up to the sampler. It's not a great mixer, but it has three basic bands that I can equalize on. If you want your sound to be heavy on the MPC, you need to EQ. For kicks, I have [tape] markers that I leave on the EQ knobs. The markers give me a range that are gonna make the kick boom. I have the same type of markers for the hi-hat and the snare. Every time I sample anything, I use those markers as a reference.”
On Rock's lead single, “Til I Retire” — the producer's three-round lyrical knockout atop a tough beat that flirts with Southern minimalism — the difference shows. The kick, hat and snare/clap each occupy distinct frequencies, and though Rock peppers the mix with scratches; a dampened, reverberating horn stab; and futuristic analog tones, the textured sounds never compete with each other, resulting in an overall brightness hitherto unknown in Rock's compositions. While part of the solution is Rock's “pre-Q“ strategy, another part of Rock's new brightness can be attributed to his newly acquired engineer and Roc-A-Fella affiliate, Young Guru.
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