All the way from Childish Gambino to Young Thug ;salute:
The ATL is WINNING
The ATL is WINNING
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...n-of-producers-working-at-the-speed-of-sound/
The real rap stars of Atlanta: A new generation of producers working at the speed of sound
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By Chris Richards September 12
20-year-old Metro Boomin moved to the hip-hop capital of Atlanta to attend college. Now he’s producing some of the genre’s most dynamic music. (Michael A. Schwarz/for The Washington Post.)
If you’re searching for rap’s nucleus, you go to Atlanta.
And if you’re searching for the nucleus inside that nucleus, you try to find a place insiders call DARP, a gated recording studio hidden on one of the city’s countless leafy residential side streets.
On a Friday afternoon in August, Metro Boomin trundles into the studio’s driveway around 4:30 p.m., ready for another workday. Inside, other producers have already clocked in – there’s Southside, a member of the top-flight production team 808 Mafia, and Travis Scott, an audacious protege of Kanye West. Everyone’s gossiping, laughing, talking light trash, swapping horror stories about stolen hard drives. But not for long, because everyone is here to make hits.
Just as country music is made in Nashville, hip-hop is made in Atlanta. This is the town where the agenda is set, where the competition is cutthroat, where young rappers are discovering new ways to make English sound cool, and where their even-younger beat-makers are grinding away behind the curtains, discreetly running the show.
“We’re the foundation of this stuff,” says Sonny Digital, a 23-year-old producer currently churning out some of the most bonzo music in town. “We know what needs to be heard. And everybody’s listening.”
Young Thug, Migos, Rich Homie Quanand Makonnen – rappers eager to jump on strange beats and try precarious things with their throats.
“Atlanta is a place to try things out,” says Alex Tumay, the in-house engineer at DARP, which recently rebranded itself as Urban Angels Studios. “You don’t want to be the guy who sounds like somebody else.”
Accordingly, Tumay describes the music being crafted at the studio this summer as “totally f—ing surreal” – primarily because a lot of it is being funneled to Young Thug, the studio’s steadiest client and the most astonishing new rapper to crash land on America since Lil Wayne.
There are three big hip-hop radio stations here in Atlanta, and on a balmy weekend in August, barely 10 minutes go by without any of them broadcasting Thug’s brilliant, blurry, occasionally postverbal babblings.
But the producers hunkering down at the studio say they don’t listen to the radio all that much. Radio is too slow. The record industry? Way too slow. The rap blogosphere is faster, but barely fast enough. They know they’re living in the torrid epicenter of this music.
Everyone else is racing to keep up.
Karate Chop,” Young Thug’s “The Blanguage,” and the rappers’recent duet, “Chanel Vintage,” Metro pushes the vocalists toward the margins of their voices. “That’s the difference between a producer and a beat-maker,” Metro says. “You need someone to walk in there and turn a beat into a damn hit.”
[Warning: The music embedded in this story contains explicit lyrics.]
“Chanel Vintage” hasn’t caught on as a hit yet, but its walloping beat is illustrative of Metro’s ability to pummel listeners into delirium. It also offers a glimpse into the chaotic handshake economics of the scene, where producers frequently give artists free tracks in hopes of building long-term creative partnerships. Metro declines to go into the financial details of “Chanel Vintage,” but the song is being sold on iTunes under Metro’s name, suggesting that Future’s and Young Thug’s verses were repayment for beats Metro had previously gifted them.
But like rap’s anarchic star system and the mutating aesthetics that guide it, the economics of this music are in a perpetual state of unrest. “Some people will produce for a shout-out and a chain,” Metro says. “And I’ve been there. But nah, bro. You gotta pay me now.”
Southside, who has been tapping away at his laptop, chimes in. “Oh, I want some of that SoundExchange [performance royalties], too,” he says. “I want some of everything! I’ll go in there with a gun and get it!”
Everyone in the studio busts out laughing because this may or may not be true.
a video surfaced of Makonnen listening to the remix for the first time. “There’s no way this is real right now!” he says in the clip.
A week later, Makonnen was in New York, answering phone calls with far more composure, rattling off the traits that must have grabbed Drake’s ear: “The creativity, the fearlessness, the confidence to be different and embrace yourself.” A few weeks later, he announced that he signed with Drake’s OVO Sound label.
“These major artists can make a difference,” says Sonny Digital, who co-produced “Club Goin Up” with Metro Boomin. “Drake hopping on that song changed Makonnen’s career from Monday to Tuesday.”
But Drake isn’t the only one listening for the sounds wafting from Sonny’s home studio. “These labels, they’re watching,” the producer says, pointing out his window. “They got telescopes on Atlanta, trying to see what’s going on.”
Sonny holds his Midtown apartment so dear that he recently had the address tattooed onto his stomach. He calls the place “legendary,” but it definitely looks like the former party spot he says it used to be. Go up the creaky stairs, past the stripper pole and hanging above his workstation you’ll find a gold record plaque for YC’s “Racks,” the song that officially catapulted Sonny into the industry system in 2011.
“And once you catch a hit, people expect another one,” Sonny says. “Then another one, then another one. You’re constantly proving yourself. You don’t want to change? You have to change.”
He’s describing his short career, but the wild metabolism of contemporary hip-hop, too. This is a genre where, generally speaking, young producers are expected to build their reputations from scratch through mixtapes, album-sized collections of songs that rappers give away for free online. The practice has been going on for more than a decade.
Even more generally speaking: A generous rapper might float a few thousand dollars up front to a reputable producer for a mixtape track, but many rising beat-makers will work with a buzzy artist pro bono, hoping fans will begin to associate the artist with their sound. Then, when the artist records a proper album for a proper label, the producer hopes to get a phone call and later, a sizable check.
Or maybe a song migrates from a mixtape to an album, as in the case of Future’s “Same Damn Time,” produced by Sonny Digital for a mixtape in 2011, and released as a single from Future’s major label debut album in 2012. Different songs follow different, totally haphazard paths. Along the way, there can be lots of back-scratching, finger-crossing, bridge-burning and tongue-wagging.
But Sonny, whose cool Georgia drawl disguises how fast he’s actually talking, sees the entire mixtape system evaporating sooner than later. “It’s more about the songs,” he says. “With [streaming sites such as] SoundCloud, people can hear you right away. I can put a track out right now if I want to. That’s the beauty of it.”
And the pressure of it, too. This is culture-steering art being made at very high speeds.
“But that’s what drives you, you know?” he says. “It’s all a big gamble. We just roll the dice every day. Every. Day. We’re all playing off hope. We’re all depending on each other for making something happen.”
We Can’t Stop” might seem sluggish, while Future’s recent single, “Move that Dope,” feels hurried. But both were produced by Will and both ended up being hits.
More importantly, he knows how to get artists to bend toward pop, a talent he began to hone as a teenager, producing beats for Gucci Mane, the rapper who looms largest over this electric moment in Atlanta hip-hop.
“I told people Gucci was gonna take over the game. They thought I was trippin’,” Will says. “Now I’m seeing all these talents going from nothing and taking over the game.”
As for his young signees, Rae Sremmurd, the idea is to start at the top. The duo’s ecstatic summer hit, “No Flex Zone,” circumvented the channels that most artists use to ascend: it never appeared on a mixtape. If you wanted to own it, you had to buy it.
“With my artists, we aren’t dropping s— for free,” Will says. “If if it’s on [the free mixtape site] LiveMixtapes, fans are gonna get it for free on LiveMixtapes. If you put it on iTunes, they’re gonna pay for it on iTunes.”
That business savvy has gone a long way in the board rooms and recording studios of Los Angeles, where Will is doing a lot of his work these days. But the night before, Will was on his native coast, up on a nightclub stage behind Rae Sremmurd, reigning over the epicenter of hip-hop, making sure the teenagers of Atlanta saw his jewelry sparkling in the bright lights.
“I got to this point quicker than I expected, but I still love making this music with these new artists,” he says. “I love Atlanta. This is all I know.”
Note: This story has been updated to reflect the re-branding of the recording studio previously known as DARP.
Producer Sonny Digital at his home studio in Midtown Atlanta, where he’s produced tracks for Que, Migos, Makonnen and others. (Michael A. Schwarz/for The Washington Post)
Metro Boomin on his in-studio perfectionism: “We polish, and polish, and polish.” (Michael A. Schwarz/for The Washington Post)
“Once you catch a hit, people expect another one,” says 23-year-old producer Sonny Digital. (Michael A. Schwarz/for The Washington Post)
The real rap stars of Atlanta: A new generation of producers working at the speed of sound
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By Chris Richards September 12
20-year-old Metro Boomin moved to the hip-hop capital of Atlanta to attend college. Now he’s producing some of the genre’s most dynamic music. (Michael A. Schwarz/for The Washington Post.)
If you’re searching for rap’s nucleus, you go to Atlanta.
And if you’re searching for the nucleus inside that nucleus, you try to find a place insiders call DARP, a gated recording studio hidden on one of the city’s countless leafy residential side streets.
On a Friday afternoon in August, Metro Boomin trundles into the studio’s driveway around 4:30 p.m., ready for another workday. Inside, other producers have already clocked in – there’s Southside, a member of the top-flight production team 808 Mafia, and Travis Scott, an audacious protege of Kanye West. Everyone’s gossiping, laughing, talking light trash, swapping horror stories about stolen hard drives. But not for long, because everyone is here to make hits.
Just as country music is made in Nashville, hip-hop is made in Atlanta. This is the town where the agenda is set, where the competition is cutthroat, where young rappers are discovering new ways to make English sound cool, and where their even-younger beat-makers are grinding away behind the curtains, discreetly running the show.
“We’re the foundation of this stuff,” says Sonny Digital, a 23-year-old producer currently churning out some of the most bonzo music in town. “We know what needs to be heard. And everybody’s listening.”
Young Thug, Migos, Rich Homie Quanand Makonnen – rappers eager to jump on strange beats and try precarious things with their throats.
“Atlanta is a place to try things out,” says Alex Tumay, the in-house engineer at DARP, which recently rebranded itself as Urban Angels Studios. “You don’t want to be the guy who sounds like somebody else.”
Accordingly, Tumay describes the music being crafted at the studio this summer as “totally f—ing surreal” – primarily because a lot of it is being funneled to Young Thug, the studio’s steadiest client and the most astonishing new rapper to crash land on America since Lil Wayne.
There are three big hip-hop radio stations here in Atlanta, and on a balmy weekend in August, barely 10 minutes go by without any of them broadcasting Thug’s brilliant, blurry, occasionally postverbal babblings.
But the producers hunkering down at the studio say they don’t listen to the radio all that much. Radio is too slow. The record industry? Way too slow. The rap blogosphere is faster, but barely fast enough. They know they’re living in the torrid epicenter of this music.
Everyone else is racing to keep up.
Karate Chop,” Young Thug’s “The Blanguage,” and the rappers’recent duet, “Chanel Vintage,” Metro pushes the vocalists toward the margins of their voices. “That’s the difference between a producer and a beat-maker,” Metro says. “You need someone to walk in there and turn a beat into a damn hit.”
[Warning: The music embedded in this story contains explicit lyrics.]
“Chanel Vintage” hasn’t caught on as a hit yet, but its walloping beat is illustrative of Metro’s ability to pummel listeners into delirium. It also offers a glimpse into the chaotic handshake economics of the scene, where producers frequently give artists free tracks in hopes of building long-term creative partnerships. Metro declines to go into the financial details of “Chanel Vintage,” but the song is being sold on iTunes under Metro’s name, suggesting that Future’s and Young Thug’s verses were repayment for beats Metro had previously gifted them.
But like rap’s anarchic star system and the mutating aesthetics that guide it, the economics of this music are in a perpetual state of unrest. “Some people will produce for a shout-out and a chain,” Metro says. “And I’ve been there. But nah, bro. You gotta pay me now.”
Southside, who has been tapping away at his laptop, chimes in. “Oh, I want some of that SoundExchange [performance royalties], too,” he says. “I want some of everything! I’ll go in there with a gun and get it!”
Everyone in the studio busts out laughing because this may or may not be true.
a video surfaced of Makonnen listening to the remix for the first time. “There’s no way this is real right now!” he says in the clip.
A week later, Makonnen was in New York, answering phone calls with far more composure, rattling off the traits that must have grabbed Drake’s ear: “The creativity, the fearlessness, the confidence to be different and embrace yourself.” A few weeks later, he announced that he signed with Drake’s OVO Sound label.
“These major artists can make a difference,” says Sonny Digital, who co-produced “Club Goin Up” with Metro Boomin. “Drake hopping on that song changed Makonnen’s career from Monday to Tuesday.”
But Drake isn’t the only one listening for the sounds wafting from Sonny’s home studio. “These labels, they’re watching,” the producer says, pointing out his window. “They got telescopes on Atlanta, trying to see what’s going on.”
Sonny holds his Midtown apartment so dear that he recently had the address tattooed onto his stomach. He calls the place “legendary,” but it definitely looks like the former party spot he says it used to be. Go up the creaky stairs, past the stripper pole and hanging above his workstation you’ll find a gold record plaque for YC’s “Racks,” the song that officially catapulted Sonny into the industry system in 2011.
“And once you catch a hit, people expect another one,” Sonny says. “Then another one, then another one. You’re constantly proving yourself. You don’t want to change? You have to change.”
He’s describing his short career, but the wild metabolism of contemporary hip-hop, too. This is a genre where, generally speaking, young producers are expected to build their reputations from scratch through mixtapes, album-sized collections of songs that rappers give away for free online. The practice has been going on for more than a decade.
Even more generally speaking: A generous rapper might float a few thousand dollars up front to a reputable producer for a mixtape track, but many rising beat-makers will work with a buzzy artist pro bono, hoping fans will begin to associate the artist with their sound. Then, when the artist records a proper album for a proper label, the producer hopes to get a phone call and later, a sizable check.
Or maybe a song migrates from a mixtape to an album, as in the case of Future’s “Same Damn Time,” produced by Sonny Digital for a mixtape in 2011, and released as a single from Future’s major label debut album in 2012. Different songs follow different, totally haphazard paths. Along the way, there can be lots of back-scratching, finger-crossing, bridge-burning and tongue-wagging.
But Sonny, whose cool Georgia drawl disguises how fast he’s actually talking, sees the entire mixtape system evaporating sooner than later. “It’s more about the songs,” he says. “With [streaming sites such as] SoundCloud, people can hear you right away. I can put a track out right now if I want to. That’s the beauty of it.”
And the pressure of it, too. This is culture-steering art being made at very high speeds.
“But that’s what drives you, you know?” he says. “It’s all a big gamble. We just roll the dice every day. Every. Day. We’re all playing off hope. We’re all depending on each other for making something happen.”
We Can’t Stop” might seem sluggish, while Future’s recent single, “Move that Dope,” feels hurried. But both were produced by Will and both ended up being hits.
More importantly, he knows how to get artists to bend toward pop, a talent he began to hone as a teenager, producing beats for Gucci Mane, the rapper who looms largest over this electric moment in Atlanta hip-hop.
“I told people Gucci was gonna take over the game. They thought I was trippin’,” Will says. “Now I’m seeing all these talents going from nothing and taking over the game.”
As for his young signees, Rae Sremmurd, the idea is to start at the top. The duo’s ecstatic summer hit, “No Flex Zone,” circumvented the channels that most artists use to ascend: it never appeared on a mixtape. If you wanted to own it, you had to buy it.
“With my artists, we aren’t dropping s— for free,” Will says. “If if it’s on [the free mixtape site] LiveMixtapes, fans are gonna get it for free on LiveMixtapes. If you put it on iTunes, they’re gonna pay for it on iTunes.”
That business savvy has gone a long way in the board rooms and recording studios of Los Angeles, where Will is doing a lot of his work these days. But the night before, Will was on his native coast, up on a nightclub stage behind Rae Sremmurd, reigning over the epicenter of hip-hop, making sure the teenagers of Atlanta saw his jewelry sparkling in the bright lights.
“I got to this point quicker than I expected, but I still love making this music with these new artists,” he says. “I love Atlanta. This is all I know.”
Note: This story has been updated to reflect the re-branding of the recording studio previously known as DARP.
Producer Sonny Digital at his home studio in Midtown Atlanta, where he’s produced tracks for Que, Migos, Makonnen and others. (Michael A. Schwarz/for The Washington Post)
Metro Boomin on his in-studio perfectionism: “We polish, and polish, and polish.” (Michael A. Schwarz/for The Washington Post)
“Once you catch a hit, people expect another one,” says 23-year-old producer Sonny Digital. (Michael A. Schwarz/for The Washington Post)
FunkyFresh
Pro
^^^ that shyts way too catchy
Sonny Digi skinny as shyt 
it is true that the producers lead the way as far as breaking artists, which is cool to me
it is true that the producers lead the way as far as breaking artists, which is cool to me
28 Gramz
How U Luv That???
I aint really into all the new weirdo hipster ATL nikkas but this shyt goes hard as hell
Metro Boomin Won Summore Nikka
Metro Boomin Won Summore Nikka
28 Gramz
How U Luv That???
BlackMajik
Behind Enemy Lines
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2012
- Messages
- 41,634
- Reputation
- 10,944
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- 217,216
- Reppin
- DSGB(Down South Georgia Boy)
Man fukk da competition is my shyt 
28 Gramz
How U Luv That???
Murda Beatz be killin shyt
