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Producer Series: Timbaland

Thirty-three tracks from the producer who rebuilt rhythm in popular music and made a decade of radio sound like nothing that came before it.

 

Timbaland

Timothy Mosley is the most rhythmically inventive producer popular music has produced in the last thirty years, and the argument is not close. Working out of Virginia Beach with Missy Elliott and Magoo, he arrived in the mid-nineties with a drum programming style that owed almost nothing to what American radio was doing.

The specifics: stuttering, syncopated patterns with beats deliberately left empty; percussion sourced from Indian, Middle Eastern and East Asian recordings; enormous amounts of space; and a habit of using his own breathing, grunts and mouth noises as instruments.

He then did the whole thing twice — once in the late nineties with Missy, Aaliyah and Ginuwine, and again in the mid-2000s with Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado, when he essentially reorganised global pop.

What to listen for

Ginuwine's "Pony" is where it starts, and the bassline — made from a sound nobody could identify for years — announced that something new had arrived.

Missy Elliott's "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" is the other founding record, built on Ann Peebles, with a beat that leaves more space than it fills.

"Big Pimpin'" with Jay-Z and UGK is built on an Egyptian record by Abdel Halim Hafez, and it is the clearest example of his sourcing.

"Are You That Somebody?" aside, Missy and Ginuwine's "Take Away" is the most beautiful thing in the catalogue.

Justin Timberlake's "What Goes Around" and "LoveStoned" are the FutureSex/LoveSounds peaks, and both are effectively two songs joined in the middle.

Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous" and "Say It Right" are the 2006 takeover, and the second is the better record by some distance.

"Apologize" with OneRepublic is the one that took him into rock radio, and Omarion's "Ice Box" is the R&B peak of that period.

Go deeper

Missy Elliott's Supa Dupa Fly (1997) and Aaliyah's self-titled 2001 album are the two essential Timbaland productions — the second is where the style is at its most refined and strange.

Aaliyah's death in 2001 is one of the great what-ifs in this music, and that album is the evidence.

Listening note: count what is missing. His patterns leave beats deliberately empty where a conventional producer would place a drum, and the space is where the groove actually lives. Add in the percussion sourced from outside American music and the breathing used as an instrument, and the whole method becomes audible within a couple of bars.

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