Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

The Producer Series: Dallas Austin

Twenty-nine tracks from an Atlanta producer who shaped TLC, launched Boyz II Men and then made records with Madonna and Gwen Stefani.

Dallas Austin

Dallas Austin is from Columbus, Georgia, moved to Atlanta as a teenager, and was producing hits before he was twenty. He is one of the small group of people — with Jermaine Dupri, L.A. Reid and Babyface — who turned Atlanta into the centre of American Black music in the 1990s.

His range is the notable thing. Austin produced hard-edged new jack swing, glossy pop-R&B, and later straight pop and rock for white artists, without any obvious change in method. He is also a genuine multi-instrumentalist who plays much of what is on his records.

He founded Rowdy Records and, later, the Dallas Austin Foundation, and has worked extensively in music education in Atlanta.

What to listen for

The TLC material is the core. "Creep" won a Grammy and is one of the strangest hit records of the decade — a song about retaliatory infidelity, built on a muted trumpet loop. "What About Your Friends," "Diggin' On You" and "Get It Up" complete the run.

Boyz II Men's "Motownphilly" is the record that launched them, and Austin produced it when the group were still teenagers.

Monica's "Don't Take It Personal" made a fourteen-year-old singer a star and remains one of the best R&B records of 1995.

Blu Cantrell's "Hit 'Em Up Style" is the most purely enjoyable thing here — a revenge song with a harpsichord on it.

The Madonna tracks come from Bedtime Stories, the album where she moved toward R&B, and "Secret" is the best of them.

Gwen Stefani's "Cool" is the pop peak — a genuinely lovely song about an ex-partner you are still fond of, which almost nobody writes.

Michael Jackson's "This Time Around" and the "I Wanna Be Where You Are" remix are the biggest credits, and Rahsaan Patterson's "Where You Are" is the deep cut.

Go deeper

TLC's CrazySexyCool (1994) is the album — one of the best-selling records ever made by a girl group, and considerably weirder than its sales suggest.

Rahsaan Patterson is the under-heard artist in this orbit and has a genuinely excellent catalogue.

For the Atlanta production world: Jermaine Dupri, Organized Noize, Bryan-Michael Cox and Polow da Don.

Listening note: follow the drums across these tracks and the signature gives itself away. Austin builds around a pocket that sits a hair behind where you expect it, which is why records he touched feel relaxed even at tempo — a producer's fingerprint hiding in plain sight.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more