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9th Wonder VibeZ

Thirty-one tracks from a producer who came out of a college dorm in North Carolina and became one of the most influential figures in modern hip-hop and soul.

9th Wonder

Patrick Douthit was a student at North Carolina Central University when he formed Little Brother with Phonte and Big Pooh. Their 2003 debut The Listening was made on a cracked copy of FruityLoops and became a cult landmark almost immediately — warm, sample-heavy, deliberately out of step with the rap mainstream.

What followed was unusual. 9th Wonder produced for Jay-Z ("Threat," on The Black Album), Destiny's Child, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar, while simultaneously building an academic career — he has taught at North Carolina Central, Duke and Harvard, where he was a fellow at the Hiphop Archive.

He also runs Jamla Records and has developed Rapsody into one of the most respected MCs of her generation. Very few producers can point to a comparable record as a talent developer.

What to listen for

The Little Brother tracks — "I See Now" and "All for You" with Darien Brockington — are the foundation. "All for You" is a song about absent fathers, with Phonte and Big Pooh each addressing their own, and it is one of the most affecting records in the genre.

The Rapsody material is the ongoing project. "Afeni" with PJ Morton — named for Tupac's mother — and "Maya" come from Eve, an album with every track named for a Black woman.

Destiny's Child's "Girl" is the mainstream credit that surprises people, and it is genuinely lovely.

"Afro Blue" in his Blue Light Basement Remix reworks Robert Glasper, Erykah Badu and Phonte over the Mongo Santamaría standard — a jazz composition, a neo-soul singer and a Grammy-winning arrangement, all rebuilt.

The Dinner Party tracks — with Terrace Martin, Glasper and Kamasi Washington — are the modern supergroup, and Anderson .Paak's "The Season/Carry Me" is one of his best productions for anyone.

Go deeper

Little Brother's The Listening (2003) and The Minstrel Show (2005) are essential — the latter is a concept album about the packaging of Black entertainment and was, predictably, not promoted.

Rapsody's Laila's Wisdom and Eve are the best evidence of what Jamla does.

And Dinner Party's self-titled album is short, perfect, and the most enjoyable entry point to any of this.

A closing note on the teaching. Producers rarely become academics, and the fact that 9th Wonder has held posts at Duke, Harvard and North Carolina Central changes how his catalogue reads — the sample choices are archival arguments as much as aesthetic ones. Developing Rapsody over a decade is the same instinct applied to a person rather than a record.

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