Skip to main content

The Producer Series: The Hitmen

Sixty-eight tracks from the production team who made Bad Boy the most dominant label in American music for five years. The Hitmen earned the name.

The team behind the throne

The Hitmen were the in-house production collective at Bad Boy Records — a rotating group including Chucky Thompson, Deric "D-Dot" Angelettie, Stevie J, Mario Winans, Nashiem Myrick, Ron Lawrence and others, working under Sean Combs' direction.

Their method was straightforward and enormously effective: take a recognisable record from the 1970s or 80s, build a new track around a substantial and unmissable portion of it, and put a great rapper or singer on top. Purists complained that it was not really production. It was, however, extremely well done, and it made hip-hop the dominant commercial force in American music.

The economics also mattered. Clearing large samples was expensive, and Bad Boy's willingness to pay for them was itself a competitive advantage.

What to listen for

The Notorious B.I.G. is the centre of everything. "Big Poppa" uses the Isley Brothers' "Between the Sheets," "Hypnotize" uses Herb Alpert's "Rise," and "One More Chance" uses DeBarge. In each case the sample is not hidden — it is the point.

"Flava in Ya Ear Remix" is the posse cut of the era: Craig Mack, Biggie, LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes and Rampage, over one of the strangest, sparest beats ever to become a hit.

"I'll Be Missing You" — The Police's "Every Breath You Take," recorded after Biggie's murder — is the most commercially successful and the most contested. Sting has spoken about the royalties.

Mary J. Blige's "I'm Goin' Down" remix, Faith Evans' "You Used to Love Me" and Total and Biggie's "Can't You See" represent the R&B side, which is where the Hitmen were arguably at their best.

Usher's "Think Of You" and TLC's "If I Was Your Girlfriend" are the outside jobs, and Mase's "Feel so Good" is the purest distillation of the whole approach.

Go deeper

The Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die (1994) and Mary J. Blige's My Life (1994) are the two essential Hitmen albums, and they could hardly be more different in tone.

Chase the samples. Every record here has a 1970s or 80s original underneath it, and following them backwards is one of the most rewarding ways to build a soul collection.

And Chucky Thompson deserves individual attention — the D.C. producer whose contribution to My Life in particular is the reason that album sounds warmer than anything else Bad Boy released.

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

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
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