Hip Hop Royalty

Known for its rock, blues, and soul roots, new Memphis sounds are ruling the airwaves.

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Irresistible sounds have always sprung forth from this river town. Thousands flock to Memphis every year for its stunning music history, but that can be a mixed blessing: Those towers of song that grew to such heights in the last century cast long shadows over vital music being created right here and now. Certainly, many are happy to live among such towers, and Memphis bands still play the best rockabilly, rock-and- roll, blues, and soul you’ll ever hear. But beyond any such genres, a new Memphis sound is ruling the airwaves.

And by sound, I mean beats: In terms of internet listens, streaming, radio play, and/or physical sales, Memphis hip hop is royalty. “Look Alive,” by young local rapper BlocBoy JB, featuring the mega-star Drake, has hovered from #1 to #4 in the Billboard hip hop radio charts for 20 weeks as we go to press in July 2018. The video features those same ragged-but-right neighborhoods that the rappers’ lyrics immortalize. It’s a taste of the Memphis streets, and it’s on screens around the world.

“Look Alive” entered the R&B/hip hop radio top ten just as Pulitzer Prize-winner Kendrick Lamar’s “LOVE,” produced by Memphian Teddy Walton, was slipping down from a long stay at #1. At the same time, “Booty,” by Memphis' own Blac Youngsta, peaked at #5. Leading up to then, “Pills and Automobiles,” by Chris Brown, featuring legendary Memphis native Yo Gotti, had been holding steady after peaking at #6, even as Moneybagg Yo, mentored by Yo Gotti, percolated for weeks in the top 50 as well. As I researched this, the recent single by Memphian Young Dolph, “100 Shots,” was certified as a gold record, and Dolph's protege, Key Glock, had accrued over six million listens on Spotify and nearly three million views on YouTube with the single “Russian Cream.”

Which all goes to say that it’s Memphis hip hop’s world; we’re just living in it. And lest you think these hits can be chalked up to rappers being scooped into star-making machines on the far-distant coasts, many of these formidable hits were produced by Memphians as well. Indeed, for nearly thirty years, Memphis hip hop producers have been crafting unique sounds, and those sounds have caught the world's ear.

One measure of these sounds’ impact is their sheer longevity. What did Rolling Stone recently call “the most influential rap song of 2018?” None other than a onetime underground hit from the Memphis scene some 25 years ago, the inimitable “Slob My Knob,” by Three 6 Mafia's Juicy J. Re-samples of the track have made a splash this year, with three different artists using it, including G-Eazy on the chart-topping “No Limit.” That the beat has lived on through a quarter-century so other rappers may use it is a testament to the power of what Three 6 Mafia’s main producers, Juicy J and DJ Paul, created in the first place, long before they shared an Oscar with rapper Frayser Boy for their song “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp” from the movie Hustle & Flow. If that was a historical win for hip hop in 2006, it came after more than a decade of producing records far below the radar.

When it was all starting in the early 1990s, no one called it “crunk,” the term coined by the Three 6 Mafia to describe their style, built from the big booming beats of a Roland TR-808 drum machine, layered over with orchestral motifs lifted straight out of the horror movie genre. What began to catch a wave of popularity as crunk in the ’90s now lives on in the spirit of “trap music,” and that’s what most of the hits above would be considered. No wonder, then, that an original track from crunk’s origins is still credible enough to spawn hits today.

But if Three 6 Mafia coined the term, there’s some dispute over who actually developed the sound. There were many other hip hop producers active in the city then, including DJ Squeeky, who still makes hits today (such as Young Dolph’s “100 Shots”). Though he admits to being inspired by others like rapper/producer DJ Spanish Fly, he stakes his own claim on crunk’s development too. As he told The Memphis Flyer some years ago, Three 6 Mafia “were really on the ‘stealing people’s music’ thing back then. Their whole style, their beats, hooks, everything were based on shit I did. All the hooks that you heard from them [earlier on] were samples they took off my mixtapes. They were making their own songs off them. That’s how they got started.”

Nowadays, Squeeky will tell you the same thing, but it’s not as if he’s been left behind. Aside from his prolific work with Young Dolph, his older tracks are in demand too. “Oh yeah, people call me all the time, trying to re-sample my mix tapes and all that old stuff,” he says. “I be cutting publishing deals all the time. ’Cos they diggin’ back.” Yet he also notes a shift in the newest sounds of trap, away from the eerie harmonies of early crunk: “People making the new trap sounds, they’re making the beat with less of the music. When I was coming up, we had more music. It was in our blood with the Memphis sound, to have more music in a track — guitar, pianos, and all that other stuff.”

Nonetheless, young Memphis producer Tay Keith, who created the musical bed of “Look Alive,” thinks there’s plenty of musicality in just the beat, and plenty of Memphis in it, too. “Most Memphis artists and producers have a specific type of bounce to the music,” he says. “And that bounce set us aside from everybody else.” And he emphasizes that tracks with fewer musical flourishes are actually liberating for the rappers. “You give the artist more room to ride the beat,” he notes. “If you put too much into a beat, artists really don’t have much room to do what they want. Keep it really simple.”

First and foremost, in his view, is to stay innovative. “You have to be persistent with creativity,” says Keith. “You have to stay consistent with your sound, but be creative with that sound.” And this last point is not lost on a whole generation of producers and artists who are bubbling just under the surface of the hit parade. Though Memphis is somewhat of a Mecca for trap, there are many alternatives brewing.

Brewing up alternatives was exactly what producer IMAKEMADBEATS had in mind when he returned to his native Memphis some years ago. Having worked at New York's Quad Recording Studios, with the likes of Talib Kweli, Common, Missy Elliott, and Ludacris, he returned here in 2011.

“I would say I went up there as Nemo, which was just a nickname,” he says, “and I came back IMAKEMADBEATS, a kind of scarily dedicated guy.” Discovering an underground of alternative rappers here who wanted to move beyond the gangster imagery of crunk and trap, IMAKEMADBEATS envisioned a collective of rappers, producers, and other creatives who could support each other's adventurism.

A few years later, their alliance is a reality and a label. Known as Unapologetic, the prolific group is creating highly imaginative approaches to hip hop, from the disarming directness of PreauXX to the even more disarming A Weirdo From Memphis (AWFM). They’re even branching out into soulful R&B with the pure singing of Cameron Bethany, whose soaring 2017 debut is turning heads. And IMAKEMADBEATS may have reached a new level of creative production with a soon-to-be-released album he made with a bass virtuoso known as MonoNeon.

MonoNeon is not exactly hip hop, but he’s not exactly not. While he comes from a family firmly rooted in Memphis jazz and funk (his father has played bass with the Bar-Kays, among others, and his grandfather was a well-respected music teacher), MonoNeon is self-taught and tuned to the sounds of modern Memphis hits. His regular YouTube posts, featuring his rapid-fire bass gymnastics, caught the attention of Prince in the artist’s final years, and MonoNeon still treasures his time at Paisley Park. These days, he remains inspired by Prince’s eclectic musical freedom, touring as a member of Ghost Note and creating his own hybrid of old school funk and psychedelic hip hop, either in cahoots with IMAKEMADBEATS or with AWFM on such tracks as “America's Perverted Gentlemen (Drawls).”

Another collaborative group on the rise, known as The Collective, is expanding hip hop as well. The Collective is centered on visual artists, but two of them, Lawrence Matthews (aka Don Lifted) and Kenny Wayne, are painting with audio tones as well as pigments. When Matthews isn’t curating gallery shows, or creating sculptures from old TVs, he’s producing and releasing original material himself, often with booklets of his own photography and highly personal/political concept albums. Kenny Wayne, more solidly in the painter’s tradition, is also inspired by his brother, the producer WeboftheMacHinE, and produces musical tracks as well.

Aside from his own tracks, Wayne works extensively with rapper/entrepreneur Marco Pavé. Having been one of the featured producers on Pavé’s politically charged Welcome to Grc Lnd album (along with respected Memphis producer Carlos Broady), and having played cello as a teenager, Wayne was a natural associate to call when Pavé wanted to create a hip hop opera, Welcome to Grc Lnd: 2030. Pavé staged an abridged version of the opera this year, commissioned and produced by Opera Memphis as part of its Opera 901 Showcase, in performances coinciding with Memphis' MLK50 commemorations in April.

Sam Shoup, a local jazz and classical musician and arranger who teaches at the University of Memphis, has tutored Wayne on conducting techniques and offered help on Pavé's opera. Shoup notes, “Marco's got this vision of a dystopian society where the roles of African-American people and Caucasians are reversed. It’s very involved. We had to just do highlights of his thing for the performance in April. It would have taken an hour and half to do all of it. I’d like to see him flesh out this entire opera. It’s very interesting. His vision is huge.”

Shoup, believe it or not, has scored hip hop for orchestras before, starting with a project called Opus One, wherein the Memphis Symphony Orchestra partnered with longtime rapper Al Kapone. He’s also been integral to an annual holiday program begun by Memphis’ New Ballet Ensemble, Nut Re-Mix, which mingles ballet with jookin’, Tchaikovsky with hip hop and soul. Shoup sees the merging of styles as more than a flash in the pan, especially with dedicated artists like Pavé or Wayne. “The music [Wayne] picks is very interesting,” he says. “Kenny likes more orchestral, classically orchestral type things, from The Nutcracker and Swan Lake and stuff like that. And he puts beats to that. He’s got a bright future ahead of him.”

A host of other artists — Cities Aviv, C'Beyohn, and Hippy Soul, among others — are also making names for themselves in the Memphis underground’s thriving live scene of salons and pop-up shows. Others, like pioneering rapper Tommy Wright III, are building unconventional audiences elsewhere. Wright, who first emerged in the early 1990s, has built a huge following in the world of skateboarding. His latest Memphis performance was booked by the new skateboarding and music shop VHS. As Flyer reporter Andria Lisle writes, a sampling of Wright on YouTube reveals him “performing at L.A.’s hipster sneaker store Undefeated, or at the Circle Bar in New Orleans, surrounded by young white kids who know every syllable of his 1994 underground hit ‘Meet Yo Maker.’” And the owner of VHS notes that “Tommy really brings out a raw essence that skateboarders love. What he raps about isn’t glamorous — it’s the raw and dirty side of things.”

Which brings us full circle to the trap music that would be king. Memphis recently hosted the sixth annual Yo Gotti & Friends Birthday Bash at the massive FedExForum, and it showed no signs of flagging. As even IMAKEMADBEATS, the diehard experimentalist, notes, “Yo Gotti, I could never challenge. He’s a founder; he’s a general in his own right, next to DJ Paul.” With such massive trap stars leading the way, and sporting the tough production skills that thrive in Memphis, a new underground is gestating, ready to follow their lead and march across the world.