At this yr’s BET awards, the respect for lifetime achievement went to Sean “Diddy” Combs – and why not? He signed the Infamous BIG and takes credit score for “inventing” the remix. He modified what it means to be referred to as a hip-hop tremendous producer whereas turning into a multi-platinum-selling rapper himself. Actually, he’s not that a lot totally different from Pete Rock.
Rock (actual title Peter O Philips) is the different type of super-producer, the one who truly does the grunt work of trawling for uncommon information and slicing and stitching them into one thing contemporary. The truth is, he might simply as simply take credit score for inventing the remix whereas reimagining Public Enemy’s Shut Em Down and Home of Ache’s Soar Round. Rock has collaborated with Kanye and Kendrick and seen his Midas contact translate to 25m world album gross sales and untold billions extra in streams. And he’s a powerful rapper in his personal proper; Rolling Stone ranks his 1991 hit with CL Clean, They Reminisce Over You, amongst its 500 best songs.
Earlier than Diddy’s polished samples had been fueling rap’s transition into the mainstream within the early aughts, Rock’s jazz-inspired beats outlined east coast hip-hop within the 90s. And whereas the 51-year-old Rock stays a drastically revered producer’s producer, there’s part of him that’s nonetheless preventing for due recognition. His large want, he tells the Guardian, is that “nothing that we’ve achieved in my time or period is disrespected, ever. Individuals gotta notice what respect means and begin exhibiting folks respect for the work they’ve achieved.”
This yr Rock dropped Petestrumentals 4, the newest in a group of vibes-only EPs – “beats that had been laying round that folks by no means actually used”, he says. They run the gamut from the Desi-inflected Das Me Da King to the a lot funkier Brother on the Run. On the lead observe, The Message, Rock reprises a signature trick: remixing Malcolm X’s speeches. “Being a proud Black myself, I really feel the message nonetheless must get on the market,” he says. “It’s unlucky that we misplaced lots of our leaders, particularly Malcolm. I simply wanna regurgitate the message to the folks, to the youth that’s having lots of points out right here.”
A Zoom name with Pete Rock is a time warp. Filling the display screen in his bucket hat, wooden bead necklace and observe go well with, he seems very very like a 90s b-boy. And he couldn’t appear any nicer or extra at peace. Nonetheless: although 90s retro is all the fad once more, children as we speak aren’t actually making an attempt to listen to Rock’s model of acutely aware hip hop. They’re too enamored with the mumble rappers who rhyme over entice beats and too naive to understand what they’re lacking. All of it offends Rock to his core.
Final month he shared a video of Eric Adams condemning drill rap – a darker entice subgenre that the New York Metropolis mayor linked to a rise in violent crime. “That type of hip-hop is doo doo and it disrupts the soul,” Rock wrote within the since-deleted put up. “It’s the results of greed, folks with no expertise and the destruction of the tradition.”
After all music lovers had been saying a lot the identical factor again in 1992, when Rock was looping a Tom Scott saxophone riff and a James Brown drum pattern to make They Reminisce Over You. The observe pays tribute to a backup dancer good friend of Rock’s who died whereas touring with Rock’s cousin, the rapper Heavy D.
Diddy, D and Rock all got here of age collectively within the 80s within the New York Metropolis suburb of Mount Vernon. Diddy made a degree of nodding at Heavy D in his BET awards acceptance speech. He additionally acknowledged Bobby Brown and touted him as the primary “Chocolate Boy Marvel”, one a slew of nicknames Diddy has reserved for himself. However for Rock – who not solely wasn’t talked about in Diddy’s speech, but in addition has been calling himself Chocolate Boy Marvel because the 80s – this in any other case harmless shoutout took on a extra sinister intent.
“I wouldn’t name myself puff daddy after I’m THE REAL CHOCOLATE BOY WONDA BOSS,” Rock shot again in a prolonged Instagram rant. “My brother Grap Luva taught you dance steps in your storage on dell ave. I contact drum machines and make beats 4 REAL. You cant erase what I’ve achieved in music or attempt to take my title lol.”
The second referred to as to thoughts a skit from Diddy’s No Manner Out album, The Mad Producer. On it, a fictional beat maker agitates over unpaid wages, report execs posing as producers and Diddy’s foray into rapping. Looking back, it appears like Diddy venting a couple of relationship that confirmed its first indicators of pressure when Rock complained about not being credited with producing Biggie’s breakout smash, Juicy.
Years of those slights, actual and perceived, have made Rock publicly combative relating to defending his singular knack. Regardless of his great respect for Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, as a producer and dealing with him and Jay-Z on the 2010 observe The Pleasure, Rock tweeted in 2019 that Ye “can by no means be like me relating to dem skillz”. He was equally crucial of Ye’s assist of Donald Trump.
This yr the rapper Canibus – whose profession stalled within the late 90s after an try to embarrass LL Cool J on a track backfired– returned with an EP referred to as C. Although it was billed as a Pete Rock manufacturing, the person himself pronounced it “tremendous trash”. “I WOULD NEVER EVER EVER NEVER EVER PRODUCE SOMETHING THAT SOUNDS THIS BAD OMG,” Rock tweeted. And but Canibus’s supervisor fortunately furnished receipts. (Canibus’s response: “Pete, I like you.”)
In the meantime, Rock and CL Clean have fought like brothers for many years and left followers hungry for a reunion all of the whereas. Although they solely produced two studio albums, their model of acutely aware rap set a excessive bar for the artwork type that arguably turned harder to uphold after their falling out.
However to listen to Clean inform it in a 2019 interview on Sirius XM, the rift with Rock goes “past music” to “having the ability to speak to one another, articulate, having the ability to perceive one another’s pains”. (Their on-again, off-again partnership was the one subject Rock’s supervisor deemed off limits earlier than our Zoom name.)
It’s sufficient to make you ponder whether there are any rappers left who can work with Rock. However, he says, “I’m at all times pondering of the brand new spitters. I’ve labored with a couple of of them – Kendrick on To Pimp a Butterfly. Now I’m working with even youthful cats that folks haven’t heard but. That’s an important half, getting new artists heard which might be dope. With actual expertise. That’s a part of my job, to make folks conscious of these varieties of issues.”
Although Rock has but to tire of placing a contemporary spin on previous information, be it as a producer or a DJ – “Sampling is such an addicting factor, – there’s nothing like pretending to be your individual band in your head” – it’s exhausting to not take inventory of the extent to which Rock’s contemporaries have developed. RZA, a peer and rival, scores movies. ninth Marvel, a protege, teaches beat making at Duke. The Roots, Rock’s acutely aware rap cousins, are The Tonight Present’s home band. (“It’s loopy,” he says. “I used do hip-hop with these dudes.”)
After which after all there’s Diddy, the arch-rival who did as a lot to construct hip-hop as to devastate the Bad Boy Records artists who helped him obtain billionaire standing – a few of whom are nonetheless preventing for full rights to their exhausting graft. And the truth that a Black label head couldn’t spare Black artists from this too-familiar destiny is partly why Rock is so defensive. “We’re waking up now to say, hey, I need to personal my music,” he says. “That’s my blood, sweat and tears on these tapes, and we should generate profits off of it like they’ve made cash off of it.”
However Rock, for all his agita, stays holistic about his work. That’s the bittersweet irony of his music: it might’t ever be all about him. “I by no means need to outshine the artist,” he says. “I simply need to be equal after I know we made an excellent product– that we are nice musicians.”
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