Posted on 10/03/2008
Face it, your beats suck. No one wants to hear them. You should sell that MPC3000 you've got sitting in the corner gathering dust and erase that cracked copy of Fruity Loops your hard drive. If you doubt the good Doctor's advice take a few minutes and listen to some selections from Sea-town's finest, Jake One, and understand just how much work a real producer puts in to master their craft. Jake occupies that "real hip-hop" zone of cats who can produce an underground hip-hop record and then turn around and work with Dr. Dre or 50 Cent. This versatility stems from his ability to hit THAT nerve: as the Ballatician E-40 once said "Jake One makes those diggin in the crates slaps." Just like Just Blaze or the Alchemist, Jake sticks to a fairly "traditional" blueprint musically, but within that traditional framework he pushes the envelope of quality as faaaaaaar as it can go. I've known Jake longer than most of the people on this message board have been in to hip-hop, so as the release date of his White Van Music LP grows closer, we sat down and talked about what it means to be a working producer in 2008.

DBC: Talk to me about "placements." All these cheesedicks sending out email blasts about how they might have a beat on some album that will be shelved until the 5th of Nevuary. What happened to caring about making good music?

JO: I hate that word!! Producers need to go back to actually working on their craft and slowdown on the mouthpiece game. Hustle is necessary on some level to be successful but it shouldn't be more important than your craft. The whole "superproducer" phenomena has set off a lot of this shit and nobody wants to play their position anymore. I'd rather be John Paxson out here winning titles than fucking World B Free.

DBC: You're pretty much a guy who's down with everyone: you fuck with G- Unit and you fuck with Boom Bap Project and pretty much everybody in between. Why? Why does everyone fuck with you?

JO: Can't really say. Maybe because I don't try to cater to any particular person or style. I genuinely do what the fuck I want when I create. If I try to make "50 Cent" beats he probably wouldn't pick em. I also come from that era when dorks didn't run underground rap and shit was actually cool. I pretty much started doing underground stuff and I never changed my mentality when it comes to making beats. My beats just started getting used by mainstream artists. I'll never stop doin underground shit because that's my foundation. A lot of the new producers want to skip the steps and that's why they fall off.

DBC: You're one of about four producers on Earth who collects records on some serious break yourself for a record with a black-dude-dressed- like-Paul-Revere-on-the-cover shit. Your crew the ConMen was (controversy alert), to my mind, the crew that really pioneered this break tape shit that a lot of self-appointed Kings and Queens of Digging take credit for. Speak on it. Don't be shy.

JO: LOL. I got The Cult record, is that a problem! The whole break tape thing was hella fun back then but I really felt like Supreme and I didn't get the chance to get our tapes out worldwide because we weren't from NY or LA. It was the same way with the records we were putting out. The two people that inspired me and Preme to do the Conmen tapes were Muro and Soulman. They were the first guys I heard doing those style of tapes. I still love buying records and discovering new sounds while spending outlandish yaper on shit I'll never listen to. Its probably my favorite thing to do at this point. After awhile though I decided I wanted to make my own music stand for me and not "discovering" somebody else's.

DBC: To stick with the controversy tip for a second, let's talk about how everyone is ashamed of their "backpacker" past. To me it's totally honorable and noteworthy to say that in the 90's you started your own record label and put shit out on wax instead of begging wack A&R motherfuckers with six two-way pagers who jocked fake Trackmasters Spanish-guitar preset beats to listen to your demo. These days though it seems like everyone wants to disown anything that ever had to do with their indy hip-hop past. You were involved with Conception, which put out some records that are now considered classics of their era and sell for udd loot on the Ebays. Do you miss that era?

JO: Its crazy how people change their attitude when things go out of style. I'm pretty much the same person I was during that time. Without the late 90's stuff I was involved in I never would have gotten to this point. When I started I didn't think I could actually make a living out of doing this. That's why I went to college and held down a job until 2006. I definitely miss that era in a major way. I feel old as shit these days! Its a different experience knowing when I turn on the machine that I gotta pay the bills with this beat. Back then I didn't even know what I was doin making beats. I would try things out and every once in awhile it would work out.

DBC: Furthermore and foremost, talk about your album. Who the fuck else has Busta, Casual, MOP and Brother Ali all on the same long player?

JO: With this album my first goal was to not do something generic. Once I got the basic foundation of the album together I tried to steer some of the rappers towards doin songs that I thought I needed to give the record some balance. More than anything I did a lot of waiting on rappers though! Once I got records from people I went back and added stuff to them and tried to flush them out a bit. Usually when I work with artists for their projects, I give them the beat and that's pretty much it. With this project I got to do whatever I wanted. Having all the different types of rappers on the record was just a natural extension of what I've been doing. The hardest thing about the album was getting it all to mold together.

Dr. Brown's Celray

For more, check it all out at Jake's myspace, and don't forget to cop White Van Music on Tuesday, October 7th.


Dr. Brown's Celray really wants to know the horn sample in Chill Rob G's "Wild Pitch Remix" but refuses to take that shit to the Breaks.com. He would like to give shout outs to Bob Bannister, Peter Oasis, the Duct Tape Kids, and Smithers with the tightly laced Jordans.