You go to a Rico Nasty show and there's gay people, trans people, white people and black people all in the mosh pit together, and it's beautiful.
Kenny Beats
At the end of the day I'm not just sending beats in. I'm mixing the song. I'm recording the song. I'm engineering the song. I'm in the studio helping with the songwriting. I'm doing the whole beat - every single piece of it is me.
Lil Jon was definitely a pioneer for some of the punk-rap acts we see now. He showed you could scream on a song and still have a hit on the radio.
There's a difference between a beatmaker and a producer.
The point of '777' is for the world to hear adult Key. Your favorite new rapper's favorite rapper, grown up. My job was to lay any canvas he needed at any given moment.
I always had this ego where if I ever wanted to come back to doing rap, I could do that. That was not true. I would get stuck, I would be in a room and someone would ask me for something and I didn't have it.
Greedo is one of the most important California artists of our generation.
Idles are the best band in the whole world.
Being genre-bending doesn't really cross my mind. I don't consider anyone I work with a specific genre.
Being in the EDM world taught me that nothing's impossible.
I started making beats in high school.
I've been doing music in some form since I was seven years old.
When I make a lot of really good music with someone, I want to let the world hear it right now; unfiltered. I don't think it has to be more complicated than that.
I heard Idles and was like this is all I want to work on, this is all I want to do, these guys are the best. I got into their DMs and told them that and luckily we got to meet and the proof is in the pudding.
The real producers back in the day didn't sit there and play every single instrument. They made sure the record had the best performance out of everyone involved possible.
I feel like I wasn't making music that meant anything to me until I was 26 years old, so I'm realizing that sometimes it takes three years or five years to understand what the point of even making music together is.
I never was able to pay any type of bill doing the music that I was instinctually was making 'cause I loved it. I had to kind of pivot into doing the stuff that someone had taught me about to really get on my feet.
You need to make people think about society in a less literal and more primal way. It's about using the least amount of sounds to make the most amount of noise and energy, and making a bass stab really feel like you've been punched in the face.
When people are saying something to you, you gotta listen to them.
I'm a very self-sufficient person, much like a lot of people I work with.
I am friends with the most amazing musicians that can do pop, rap, punk and jazz.
You don't have to be best friends with people to make music.
Every time I'm working on something, I'm extremely excited about it.
Many times you make music and someone decides to try and pick the best of everything. But if you wait, you sometimes fall out of love, or a song doesn't speak to you anymore, so you lose the moment.
I've never seen Key think about how he was going to act on a song. He just is whoever he is that day.
The biggest thing Rick Rubin taught me is that you don't get any extra credit by doing everything yourself.
I got way more songs with Key! than Greedo, but I met them via each other, they Facetimed me at 6 A. M. in Atlanta, wearing sunglasses. Key! said, 'You and Greedo doing a whole project.' And I was like, 'Alright.' Then they hung up on me.
I get hit up all the time from every verified rapper with 1,000,000 followers like, 'Yo bro! You got the sauce right now. Send me beats!' Naw, that takes everything away from what I do.
Most of these producers have an agenda of what they want to push or what they think will be hot for someone. I don't have an agenda. My agenda is to take someone and bring out their dreams, what they're hearing in their head.'
I played guitar since I was 9 years old, drums since I was 11.
Rap music's the only thing that ever mattered.
By the end of high school, I was interning for no school credit, no money, no nothing, for Jonny Shipes. He was my first entry into going to XXL, being around rappers, meeting Yams and A$AP.
I had to learn how to bring the best outta Key! by learning what's going on with him. That's how I approach every artist I work with, period.
I was working for Johnny Shipes in New York when I was 17 years old, getting beats off.
I started a group called Loudpvck, which I do by myself now, and toured the whole world.
Key! is the greatest rapper alive. I honestly, truly believe that no one is as effortless, weird, and creative, and themselves as he has been for years and years.
I think a lot of people make a big misstep when they assume what an artist is going to be interested in, so I try to just take that out of the equation and make sure whenever I'm talking to people about their music, I'm getting all my context clues from that - and then we go to work.
People will go through 50 beats from a producer and pick the best ones, go make a song on that beat. That's cool, but someone coming to me and hearing what I've been working on, picking out pieces of all of that, and then adding some of their own ideas is way more exciting.
Making assumptions taught me a lot as a producer, because it's something I never do now.
Greedo taught me a lot. I don't say that about every artist. Some artists might teach me stuff musically, but Greedo taught me stuff about being a man and being a musician and being a creative, and being different from other people.
Since he was 17 years old in Atlanta, I think people always knew that there was something different about Key. He's obviously been able to adapt to so many sounds and time periods in his own way, which is clear from the long list of collaborators; but he has always retained an effortlessly weird perspective.
