Trackmasters Tell All: The Stories Behind Their Classic Records (Part 1)

Poke and Tone talk about working with Biggie, Nas, Mary J. Blige, and many more.

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Throughout the late ‘90s and early 2000s, you couldn't turn on urban radio without hearing a song produced by Trackmasters. Comprised of Jean-Claude “Poke” Olivier and Samuel “Tone” Barnes, the New York-based duo started out in the music business in the late ‘80s (back when Tone was a rapper known as Red Hot Lover Tone) and went on an incredible run of hits. Today, their discography speaks for itself.

They worked with everyone from legends like Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap, and LL Cool J to pop rappers like Will Smith to commercial darlings like Jay-Z, The Notorious B.I.G., and Nas. Along the way, they also made R&B smashes for the likes of R. Kelly, Mary J. Blige, Destiny’s Child, and Mariah Carey. Not to mention the fact that they helped usher in acts like Soul For Real, T.C.F. Crew, and a pre-bullet wound 50 Cent. Needless to say, these guys got hits for days.

They’ve also got an undeniable chemistry—one they possibly honed while spending years playing Run and Gun at local arcades back in the days. Maybe that’s why when we sat down with them at their studio in NYC's SoHo neighborhood, they were able to finish each other's sentences when recalling classics from their catalog. What else would you expect from guys who’ve worked together for over two decades?

In part one of our epic conversation, the duo talked about getting in the game, the last days of Cold Chillin’ Records, and the rise of Bad Boy Records. They had plenty of stories to share, including how Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs (as he was known back in those days) was the master of taking credit and a hilarious story about how Steve Stoute became their manager. They also revealed the secret production technique behind all of their hits and how they were never properly credited for making hip-hop classics like Biggie’s “Who Shot Ya?” and Method Man’s “You're All I Need to Get By” remix. Get ready for your history lesson.

As told to Insanul Ahmed (@Incilin)

Follow @ComplexMusic

Starting Out

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Chubb Rock "Just The Two Of Us" (1991)

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Album: The One
Label: Select Records

Poke: “That was the first [song we really did]. Howie Tee did the original and we came in and did the remix. We met Chubb through doing ‘Soul Sisters’ for Finesse & Synquis. When we went in to do that joint, Chubb came in to write the rhymes for them.”

“Chubb was like, ‘I like the way you guys work and the music that you guys do. You should come in and make some records with me.’ I was like okay and ‘Just The Two of Us’ was one of the first ones that we did. Chubb was one of the first real rappers we worked with that we were excited about it. He did one-shot vocals, every time.


 

Even when we got to what we perceive to be the top, we realized we didn’t know sh*t. And it’s not really the top, you just look at that sh*t and you’re like, ‘Oh sh*t, I was nothing!’ Nobody knows. You would never know. You would never guess. - Poke


 

“Chubb taught us a lot about the business that we didn’t know because we were fresh in the game. It was an enlightening experience because you think you know but you don’t really know, and when you really think that you know, you really don’t know. It’s crazy.

“Even when we got to what we perceive to be the top, we realized we didn’t know shit. And it’s not really the top, you just look at that shit and you’re like, ‘Oh shit, I was nothing!’ Nobody knows. You would never know. You would never guess.

“Then we got to see who was actually controlling everything. We looked at shit going on, like, ‘Holy crap, it doesn’t even matter.’ You work hard, you do all these different things, you’re striving to make good music, and it doesn’t even matter. It’s bugged out.

“It’s funny how life puts strings. You grab the next rope not knowing what’s going to happen. But something manifested off of that which was a great experience. It shows your timeline in life and where the forks in the road were.

“That record led to going into Select Records and doing everything on that. Then that’s when Fly Ty called us and we went into Cold Chillin’ and we got into working with Kool G Rap and Big Daddy Kane. One thing led to another. Those situations led to all of those different [opportunities].”

Red Hot Lover Tone "Give It Up" (1992)

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Album: Red Hot Lover Tone
Label: Select Records

Tone: “I was a rapper before I was a producer. I had Heather Hunter in my video. Back in the day, I think I was one of the first rappers to have a porno star in their video.”

Poke: “If not the first.”

Tone: “That album came about because I was a rapper before I become a producer. I started out writing for Finesse & Synquis when Puff Daddy was their A&R. I wasn’t signed as a rapper but that gave us our segue into the production side of music. Being an MC always stayed on my mind, so when we hooked up with Chubb Rock and produced his I Gotta Get Mine Yo album, Chubb got me the deal at Select. We actually made two albums. The albums were cool.”

Poke:“For back then, they were good.”


 

I had Heather Hunter in my video. Back in the day, I think I was one of the first rappers to have a porno star in their video. - Tone


 

Tone: “My budget was $60,000 to do the album. We had Biggie on the record back then. I had a Hip-Hop Quotable in The Source. We had a lot of people on the album: Pharoahe Monch, Charlie Brown from Leaders of the New School, Diamond D, Greg Nice, and Buckwild.”

Poke: “We got a little more hip to the business side of things. We knew Select wasn’t really a good label to fuck with. But we were making more money on the production side than we were on the rap side so it was like, ‘Fuck that.’”

Tone: “I remember the day I hung up my mic as a rapper. I was up at Select and we had put out the red vinyl on my song ‘4 My Niggaz’ which featured M.O.P., Prince Poetry, and The Notorious B.I.G. It picked up real fast in the street and Select wanted to drop the album in like three or four weeks. That was only a set-up record in my eyes.

“I was like, ‘We have to come up with an official single.’ But they wanted to drop the album and it was a huge argument up there. I was like, ‘Fuck y’all. I’m not doing anything.’ I walked out of the door. I said, ‘Fuck you. Fuck y’all.’ I walked out and I just never went back. I’m still probably signed to them. [Laughs.]”

Poke: “[Label founder] Fred Munao was probably mad after he seen all of our success. He was probably like, ‘I was an idiot.’”

Kool G Rap "On the Run (Al Capone Version)" (1992)

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Album: Live & Let Die
Label: Cold Chillin'

Tone: “[Founder and owner of Cold Chillin’ Records] Tyrone 'Fly Ty' Williams’ nephew O.J.—who I grew up with—called us and they asked if had anything for him. That’s how we got into the Cold Chillin’ building.

“Before we got to work with G Rap, we worked Roxanne Shanté and Cold Chillin’ gave us a production deal for a group we had called Little Bastards. They gave us $7,500 for production for Little Bastards.”

Poke: “Fly Ty was seizing the moment of what he would call ‘birthing us.’ He was like, ‘I birthed those guys! Those are my dudes!’”

Tone:“Plus he was getting us for like $1,500 a record.”


 

We always wanted to make records for rappers’ rappers. G Rap and Kane were the rappers’ rappers. If you made a rapping record with them, that’s it. You could hang up your fucking MP and say, ‘I’m good, I did everything that I wanted to accomplish.’ - Tone


 

Poke: “Kool G Rap got a 2-for-1 deal because that’s how we were in the beginning. Remember, we were fans of everyone we worked with.”

Tone: “We were super G Rap fans. We always wanted to make records for rappers’ rappers. G Rap and Kane were the rappers’ rappers. If you made a rapping record with them, that’s it. You could hang up your fucking MP and say, ‘I’m good, I did everything that I wanted to accomplish.’”

Poke: “These were all artists that we grew up watching. We always wanted to work with them. We wanted to make records for that whole Cold Chillin’ crew. Like, ‘Give me any one of those rappers, we’ll make records.’ Who didn’t want to work with them? We had the opportunity because we were Fly Ty’s little guys like, ‘Yeah, this is my little producers. These niggas is nice.’”

Tone: Meanwhile, Sir Jinx was doing G Rap’s album. Jinx was a big name because he was working with N.W.A and Ice Cube. We were like, ‘Wow. Jinx is on there.’ As G Rap was working on his album, we had made some ground as producers. Fly Ty believed in us and he told G Rap, ‘You really gotta go in with these guys.’”

Poke: “So we got in with G Rap and we gave him ‘On The Run’ first because he did a video for the song. Jinx had produced the album version of the song and people were complaining like, ‘This sounds like an N.W.A album. It doesn’t sound like a New York street record,’ and ‘What the fuck is this L.A. shit?’ That’s basically where their mindset was at the time.

“So we’re like, ‘Give us some acapellas, we’ll get busy.’ They gave us the ‘On The Run’ acapella and it became ‘On The Run (Remix).’ That became the record because the one he did, we wasn’t fucking with that.”

Kool G Rap "Ill Street Blues" (1992)

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Album: Live & Let Die
Label: Cold Chillin'

Poke: “After we did ‘On The Run,’ Cold Chillin’ asked if we had more records so we gave G Rap ‘Ill Street Blues.’ That’s when everyone was like, ‘OK, whoever they are, they got it. Let them get with G Rap and do what they need to do.’”

Tone: “G Rap was exactly who I thought he was. Not to go into detail, but he was going through some beef, some gangster drama when we met him. He was who we thought he was. He didn’t disappoint us in the studio. He wrote his own stuff. He wrote hot rhymes.

“It’s interesting because the ‘Ill Street Blues’ track was something that we had in our studio for a long time. We wouldn’t give it to anybody. It was a hot beat in the studio and we didn’t want to waste it on anyone. We used to just put it on and freestyle to it in the studio but we never gave it away until G Rap came along.”


 

We didn’t understand it because what Puffy was trying to do was brand new. He would talk about ‘Ill Street Blues’ and be like, ‘I want that record right there for Mary J. Blige.’ We would say that doesn’t make sense for Mary. But really what he wanted to do was basically put her over hip-hop breakbeats and make a hip-hop album. - Tone


 

Poke: “We were like, ‘Give it to the rappers' rapper.’ We went in and we were like, ‘This is it, this is the moment [to give the beat away].’ It’s one of those moments that you seize the right opportunity and it worked. What it did is it gave us the hip-hop producer stamp, like, ‘Yo, these guys got beats.’”

Tone: “At the time, [the hip-hop producers were] Large Professor, Buckwild, Pete Rock, DJ Premier—all those guys. It gave us that stamp as official producers but then we quickly turned into the ‘pop producers.’”

Poke: “We were always in the Uptown world from our work with Finesse & Synquis. When Puff Daddy was working with Mary J, Blige and Jodeci, we were messing with G Rap. So we missed those string of records. But we had an invite to go and make those records.

“We were like, ‘Do we want to mess with these new artists or do we want to mess with G Rap?’ Do we want to go mess with all these new artists or do we want to go mess with these top-tier artists?’ We said, ‘Let’s go mess with the top-tier artists.’ We went the G Rap route because none of those artists were out yet.”

Tone: “I remember when Puff came to us...”

Poke: “—Puff was like, ‘Gave us the Mary record! I want a rap record for Mary.’”

Tone: “We didn’t understand it because what he was trying to do was brand new. He would talk about ‘Ill Street Blues’ and be like, ‘I want that record right there for Mary.’ We would say that doesn’t make sense for Mary. But really what he wanted to do was basically put her over hip-hop breakbeats and make a hip-hop album. That was it. But we missed that boat.”

Poke: “No, but we got the very next boat.”

Tone: “That boat was the most important boat.”

Poke: “The most important boat.”

Big Daddy Kane "How U Get a Record Deal?" (1993)

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T.C.F. Crew "I Ain't The One" (1993)

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Soul For Real "Candy Rain" (1994)

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Album: Candy Rain
Label: Uptown

Poke: “The whole Soul For Real experience came out of Heavy D trying to experiment and see if he can create an act that was viable in the marketplace. Hev was like, ‘I like the shit that you dudes do. I got this R&B group and I want to make them like the Jackson 5. We should go in and make records together.’ So we were like, ‘Yeah, Hev. Let’s go.’

“We locked into the studio—similar to what we are doing now with LL Cool J—and stayed in the studio for two weeks and made Candy Rain. It was us, Heavy D, and Terry Robinson. We just locked in and started coming up with ideas. We became really good friends with Hev while making that whole Soul For Real album.”

Tone:“We were in the studio making records. There was no record deal for the group, no future plans. We were just creating. Hev’s thing was that he was going to make some songs for this group, bring it in, and see how [Uptown Records founder] Andre Harrell felt about it.”


 

When Andre Harrell came into the studio and was like, ‘Yo this is nuts!’ Puffy came in the studio too. Puff was on some real competitive, whisper sh*t like, ‘Why you giving this ni**a Hev hits? What are you doing? Yo, I’m working with Mary ni**a. You wanna do Mary? What are you doing? You doing music? Come on, B.’ - Poke


 

Poke: “Andre felt like it was the best shit he had heard in a long time. Andre linked it up and started putting the marketing plan together for them. It was crazy because it was summer time when we made the record and they came out in the fourth quarter. Which is unheard of, an act coming down in the fourth quarter. The single was out in September. It was fast.”

Tone: “At that time, we were still just 22 or 23 years old—kids having fun. We were appreciative of the work and the artists that was coming in. It was never ever about money in the beginning. It was, ‘Hev said he wanted to work? OK.’ We never said, ‘If you get a deal for these kids, how much will you pay us for tracks?’ It was never about that.

“That was with everything we did, even with all the work that was done for Bad Boy in the beginning from ‘Juicy’ to ‘One More Chance’ to ‘Be Happy’ for Mary. A lot of that stuff was just because we just loved doing it...”

Poke: “—And we loved working with our favorite artists. There were levels of business that we didn’t know about. At that time, the level of business was, ‘I’m getting a check so I can pay my rent.’ That’s all we wanted to do, let me pay my pager bill and my rent and I’m good. We would get the check and we would pay our pager bill for five months. Like, ‘We good for five months!’”

Tone: “We used to get a check, go to the bank together to deposit it, wait the three days, go back to the bank to take money out together. Then we’d go shopping and buy sneakers and shit.”

Poke: “We didn’t know that we were making hits. We were just making records. But when Andre came into the studio and was like, ‘Yo this shit is nuts!’ Puffy came in the studio too. Puff was on some real competitive, whisper shit like, [Does Puff Daddy impression] ‘Why you giving this nigga Hev hits? What are you doing?’

“That’s when Puff was like, ‘Yo, I’m working with Mary nigga. You wanna do Mary? What you want to do? I’m doing Mary and Usher. What are you doing? You doing music? Come on, B.’ So that’s when we started going to work with Usher and Mary right after that.”

Mary J. Blige "Be Happy" (1994)

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Album: My Life
Label: MCA

Tone: “Poke was laughing at me. He had the sample of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘You're So Good To Me” in the house. Remember, hip-hop R&B had existed. But no one had taken [real] R&B to make an R&B record. So he had this Curtis Mayfield going, and it’s like instruments all over the place. I’m like, ‘Where the fuck is she supposed to sing?’ Because you can’t break it down into the drums.”

Poke: “Tone kept asking, ‘Where we gonna drop it?’”

Tone:“And he’s like, ‘No, she’s going to sing over all of this.’ I’m like, ‘This shit doesn’t make any sense.’ We couldn’t really add any instruments to it because it was just done. I said, ‘That’s never going to work, you’re out of your mind.’ But then Poke obviously took it and played it for Puff.”


 

We had a secret how to take out drums out of instrumentals. So now it’s just the music, all we got to do is put our smack on it. And that’s what we did—we’d put our smack on the record and go. - Poke


 

Poke: “Then Tone and I started running with that whole thing of being like the DJ at the block party. The DJ plays instrumentals and people rhyme. So that was the whole notion, like this is a DJ playing a record. Let’s put our big drums under this.

“We had a secret how to take out drums out of instrumentals. So now it’s just the music, all we got to do is put our smack on it. And that’s what we did—we’d put our smack on the record and go. One of our partners had an idea of how to formulate that.

“It was a long process at the time for us because we were used to trying to make records really fast. So it’s almost like a process to make the record, in order to do that. We were like, ‘That shit take too damn long, I’m not doing that.’ But when it worked and it gave you the ability to drop the drums out of that shit, that’s all we did. Like, ‘Fuck that—I don’t care how long it takes.’”

Tone: “That formula made all of our hits.”

Poke: “Every record.”

Tone: “Every hit that we had we used this one little formula. See, because it was hard to sample a record like Sam Cooke’s ‘Good Times.’ How do you put a drum on top of a beat that already had a drum? We found a way to basically take out the kick and snare.

“Today, it’s easy to do it. But back then, we found a way to isolate the kick and isolate the snare and keep all the music and then add our own kicks and snares. We called it The Fadies.

“Basically, what we were doing was fading kicks and snares inside of the samples. I can play a sample for you and there would be no drums in it whatsoever because we broke the sample up into 100 pieces. You could take anything you didn’t want out. It was ridiculous.”

Poke: “It took a long time. It was tedious.”

Tone: “But we got good at it.”

Poke: “When all of the other producers under us found out the formula that we were doing, we all started doing it. It was like, ‘We can’t tell nobody this secret. This shit is crazy.’”

Tone: “We kept it a secret until just now.”


 

Every hit we had used this one little formula...we found a way to isolate the kick and isolate the snare and keep all the music and then add our own kicks and snares. We called it The Fadies. Basically, what we were doing was fading kicks and snares inside of the samples. I can play a sample for you and there would be no drums in it whatsoever because we broke the sample up into 100 pieces. We kept it a secret until just now. - Tone


 

Poke: “It’s crazy because it just broadens your library of records because now you can use everything. It doesn’t matter what record it is. So now you can go crazy. And all our producers, let’s just say their production went [to the next level] after they learned that. They were just doing records like, Forget this!”

Tone: “No sample was off limits.”

Poke: “Everything could be used. It’s almost like somebody giving you all the instrumentals in the world and took all the drums out. All producers want that. And it’s like, ‘I can get all that?’”

Tone: “If you think, everything in the ‘90s that was sample driven, it was basically coming from Bad Boy, So So Def, and the Trackmasters in the ‘90s. Everyone was basically racing to get the next hot sample.”

Poke: “It’s funny because when we had that formula we came up with a list of records, like, ‘We are going to use all of these records.’ Tone and I just went and made all of those records and started dishing them out. Everyone was going crazy. We were selling four or five records a week, like hotcakes. It was nothing.”

Tone: “It was interesting because it was also the era that we grew up in. We grew up listening to that music. So a lot of it was current knowledge. People looking for records from the disco or R&B era. We’re like, ‘Oh OK, you can use this.’ The library was right there. I didn’t have to go search for anything because it’s what we grew up in.”

Poke: “Even if you’re using a sample from say an ‘80s disco record and you’re bringing it to the ‘90s, you change the sound of it because now the drums are different, the swing is different, everything is different. You can hear the sample in there, like, ‘Yeah, this shit sound real familiar but it doesn’t feel like a disco record anymore. It feels like a hip-hop record.’”

Tone: “It’s the best of both worlds. You’ve got the new sound, the new snare, the punch, but then you’ve got that sound that you can’t recreate. That old, vinyl ‘80s feel.”

Mary J. Blige "No One Else" (1994)

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Album: My Life
Label: MCA

Poke: “That was more of being in the Puff camp. A lot of it was, Puff had a lot of talented producers and writers. I didn’t even call them producers. We called ourselves producers but now in hindsight we weren’t really producers. We were more like beat makers who learned how to produce.

“Puff had a lot of talented people around him and he knew who to get certain things [out of them]. Every time he was going to make what he considered big records, our names would always come up. We would go in and fix whatever he needed fixed and deliver whatever he needed to deliver. So we were like his go-to guys when he needed ‘that joint.’


 

You look foolish walking in and not having a capable executive or a capable manager speaking on your behalf. Somebody has to play the good cop, somebody has to play the bad cop. The bad cop was always the manager. Let the artist be the artist. - Poke


 

“That’s how we got really on top. Terry Robinson used to write for him a lot and used to always want [us]. ‘If Poke and Tone is doing it, I’m in.’ That’s how Puff used to get it together. ‘Yeah I’ll go get them. That’s nothing. That’s my boy. I get Poke right now.’ So we got in and just made the record."

Tone: “We were just getting more hip to the business, understanding that we were also artists and not just beat makers. We had our first manager, Steve Stoute.”

Poke: “We were always afraid of management because we always heard the horror stories of what managers do, like taking publishing away from you. Those Teddy Riley horror stories. We never wanted to fall under that umbrella.

“All the different things we heard, we were just like, ‘Fuck a manager, we’re going to try to do it ourselves the best way we can.’ But it comes to a point where you’ve got to have somebody to represent you.

“You look foolish walking in and not having a capable executive or a capable manager speaking on your behalf. Somebody has to play the good cop, somebody has to play the bad cop. The bad cop was always the manager. Let the artist be the artist.”

The Notorious B.I.G. "Juicy" (1994)

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Album: Ready to Die
Label: Bad Boy/Arista

Poke: “This goes back to the whole block party thing. Puff said, ‘Yo ‘Juicy Fruit’ is a hot record to jack.’ OK. I went home, we put the shit together, came back to the studio, Biggie rhymed, and that was it. That’s the whole story.

“I don’t know where Pete Rock came from [saying he did the original version]. Maybe Puff tried to get Pete to do it and maybe it didn’t come out the way he meant it. That could have happened prior to it coming for us to do. But that’s really what it was.

“You know what it is also? Because of what we knew about how to chop records up, people had ideas of using things, but they could not get the proper elements they needed to make a verse, a hook, and a bridge.


 

I don’t know where Pete Rock came from [saying he did the original version]. Maybe Puff tried to get Pete to do it and maybe it didn’t come out the way he meant it. That could have happened prior to it coming for us to do. But that’s really what it was. - Poke


 

“But we had the Fadies formula on how to just take anything. I don’t give a fuck what the record is—we can make it happen. We did that and that’s how ‘Juicy’ came about. Like I said, maybe they tried to do it prior to that and it didn’t work out, but that was the end result. That was the second time [we felt successful]. Working with G Rap was the first.

“The other thing about the business that we didn’t know is the viability of having a Top 10 record on the charts. We didn’t know what the fuck that was. People were like, ‘You know you got a Top 10 record?’ We were like, ‘So what?’”

Tone:Billboard didn’t mean anything to us.”

Poke: “We in the fucking arcade playing video games.”

Tone: “There used to be an arcade around 47th and Broadway and there used to be a basketball video game called Run and Gun. We used to go in there and play it all the time. One day, Steve Stoute was in there playing.

“We started playing Run and Gunagainst each other for hours. We got to talking and it turns out he was down with Kid 'n Play. We were absolutely not interested in Kid 'n Play, but we maintained a relationship with each other.


 

We knew Steve Stoute, we were friends, so we had a meeting at RCA Records. While in the meeting, Steve said I’ll be right back and went to the other room. He came back like 15 minutes later and said, ‘I just got fired. Do you guys need a manager?’ And that was it. RCA let him go from that day and he became our manager. - Tone


 

“One day, I seen him in the studio. He was working with an artist called Bass Blaster. I went up there playing some tracks for Bass Blaster. We knew each other, we were friends, so we had a meeting at RCA Records.

“While in the meeting, Steve said I’ll be right back and went to the other room. He came back like 15 minutes later and said, ‘I just got fired. Do you guys need a manager?’ And that was it. RCA let him go from that day and he became our manager.”

Poke: “Steve just wanted us to understand who we were and where we were in the game. We didn’t understand any of that because we didn’t really understand the business like that. He was trying to make us aware of our value.

“When we got with Steve Stoute and he became our manager, he showed us the viability of what that was. At the time, we had Soul For Real, Mary J. Blige, and Biggie all on the Top 10 charts. Steve was like, ‘Do you know who you niggas are?’ We’re like, ‘What are you talking about, man? Let me finish playing fucking video games. I don’t fucking care.’”

Tone: “He’d be like, ‘You know how hot you guys are?’ We’d be like, ‘No.’ When Steve came in, he was able to capitalize on the success that we were having. The success that we were having wasn’t being celebrated by anybody. It was kind of just, ‘You can go get those guys any time you want. They’re right there. They’ll be here tomorrow.’”

The Notorious B.I.G. "Respect" (1994)

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Album: Ready to Die
Label: Bad Boy/Arista

Poke: “It wasn’t me by myself. It was me and Tone who made that beat. The credits read [Poke for Trackmasters] but that was a me-for-my-team kind of deal. If Tone was making records, it was Tone for our team. It’s not like we didn’t do it as a Trackmasters unit.

“Sometimes, because we had certain relationships, we used to do records outside of Trackmasters. But it wasn’t really outside of that; it was just that I had the relationship so I did that. We all knew Puff. I put Poke for Trackmasters, which was our team.


 

It was me and Tone who made that beat. Back then, credits used to get f**ked up all the time. Labels would get it f**ked up, period. Especially if you didn’t have management or a good administration staff behind you making sure that everything is right. - Poke


 

“Back then, credits used to get fucked up all the time. Labels would get it fucked up, period. Especially if you didn’t have management or a good administration staff behind you making sure that everything is right.

“As we started building our staff and getting our company together, we got good administrators so credits would read better, publishing rights would read better. Everything would be under control. But if it’s just you and your man, especially if you’re 20 years old and you don’t know shit, everything would get fucked up. That’s why sometimes credits got messed up.

“If you don’t have a good staff, you can get railroaded really fast. That’s one of the things that artists and producers have big problems with trying to make records. It’s a daunting task but someone has to stay on top of it in order for you to get your just due.”

Tone: “I never liked ‘Respect.’ I didn’t like Diana King.”

Poke: “It’s just finding hot loops to use. Let’s try this kind of thing, press play, this shit is hot. Trying to fill niches on the album. Which slots work best kind of thing. And it just worked out.

“When Puff make records he tries to make what he considers the 15 best and keep 12. He was going through that whole thing. And it was really the tail end of the album and we were trying to find slots. Let’s do this kind of thing. And Biggie was a beast.”


 

I never liked ‘Respect.’ I didn’t like Diana King. - Tone


 

Tone: “He was a kid too though.”

Poke: “He was happy.”

Tone: “He was just rapping. Once the music business really becomes a part of your life, you start to realize some of it’s not fun anymore. I think when Biggie was making that album, being up in Scarsdale at Puffy’s house, he was just having fun. He was just spitting and taking direction. And that was it.”

Poke: “And you know, Puff whole thing was like, ‘Let me put everybody in the same house and get everything I need to so I don’t have to run around different places.’ So that’s what happens. Mary, Craig Mack, Biggie, Usher, everybody in the same fucking house. Let’s go. He put together the fucking unit. We played, we joked, we made records.

“When we made those records, we got snowed in Scarsdale at Puffy’s house. We couldn’t leave. We were there for two and a half, three weeks snowed in. It was a ridiculous snow storm. We could not get out.”

The Notorious B.I.G. f/ Faith Evans & Mary J. Blige "One More Chance (Remix)" (1994)

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Album: Ready to Die
Label: Bad Boy/Arista

Poke: “Puff was like, ‘We need a sexy record. My fat dude is sexy. He ugly and sexy.’ We’re like, ‘Really?’ So he was like, ‘Let’s try to fucking attack one of these DeBarge joints, let’s go in that direction.’ So we got the DeBarge album and he was like, ‘This ‘Stay With Me’ shit, this shit right here is the shit, nigga!’

“I’m looking at him like, ‘Are you fucking nuts? You can’t be serious with what you’re talking about. It’s a ballad.’ That’s what I was thinking, this is a fucking ballad. So I go home. Now here’s the thing, he’s singing all over the fucking song. Even when it breaks down, he’s singing all over it. There’s no bass lines, there’s no nothing. So how do you chop it up? So that comes back to our Fadies technique.


 

It’s no big deal [we didn’t get the proper credit for that record]. It’s not like Puff don’t know what he’s doing. He is—if not one of the all-time greatest—the best A&Rs in the business. He knew about putting proper elements together and making hits. He probably wasn’t thinking, ‘I may be f**king up some of these people’s lives by not giving them the proper credit.’ - Poke


 

“So we take it, chop it up, and bring it to the studio. ‘WOOOO!’ Puff jumps on the table, do all the shit that he does, and starts going crazy. Biggie, he’s smoking his la in the back of the studio, bobbing his head. You don’t know what the fuck he’s doing but the whole record is being written as he’s smoking his chronic. Then he goes into the booth, Mary and Faith come in, and that’s it.”

Tone: “Puff is really good at putting records together. He’s a great executive producer. I guess he just wanted to take all his resources—Mary, Faith, his whole camp. I think the video was supposed to have more people in it singing the hook. That’s basically how that record came together. But because it was a remix and today it’s looked at as the main version.”

Poke: “Obviously. I don’t know when the last time I heard the original. Back then, anything that came out under Bad Boy was Puffy’s record. So he does take credit. Sometimes not on purpose, but just because it came out on Bad Boy.”

Tone: “But there’s great producers that produced for him for years. Easy Mo Bee, Chucky Thompson, Deric ‘D-Dot’ Angelettie, the whole Hitmen crew.”

Poke: “It’s no big deal [we didn’t get the proper credit for that record]. It’s not like Puff don’t know what he’s doing. He is—if not one of the all-time greatest—the best A&Rs in the business. He knew about putting proper elements together and making hits. He probably wasn’t thinking, ‘I may be fucking up some of these people’s lives by not giving them the proper credit.’

“Mind you, this is pre-e-mail, this is pre-everything being typed out. Stupid shit would happen. Let’s say we’re working on an album and we did two songs. Then the artist goes and works with other producers. Then they want to do more records when they get to the tail end of the album and we do more songs. The first set of songs get a first set of credits and then the last set of songs gets a different set of credits; it’s two different pieces of paper that you hand in.


 

Puff goes in, he puts the proper team together, a hit record comes out, and he takes the [credit]. He’s the pool shark, he’s the best at getting credit. He knows how to seize the opportunity to make sure the credit favors him. - Poke


 

“The information may be the same so the label’s administration will say, ‘We can’t find the other pieces of paper so we’ll just go with these credits because we’re running out of time.’ Then they just mirror whatever the first set of credits were. Then you get writers and musicians getting mad at you, the producer, like, ‘Yo, you dicked me on the credit and all that.’ It’s like, ‘Yo, I have no control over what these guys at the label do.’

“It’s a little different now because you have email, you can hand it in really fast. But prior to that, there was no email, so you had to physically go in there and hand in the credits. Stuff like that got twisted out a lot.”

“You’re young. You don’t think. You’re just trying to do your thing and make the best situation for yourself. Puff goes in, he puts the proper team together, a hit record comes out, and he takes the [credit]. He’s the pool shark, he’s the best at getting credit. He knows how to seize the opportunity to make sure the credit favors him. It’s cool though.”

The Notorious B.I.G. "Who Shot Ya?" (1995)

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Album: N/A
Label: Bay Boy

Poke: “That’s me and Nasheen Myrick [from The Hitmen] on that record but they fucked up the credits. I don’t stress that. I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s over. We go on and we make more records.’ It’s a lot of things that people don’t know that we were involved in, like we had some indirect or direct influence on that event.

“We’re not the type of guys that will go out there and just splatter that all over the walls. Things didn’t work out that way because of dumb shit that happens. It could be political as well—I don’t know, but I’m not going to beef about 20-year-old politics. It’s definitely a mark in time.

“What happened was, Nashiem Myrick was an up-and-coming producer. He wanted to get in. He had a lot of great ideas but he didn’t know how to put the record together. He didn’t know how to ‘produce’ a record.


 

That’s me and Nasheen Myrick [from The Hitmen] on that record but they fucked up the credits...Nashiem Myrick was an up-and-coming producer. He had a lot of great ideas but he didn’t know how to put the record together. Puff tells me, ‘Yo, Poke, get with Nash and try to fix this s*it. I know there’s something there. It sounds crazy, but the drums is light and everything is f**ked up.’ - Poke


 

“So Puff tells me, ‘Yo, Poke, get with Nash and try to fix this shit. I know there’s something there. It sounds crazy, but the drums is light and everything is fucked up.’ There was a girl talking on the beat. Puff couldn’t get that out of the record.

“So I had to go in and do what I do to get the drums out and put our shit in. And I had to do what I do to get that girl’s voice out. You can still hear it, but it’s low. We did all of that to try and get the whole beat right.

“I remember it was maybe 7 PM and Big was coming in around 9 PM. Puff was like, ‘Let’s get this shit together before he gets here because I just want to get him in. I want to make Flex.’ I remember him saying that, ‘I want to make Flex.’

“So Big comes in, Big goes in, and Big does the whole fuckin’ record. And we brung the DAT tape of that to Hot 97 and Flex played it that night. Puff is brilliant at getting everybody amped for an event or a presentation. So they went straight to Hot 97, Flex went in, and that was it. All in the same same night. Puff was innovative.

“The song was made way before [2Pac got shot]. It had nothing to do with him. Big was just in his element.”

Tone: “It was just so ironic. Who starts off with, ‘Who shot ya?’ When you think about it, that line doesn’t even make sense in the record. It’s just a question. And Puff was the greatest ad-libber ever. He just did it.”

Poke: “They was just wilding. It was just a wild-out record.”

Tone: “[All our records sounds different because] we never wanted to use the same sounds over. If I made a record, I would say to myself, ‘I used that sound on the last record, I’ma use a different kick or a different snare this time.’ When we introduced the clap to the industry, with the R. Kelly records, we were trying to get away from it when people were embracing it. We never wanted you to just say, ‘That’s a Trackmasters record.’

“We have this phrase, we call ourselves TM—that’s Tailor Made—because we always to make records specifically for the artist. I never wanted to cheat the artist. I never wanted to give him something that sounded like an artist that we worked with before. So in a sense, when you say our records sound different, they’re different because of reasons like that. We always try to use new sounds to stay creative.


 

Thinking back, when I think about the success producers have had in all genres, they all kind of keep to their sound. That’s something that we never did. Even producers that I idolized like Teddy Riley. I’m like, ‘Yo this motherf**ker never changes his snare.’ - Tone


 

“Thinking back, when I think about the success producers have had in all genres, they all kind of keep to their sound. That’s something that we never did. For example, Premier had a sound. Even though he used different kicks and snares, he chopped his shit like no other. He always had his DJ scratch in there, that was his signature. So you knew the way that thing was chopped up like, ‘Oh, that’s Premo.’

“Even producers that I idolized like Teddy Riley. I’m like, ‘Yo this motherfucker never changes his snare.’ But I look up to him. Out of the producers that I idolize, it’s Teddy Riley, Premo, Dr. Dre. Those are guys that I’m like, ‘Oh my God!’ And Timbaland, I don’t idolize him as much, but I always admired what he did to music when he put his shit down.”

Poke: “Timbaland came from left field. He came out of DeVante’s camp, but he had his own swing and sound. His swing changed the game.”

Tone: “And Timbaland told us that too. He said, ‘When you hear my sound, it’s going to change everything.’ He told me that one night at a party. He wasn’t lying. Even to this day. Timbaland’s sound is Timbaland’s sound.”

Poke: “You know it when you hear it.”

Method Man f/ Mary J. Blige "I'll Be There For You/You're All I Need to Get By" (1995)

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Album: Tical
Label: Def Jam

Poke: “That song is us. [We produced it] all the way. Everything. Big record, but the credits got twisted out. It’s listed as Puff Daddy as producer and drum programming by Poke, or some shit like that. But it was us, all the way. It’s fucking ridiculous. A soon as the record comes out, we seen the credits like, ‘What the fuck!?! We just got dicked.’

“It was a big deal. You come in the studio, you’re making hot records, and you know that this shit is fire. You’re going home thinking, ‘Oh, I’m good. I’m about to have this record come out.’ Then the fucking record winds up winning a fucking Grammy and you’re like, ‘Holy shit, I did that record!’

“But when lawyers get involved, credits get fixed. It may not get fixed on the actual records though, because if you got a record that sold a million copies, there’s a million copies with wrong credits out there. It’s not like you can tell them to retract all the copies. All they do is fix it moving forward on the second or third shipment, so maybe 300,000 copies have the right credits.


 

That song is us. [We produced it] all the way. Everything. Big record, but the credits got twisted out. It’s listed as Puff Daddy as producer and drum programming by Poke. But it was us, all the way. It’s f**king ridiculous. - Poke


 

“Stuff like that was going on all the time. There’s a million records out there with wrong credits that nobody knows. That happened not just to us but to Swizz Beatz, DJ Premier, and a lot of guys. Large Professor went through that big time.

“What happened was I was in my crib and Puff was like, ‘Yo, you’ve got to do this remix for Mary and Meth.’ Okay, I’m on my way. I jumped on the train and came down to the studio. I went into the studio. Mary didn’t get to the studio yet and then Meth came in.

“This is the situations that Tone and I hate: there was like 50 niggas in the studio. It was Wu-Tang’d out like it was crazy. I’m there trying to make this fucking record and I’m looking back at all these smoked-out dudes.

“I’m like, ‘How the fuck am I gonna make a hot record in front of all these guys?’ I asked Puff, ‘Can you tell these niggas to go wait in the lounge?’ He was like, ‘Nigga, you want me to tell all these niggas to go get in the lounge? You’re bugging.’ So I’m like, okay.

“They played me the original version of the song, the one that RZA did. No disrespect, but I said to myself, ‘This shit is wack. What the fuck am I going to do?’ I was sitting there and then Puff was like, ‘We’ve got to keep the melody, we got to keep the whole vibe.’ I was like, ‘What?’ Puff was like, ‘Just do something. Let’s grab one of the loops, it’s gonna be easy. Mary’s going to do her thing on it. We’re going to put them in the club!’

“I was like, ‘We’re going to put them in the club with this record? How the fuck are we going to do that?’ The engineer was looking at me like, ‘What are we doing?’ I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ Puff was like, ‘We need to just make them bounce like one of them Slick Rick records.’ I was like, ‘You got any Slick Rick beats with you?’ So he told the intern to go get a Slick Rick album. The intern gets the Slick Rick album.


 

I said, ‘Puff, you my dude and all but we got to like, have a conversation with Steve about how we’re going to move forward with all this stuff.’ Puff is like, ‘Ni**a what? I gotta talk to somebody? Ni**a, I got you on speed dial! How you going to tell me I got to call somebody?!?!’ After that, we didn’t make any more records with Puff. Just like that. - Poke


 

“He gives me the Slick Rick album and we’re playing it.’ I was like, ‘OK, I can use these drums.’ So I chopped up the kicks and snares and I put the beat on and the beat was on for like at least 15 minutes, just the beat.

“The strings were on the track, I said we can keep these strings. It was just the strings on the hook and I was like, ‘So what are we going to do?’ Then I took the M1 and I got to the favorite bass that we liked on the M1 and added that. I was just going, ‘Dun dun, dun dun.’

“Puff start going crazy. ‘AHHHH! THIS IS IT! THIS THE SMASH!’ He started doing all the shit that he does. So I’m looking at him like, ‘Really? This shit is hot?’ He’s like, ‘This is hot.’ So Meth does his Meth shit and I track it.

“But then Steve Stoute came and grabbed me out the studio and was like, ‘Yo, we’re not doing this no more.’ I said, ‘Let me just finish this record.’ Steve walks in and has the biggest argument in the world with Puff about me being in the studio. That’s when Steve was like, ‘Yo, we can’t let this shit happen no more. If Puffy calls you, don’t even go back to the studio because this is bullshit.’”

Tone: “At the time, Steve was trying to straighten out our business. Puffy was being resistant and was like, ‘I got my own deal with Poke.’ Steve was trying to be like, ‘Man, you can’t just do that.’”

Poke: “I finished making the record and went home. Next day, Puff calls me and is like, ‘NIGGA WE GOT A SMASH!!’ I’m like, ‘Really? Alright cool.’ But then I say, ‘Puff, you my dude and all but we got to like, have a conversation with Steve about how we’re going to move forward with all this stuff.’

“Puff is like, ‘Nigga what? I gotta talk to somebody? Nigga, I got you on speed dial! How you going to tell me I got to call somebody?!?!’ After that, we didn’t make any more records with Puff. Just like that.

“[In the end] I got the Grammy for that record, but it’s upsetting that the audience can’t acknowledge or appreciate the true career of a marquee production team in retrospect. You say to yourself, ‘Damn, if they would have known everything that we had done, they would have looked at us differently than they look at us now.’


 

It’s upsetting that the audience can’t acknowledge or appreciate the true career of a marquee production team in retrospect. You say to yourself, ‘Damn, if they would have known everything that we had done, they would have looked at us differently than they look at us now. - Poke


 

“Not to say that people look at us and don’t think that we’ve done great work. I just think that they would have looked at it like instead of us being let’s say top 10 producers, we would’ve been top 7 or something. It’s cool. We move on. We make mistakes in life and we move forward.

“There were a lot of different situations where we influenced or directed a situation or put our stamp on something and didn’t get credited for. And then it wound up being the best shit at the time. We just look at those situations and know what not to do next time.

“We seen Puff all the time [after falling out over ‘All I Need’]. It was just, if you want to hire the Trackmasters to make a record for you, you’re going to hire the Trackmasters to make a record for you. That was the mentality. It wasn’t no more of, ‘They’re going to come in, you’re going to get all the credit, and you’re going to get all of the money.’ No. These are the Trackmasters. You are hiring them to produce a record.”

RELATED: METHOD MAN BREAKS DOWN THE STORY BEHIND "I'LL BE THERE FOR YOU/YOU'RE ALL I NEED TO GET BY"

LL Cool J f/ Boyz II Men "Hey Lover" (1995)

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Album: Mr. Smith
Label: Def Jam

Tone: “LL was managed by Chris Lighty at the time.”

Poke: “Chris Lighty was the A&R at Def Jam and we’ve known Chris for forever.”

Tone: “He basically came to us and said, ‘Y’all gotta fix LL.’ We were like, ‘Cool.’ We were just in Chung King Studios that night working on some other project. We played LL the ‘Hey Lover’ beat and he lost his mind, like, ‘Yo, this is the record! This is the joint!’ In that conversation we said, ‘Who’s the rapper and who’s the singer?’ Because we always wanted to make event records.

“LL wanted Boyz II Men, which was unheard of. Like, Boyz II Men is not singing on anybody’s rap record. Somehow they got Boyz II Men on the phone and they were shooting a video in Philly. Right there we said, ‘Let’s get in the car, go down, and play them the track.’


 

Chris Lighty basically came to us and said, ‘Y’all gotta fix LL.’ - Tone


 

“We drove down to Philly with a cassette tape and ran up on Boyz II Men. We got into Wanya Morris’ white Range Rover, played the track, and LL started spitting the rhymes to him. He was like, ‘I love this, let’s do it right now!’

“We went over to their studio in Philly. We didn’t know that we were about to record a record that night. We were not prepared. I just had the track on the cassette. We went into the studio and I went looking for my disk and I was like, ‘I don’t have the files.’ It wasn’t a Pro-Tools era, you couldn’t email shit. I just had the cassette.

“I fucking put the cassette in the tape deck and looped it. I looped it into the MPC, they bounced it to a 2-inch reel, and that’s what you hear on the radio now. We didn’t touch it after that. That’s the record.

“After that, LL was just like, ‘I like you guys, I like how you lock in. I just wanna lock in with you guys and make a record.’ That record was like a blur to me.”

LL Cool J f/ Fat Joe, Foxy Brown, Keith Murray & Prodigy "I Shot Ya (Remix)" (1995)

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Album: Mr. Smith
Label: Def Jam

Poke: “We locked in with LL for two weeks at Chung King and just went in. I remember we played him the ‘I Shot Ya’ beat. At first we didn’t even want to give him the beat because we wanted the beat for Biggie. But Chris Lighty was like, ‘No! You’re giving him the beat!’”

Tone: “It’s funny how the name came up because it was a beat for Big but it reminded everybody of ‘Who Shot Ya?’ And somebody in the room said, ‘This is not ‘Who Shot Ya? It’s I Shot Ya.’ And that’s how the title came up. So L was writing rhymes and we were like, ‘Ohhhhh.’ It’s crazy because Prodigy was in the other room writing.”

Poke:“I know we went and got P to get on the record. Somebody else rapped on the record and we took them off. I can’t remember who it was.


 

It’s funny how the name came up because it was a beat for Big but it reminded everybody of ‘Who Shot Ya?’ And somebody in the room said, ‘This is not ‘Who Shot Ya?' It’s I Shot Ya.’ And that’s how the title came up. - Tone


 

“Chris Lighty was managing Fat Joe at the time. Joe really wanted to be on an event record and that would have been the staple for him. He was like, ‘Yo, lemme just go on. I promise you the rhymes are gonna be amazing.’ So we were like, 'Okay.’ So he got on the record.

“There was a big thing about putting Foxy Brown on the record. They were like, ‘We’re not putting no new artists on the record.’ Until she went in the booth and spit and they were like, ‘Holy shit, we gotta keep her on this record!’ That spawned Foxy.

“Tone grew up with Foxy and her brother Antwan. Foxy used to have a record deal at Capitol—she was AKA at that time. Then she was outta that deal.”

Tone: “She was basically gonna be our artist.”

Poke: “So when she got on the beat and murdered it, everybody was like, ‘Yo, this is it.’ So we did the Def Jam deal and then immediately we started on that record. Everybody knew that we had to seize the opportunity because this was the record that was gonna launch her.”

RELATED: PRODIGY BREAKS DOWN THE STORY BEHIND "I SHOT YA"

Nas "The Message" (1996)

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Album: It Was Written
Label: Columbia

Tone: “Nas had always been a friend of mine since ‘Back To The Grill’ with MC Serch. At the time, I was a rapper and Nas was a rapper. There was kind of like a rivalry thing between us. I think there was a small part of just getting used to that. Also, me not being a rapper anymore and producing now, and Nas trusting me producing tracks for him. That was big on his part to look past that.

“At the time, we were managed by Steve Stoute, who was also looking to manage Nas. In the conversation Steve had with Nas, he said, ‘You know, once you’re in with Trackmasters, it tends to produce the record.’


 

We felt a lot of pressure because Illmatic was a benchmark in hip-hop. The thing about Illmatic wasn’t the records themselves or the album, it was the movement behind it. So how do we make it that?” - Poke


 

“That didn’t really sit well with Nas because Nas was known as an underground rapper and we’d had a lot of mainstream success. In the beginning it was like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. But Nas agreed to give it a shot and we were all excited.”

Poke: “We felt a lot of pressure because Illmatic was a benchmark in hip-hop. The thing about Illmatic wasn’t the records themselves or the album, it was the movement behind it. So how do we make it that?”

Tone: “We both managed to ignore the criticism that people started to give us because here we were going in with Nas and we were going to make radio records with him. But Nas didn’t really know what we knew, which was that we come from the underground. We come from Kool G. Rap, Big Daddy Kane, The Real Roxanne. We come from that era. That’s what we do.

“So what happened with 'The Message' was I was at home watching the movie The Professional one night. The movie went off and the song ‘Shape of My Heart’ by Sting came on. I jumped up and said, 'Oh my God.' At the time, there wasn’t no Internet so I ran down to the record store, found out who made it, went home, and chopped it up. That was different for hip-hop at the time. It was actually the first time we experimented with Latin-feeling guitars.

“'Shape Of My Heart,' that’s a love song. You don’t get any more pop than that. Using that sample with Nas, it was like, 'Wow. Where are they going with this.' So it was a very popular sample, with a pop artist, and now you’ve got Nas rapping on it.


 

There was some undertones with him taking little jabs at other rappers in that record. [Laughs.] The 'Lex with TV sets, the mininum,' that line was directed right at Jay-Z. Jay was fronting hard with the Lexus in his videos and there was a little rivalry brewing. - Tone


 

“I brought the beat to the studio one night. It was at the end of a session, at Chung King, and they were like, 'What do we work on next?' I threw the cassette on and the intro had Nas really stuck because we got the intro from Scarface, which was really big for him. He was listening to it but when the drums kicked it he went bananas. He jumped up like, 'Oh my God!' Instantly, he knew the rhyme for the record.

“It took me a minute to really realize the picture he was painting. I was so caught up in the flow that he was putting on it that I didn’t even listen to what he was actually saying. The picture he on 'The Message' that was incredible.

“There was some undertones with him taking little jabs at other rappers in that record. [Laughs.] The 'Lex with TV sets, the mininum,' that line was directed right at Jay-Z. I’ll say it since they’re friends now. Jay was fronting hard with the Lexus, at the time, in his videos and there was a little rivalry brewing. It hadn’t really started yet, but it was brewing.”

Poke: “He definitely was referring to New York as a whole with that one king line. And I know 'Lex with TV sets, the minimum' was definitely at Jigga-man. Nas is very subliminal. You would have to read into it to know that he was even talking about Jay.”

Nas "Street Dreams" (1996)

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Album: It Was Written
Label: Columbia

Poke: “At the time, Tupac had come out with the same sample. We had no idea he was doing that. Some people ask, 'Did Tupac take that idea from Nas, or did Nas take that idea from Tupac? What’s the deal with that?' They were just being creative on the West Coast and we were being creative on the East Coast, it just so happened to play out like that. That was a total coincidence.”

Tone: “You’ve got to understand, Nas is used to dealing with producers like Large Professor, Q-Tip, Premo, where they’re giving him raw hip-hop. Our whole thing was raw hip-hop is good—and we love it—but it has to have enough of an appeal to get the people in the stores to buy your record. Not just your homeboy on the block.


 

A lot of people don’t realize that Nas was really one of the first rappers who opened that door and made it okay to sing. On Big’s very record, he was singing the hook. Nas opened the door for that. - Tone


 

“One of the main things that we thought about was producing Nas and making it so that he doesn’t lose credibility. The word ‘sellout’ was a big word, back then. If you got labeled with that word, as a rapper, you were finished. So we had to make sure that we could get him stuff that was middle-of-the-road—that radio could understand and that the hood could understand.

“Once Nas got comfortable and we had a gameplan on how to make this album, things started to magically come together. We knew that, in doing this album, we were going to have to bring in other people, like DJ Premier, to make it a broad enough album so that people don’t say that we tried to make this guy a commercial rapper.

"A lot of people don’t realize that Nas was really one of the first rappers who opened that door and made it okay to sing. On Big’s very record, he was singing the hook. Nas opened the door for that. Nas is a very melodic guy. He always loved to do things like that. Even on 'Black Girl Lost,' that has nothing to do with us or Steve Stoute, that’s just him being creative and bringing out who he really is.

“We also tried to incorporate original hip-hop. If you listen to original hip-hop—like Crash Crew and all those guys—they were all singing. So we tried to incorporate that type of feel on record. It isn’t that they’re trying to be Luther Vandross, they’re just harmonizing. They’re giving melody to the record. So you can sing along when the hook comes, as opposed to just being on stage and pointing the finger and trying to just rhyme. You get the audience interaction when they can sing the record along with you.”

Nas f/ Lauryn Hill "If I Ruled The World" (1996)

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Album: It Was Written
Label: Columbia

Poke: “The first track we played for Nas was ‘If I Ruled The World.’”

Tone: “We didn’t have a singer on it at first. We played it for him and I don’t think he got it at first.”

Poke: “He was definitely resistant. The thing about Nas is that he’s pure hip-hop. We were trying to cross him over, trying to give him a broader appeal in the marketplace. He got flack for that because everybody was saying that we were trying to water him down. So when we played him the record, he was like, ‘I don’t know.’

“The strategy became lets give him harder records first, so that we can ease him into the radio records. We also tried to make sure that on the harder records, the hooks were sing-along enough that they could cross over to the mainstream. That was the strategy.


 

Nas was definitely resistant [to the song]. The thing about Nas is that he’s pure hip-hop. We were trying to cross him over, trying to give him a broader appeal in the marketplace. He got flack for that because everybody was saying that we were trying to water him down. So when we played him the record, he was like, ‘I don’t know.’ - Poke


 

“It was kind of like a spoon-fed system to get him comfortable with the strategy that we had and put him out there. After three or four records, he was like, ‘We’re in the zone, right now. Let’s get busy.’

Tone: "But we were still looking for someone to sing 'If I Ruled The World.' We had to find that person that had hip-hop credibility. Do we get a pop singer? No, that’s not going to work. We had a get a singer that was suitable on the hip-hop side of the arena.

“The only other person that could have sung that was R. Kelly, but at the time we didn’t start working with him yet. But 'Killing Me Softly' had just popped. It started catching on and Lauryn Hill was the one."

Poke: “Nas did a couple of those verses over because it just didn’t work in the concept of the record. Some of the lines didn’t work with some of the records that we were doing, across the board. But sometimes it was just magic and everything worked.

“As an artist, sometimes you get tunnel-vision and you don’t see every other aspect. Nas would always ask, 'What do you think about this? What do you think about that?' and we would give him our real opinion, like, 'Nah, I don’t think that verse will work' or 'I don’t think that line works.'"

Poke: “The song has a Whoudini sample and then we just took the 'If I Ruled The World' hook from Kurtis Blow. Nas came up with the 'If I Ruled The World' title, and that’s when we were like, 'Yo that should be the whole hook.' 

“We were one of the pioneers of, 'Yo lets make block party records.' Like, what DJ’s used to do, back then, they used to just put on instrumentals of an R&B record and emcees used to just rap over it. So we had that whole mentality of let do that. That’s when everybody started going sample crazy because we started doing that stuff and it was working at radio. 


 

We took the concept of block party records and tried to put it on wax, and now all of a sudden we’re sell-outs because the record sells a lot? It made no sense. I would think that you would give it up to us because we’re paving the way for rappers to sell more records than they ever sold before. - Poke


 

“[The whole ‘sellout’ label] made no sense to me. Like, if you sell more than the regular album, than you’re a sell-out. That’s what the mentality was.I think the stigma about selling out is how many records you sell because if you listen to all the beats that we made, they weren’t sell-out beats. They were hip-hop beats or they were R&B records that a rapper would rap on.

“I don’t think it came from what beats you made or if a person was singing because in the beginning of hip-hop, that’s what it was. It was singing with R&B records like 'Another One Bites The Dust' or 'Good Times.' All of those records are the records rappers used to rap on at block parties and DJs used to blend and mix. That’s what we used to do at block parties. 

“We took the same concept and tried to put it on wax, and now all of a sudden we’re sell-outs because the record sells a lot? It made no sense. I would think that you would give it up to us because we’re paving the way for rappers to sell more records than they ever sold before. Prior to that, for rap acts, it was like, 'You’re going to sell platinum? That’s not going to happen.'”

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