The Best One-Producer Albums of the 2000s

With the release of Run the Jewels 2 last week, El-P and Killer Mike added to the small number of major albums crafted by a single producer or production team. It may seem absurd—after all, there are plenty of underground rap records put together by one beatmaker. But very few have any kind of major profile. This isn't unreasonable; variety is a necessity, and few producers have the depth to make an entire album worth hearing, instead preferring to churn out a few iterations of the same theme over and over.

Keeping a record to one producer can easily have its own upsides, especially when it comes to consistency. A producer can build his own world—as El-P or MF Doom have done—where the sound of the album seems to exist separate from the rest of rap music altogether. Other times, they may improve upon an existing formula, as did D.C.-based boom bap auteur Oddisee. Or they parlay a local trend into a national pop sound, like Mannie Fresh.

Although few single-album producers may make it out of the gate, it seems likely to become more and more common as hip-hop returns once again becomes more independent. After all, there's less money in production than there was a decade ago; many beatmakers end up linked directly to the rapper who made them hot.

But taking a look back, there are still a number of rap records that stood apart thanks to singular producers.

Producer: Mannie Fresh

By the time a new decade arrived, Cash Money was more than an army or navy: It was a movement. And the workhorse of the label's success was Mannie Fresh, one of hip-hop's game-changing producers. By adapting New Orleans' bounce sound to a studio context, Mannie helped cultivate a new generation of artists for stardom. From the beginning, label head Birdman—then known as Baby—was an artist in his own right. When Mannie and Baby teamed up as the Big Tymers, the two became characters in an X-rated comedy team, their cartoonish boasts of over-the-top acquisitions (“I just bought me a platinum football field”) setting a new standard in stuntin'. This reached its apex on I Got That Work, the duo's biggest record, which in addition to hits like “No. 1 Stunna” and “Get Your Roll On,” is full of some of Mannie's most well-crafted beats—and funniest rapping. (What would you do if your partner gave you the itch? You'd be like “No, n-no, n-n-n-no he didn't.“)

Although the album is remembered primarily as a vehicle for its singles, Mannie manufactured everything from the cheery children's chorus of “10 Wayz” to the pristine slow jam “Snake,” selling himself and Baby as hip-hop's court jesters.

Producer: DJ Quik

Although finally (and rightly) hailed by critics for his unparalleled run of self-produced rap albums in a career that has run from the late 1980s through today, much of Quik's catalog remains under-examined and poorly recognized. One of the most underrated is his 2000 record, Balance & Options, although we could as easily celebrate 2002's Under tha Influence, 2006's Trauma, or 2009's Blaqkout. But his first record of the decade had the most mainstream appeal, and presaged some of his most innovative behind-the-scenes work. From the inspirational “Change da Game”—recorded with his protégé Mausberg shortly before his tragic killing—to party-starter “Pitch In on the Party”—where a stressed out host laments the seedy underside of a party's couch cushions to the tune of a catchy dancefloor jam—Quik found a meeting point between gangster rap, party music, and earnest personality that defines the arc of his career.

Producer: El-P

In the late 1990s, Company Flow was a respected name in underground hip-hop. “Independent As Fuck”—as their liner notes proudly proclaimed—in the era of hip-hop's commercial apex, the group nonetheless had a rocky road on indie labels like Rawkus. By the time the new millennium rolled around, little had changed in the wider world—but Company Flow's El-P joined with Amaechi Uzoigwe to found Def Jux records. And the label's flagship act was Cannibal Ox, whose debut, The Cold Vein, was produced entirely by El-P. This wasn't all that had changed for El; his production style had mature considerably, shifting from its earlier organic boom-bap sound to an almost robotic sci-fi experimentalism. Warped samples and synthesizers gave the record a particularly dark, disorienting quality critics across the map would call "dystopian." It was also one he would replicate on subsequent albums, like his 2002 solo debut, Fantastic Damage.

Producer: MF Doom

One of MF Doom's many aliases, King Geedorah remains to this date his most underrated iteration. Self-produced, the album is all idiosyncratic loops set at odd angles, cartoons and funk songs treated with equal billing as sample sources for one of the most unique-sounding records in hip-hop history. Highlights include Doom's flip of “Message to the Black Man” for the funky “Anti-Matter,” years before Nas did something similar; the searing “Fastlane.” And album near-closer “One Smart Nigger,” the most potent commentary on racism ever constructed solely from samples.

Producer: J Dilla

A year after his passing, J. Dilla's Ruff Draft EP—recorded prior to his Champion Sound record with Madlib from 2003—received wide release. It captured a snapshot of one of the rapper-producer's many reinventions. At this point, he was turning away from a label-friendly sound for a distinctly underground grit—this was the sound of tapes popping, not songs. Not that he'd lost his understanding of pop's most reliable tools: pathos and empathy leak from records like the droning “Nothing Like This.” And despite the record crackle that permeates songs like “Make Em NV,” or the hilarious child's voice singing a cover of Quiet Riot's “Cum On Feel the Noize” on "Wild," the songs only meander when it seems purposeful to do so.

If he had one skill that wasn't recognized until after he had passed, it was to make even his incidental work feel as if it were part of a much larger plan.

Producer: Kanye West

Maybe you've heard of him. Kanye West began producing Hitmen-lite beats in Chicago in the late 1990s before moving to New York and working with Roc-A-Fella Records, eventually forcing out a solo debut that few believed in—at least initially. Now, of course, it seems absurd that anyone would have doubted. Known as a beatmaker first, a hitmaker second, and a rapper maybe 14th, West didn't make his album worthwhile with his production skills; it was the personality that he imbued in the music, the way the beats complemented his vocals, the way his words—plainspoken, straightforward, often funny—connected with the American mainstream in a way few rappers had prior.

Producer: Madlib

Doom was a self-produced auteur who, since 1999's Doomsday, had cultivated an entire world outside hip-hop's mainstream for his idiosyncratic rap style to thrive. At the time, one other producer seemed to work on his wavelength, albeit from a different direction: Madlib, whose unparalleled knowledge of the vinyl depths was nearly matched by his lack of presence on the microphone. Doom was a stronger producer than Madlib was a rapper, but he was nowhere near as prolific. Just a year after Doom dropped projects as both Viktor Vaughn and King Geedorah, the Madvillainy project promised to top them all, with Madlib broadening Doom's musical palette. To this day, it's one of the best projects either artist has ever released; Madlib's funk and soul loops jut out at odd angles, as do some of the cleverest bars of Doom's career.

Perhaps the highlight is “Fancy Clown”—which appeared in an early form of the album as “Pretty Blood”—a record whose Z.Z. Hill sample gave a metal-faced man a human heart.

Producer: DJ Muggs

Some have argued that one of the biggest influences on RZA's dark sound on Wu-Tang's debut was the murky sonic backdrop crafted by DJ Muggs in the early work of Cypress Hill. Even if Wu-Tang was more of Cypress Hill's East Coast counterpart, the coincidence still opens up intriguing possibilities, particularly because Muggs rarely sold beats outside of his own projects. Fans of Wu and Cypress Hill got their dreams answered in 2005 with the release of GZA and DJ Muggs' Grandmasters project. If the lines between RZA and Muggs' styles were imaginary before, Muggs redrew them here, working in sharp, de-tuned guitar lines, while GZA rapped in classicist wordplay-heavy similes and metaphors.

Outside of Wu-Tang's own projects and GZA's classic Liquid Swords, it's easily the rapper's most interesting project, a rap fan's “what if…” come to life.

Producer: The Neptunes

You had to know this was coming; one of the most critically acclaimed records of the decade almost never was, until a particularly vocal online fanbase so impacted by the commercial success of “Grindin'” managed to lobby the group's label to record a sequel. Even more incredible was that it was actually great—a rare moment of internet A&R that got results. Of course, one can hardly credit the Internet with what makes Hell Hath No Fury work; one even hesitates to credit the Thornton brothers, whose implacable deadpan was a flatline around which the entire project rotates. The group lived or died by their production, and the Neptunes weren't nearly as flush as they'd been three or four years earlier. Nonetheless, they brought it.

As if learning from “Grindin'”'s mega-success four years earlier, the Virginia collective crafted a record that was more about texture than melody, where gravity was the driving force rather than rhythm.

Producer: The Alchemist

One of the most exciting moments of 2006 was the release of a horror film-esque music video set to the tune of Edwin Starr's “Easin In”—the same sample used for Ice-T's “High Rollers” two decades earlier. It was the dawn of a new era for one half of Mobb Deep, as Prodigy's second album was a gem in the rapper's catalog, arguably his most consistent solo release. Alchemist's production gave its old soul samples a glossy sheen, treating them not as gritty raw material to be repurposed, but as the pop songs they always were. Spiritually of the '80s but texturally of the now, Return of the Mac let Prodigy handle the grit by framing his voice in the sleek, pulpy drama of history.

Producer: Black Milk

In the wake of J Dilla's passing, there was a void in Detroit's underground hip-hop scene that no one artist could expect to fill. One of the most talented artists to step into that spotlight was Black Milk, and while he may tire of the comparisons today, even he would admit he owes him some debt. Like Dilla, Black Milk was a rapper-producer. While he was not the innovator his inspiration was—and who could be?—he had a particular take on the prog-soul-rock future-funk that Dilla established as the core Detroit sound. But most significantly, he was, in both traditional terms (wordplay, “technique,” etc.) and more holistic ones (pure existence), a more coherent, centered presence on the mic than J Dilla ever was. In some sense, Black Milk's success was the rapper's revenge for Detroit's biggest talent being more of a production whiz than a lyrical one.

Black Milk's tape was strongest on records like “Losing Out,” where an Alan Parsons Project sample provided the unconventional canvas for Black Milk and Royce Da 5'9" to stunt about Detroit's under-heralded place in the hip-hop scene.

Producer: Roc Marciano

In a time when East Coast street rap could often seem tame or rehearsed, Roc Marciano wrote street narratives that—well, insert your favorite hide-a-razor-in-your-Timbs chain-link-fence concrete metaphor here. And the self-produced Marcberg brought back not just the sound of old New York, but to a strong degree its spiritual essence—let's go with the blunt smoke metaphor this time. And while it might've inspired all kinds of cliches from the writers who discovered and loved it, the record itself had a freshness at odds with its gritty, grungy, grimy—you get the idea—exterior.

Producer: El-P

El-P and Killer Mike have been some of hip-hop's most reliable artists on their own over the years; that it took them as long as it did to collaborate now seems absurd in retrospect, a peanut-butter-and-jelly team-up that may end up more successful than either artist ever was solo. But Run the Jewels started here, with Killer Mike's El-P-produced R.A.P. Music, a record that works as part-agit prop, part party record, giving Mike's aggressive, boisterous rap style beats that sit off of center without losing an inch of their confrontational bounce.

Producer: Oddisee

In some ways, Oddisee is a hip-hop comfort food artist, apt to be labeled a traditionalist. He came up with the Washington, D.C.-based Diamond District group, a crew whose sound will feel like home to anyone whose earliest hip-hop experiences took place in the opening years of the 1990s. But while he sticks to that production template, he's also liable to subvert and modernize it, offering an expansive flavor of a typically insular sound. Rather than feeling closed off, it's an open and inviting record. Oddisee is also a smart writer, one whose writing on “Way In Way Out” underlines the feeling of being trapped in the current system—not a novel idea, but executed with passion and a deft pen.

Producer: Madlib

Steadily over the course of 2014, Gibbs' Madlib collaboration Cocaine Piñata has grown in stature to become an early favorite among Gangster Gibbs' aficionados, its flowering psychedelic sound an unexpectedly vibrant contrast with the rapper's dense delivery. It transforms his words into a blurred tapestry of memory, action, and relaxation, a juxtaposition of the expected and unexpected floating together in a florid cloud of kush smoke. The old soul samples give the entire project a nostalgic tinge, while Gibbs recalls a hardscrabble past in Gary, Ind., with “kissed my mother and told her if I die it's part of mother nature.”

Producer: El-P

Bless whatever series of events led to these two monsters linking up. After the positive response to Killer Mike’s 2012 R.A.P. Music (produced entirely by El-P), they decided to form Run the Jewels. Somehow Producto’s dense lyrics and sci-fi beats mix perfectly with Killer Mike’s imposing style of rhyme. The group's first effort is nothing to sneeze at, but RTJ2 is a more balanced record that sounds like falling through the sky in the future. The production hits like blunt force to the rib cage. The bass might knock your block off like Euro-techno, and the subtle samples promote paranoia. This is one of El-P’s greatest works—and given his history—that is saying a lot.