New Hip Hop News

Legendary jazz and R&B musician, James Mtume, passed away over the weekend at the age of 75. Mtume’s 1983 single “Juicy Fruit” was famously sampled on Biggie Smalls’ 1994 classic “Juicy.”

Lisa Lucas, daughter of Reggie Lucas, shared the news on Twitter, Sunday.

“So much loss. So much grief. Rest in power to Uncle Mtume,” she tweeted. “My late fathers partner in crime, the co-creator of the songs of my life (and about my birth!). He was essential part of the life of the man who made me, therefore me too. Gone now. He will be dearly, eternally missed.”

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Mtume’s career exploded in the 1970s as he collaborated with Miles Davis. His band, also called Mtume, released several R&B hits throughout the 1980s which neared the top of the charts including “You, Me, and He,” “Breathless,” and more.

Mtume’s work has been sampled by countless hip-hop artists including Fat Joe, Lil Kim, Snoop Dogg, Common, Earl Sweatshirt, and many more.

The Roots’ Questlove shared a tribute to Mtume on Sunday.

“It’s really not doing justice listing accomplishments,” he wrote. “Right now. Thank you James Mtume for all the wisdom & love & respect you’ve shown me & my brothers over the years.”

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Chief Keef admitted on Twitter, Friday, that he cried while recording his song, “Ain’t Gonna Happen.” The track was featured on Chief Keef and Zaytoven’s collaborative album, GloToven, in 2019.

“Fun fact: on front of ain’t gonna happen a young n***a was cryin thinking about them members but everytime I cry I laugh so I ended up laughing and taking the crying out the front you only hear it on intro by the time I got to laughin,” the Chicago rapper tweeted.

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“Ain’t Gonna Happen” sees Chief Keef reflecting on the deaths of his stepbrother, his cousin Big Glo and rapper Fredo Santana.

He raps: “I wanna bring my brother back but I know it ain’t gon’ happen/ Knew I had to be the man back when I had started trappin’/ I never gave a fuck what they said/ Foenem told me off with they heads/ Surely, you don’t sleep in they beds/ You surely wasn’t raised with they kids.”

Big Glo was shot and killed in Chicago in 2014 at the age of 33. Santana, a fellow Chicago rapper and older cousin of Chief Keef, died at the age of 27 in 2018 after suffering a fatal seizure. 

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Shyne was a star on the Bad Boy roster until a shooting in 1999 at a nightclub in NYC put his rap career on hold indefinitely. Shyne was sentenced to a decade in prison, though served time between 2001 to 2009. His relationship with Diddy became strained during that time but in his recent interview with the Drink Champs, he explained how he got over the “bitterness” he felt towards his former boss.

 Danny Martindale/FilmMagic/Getty Images

“What happened with Diddy, with Brother Love, I don’t really blame that on him now as much as I did then,” Shyne admitted, adding that he went through a stage of “bitterness.” However, he said that it was Diddy’s lawyers who were to blame in the situation, more so than Diddy himself. “In retrospect, I blame it more on the lawyers that were advising him. Because his lawyers were there to secure a ‘not guilty’ verdict by any means,” he added.

“He’s a corporation — a $100 million corporation and, you know, they looked at me as the enemy,” he said, recalling that Diddy was still quite young at the time. He also explained that he had came from the streets while Puff already had established himself as a musician. Shyne acknowledged that the stakes were much higher for Diddy at the time, too. 

“He’s about to lose everything. I’m about to lose everything. I’m from that, though. Diddy is a musician, but he wasn’t from that,” he said. “So his response shouldn’t be expected to be my response. When your lawyers are misleading you and misguiding you, that’s how everything fell apart. And he said that to me. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have never listened to those lawyers.’ I forgave him. It was traumatic. I would forgive him and then you might hear me a few months later going in on him. That was over a decade ago and I was in a different space then.”

Shyne also revealed that Diddy extended a helping hand during his political campaign in Belize. “Diddy lost it when he heard that,” Shyne said. “He got the REVOLT people involved, he got the publicists, he got his legislative friends. He said, ‘We can’t let this happen.’ Puff, to me, totally redeemed himself.”

Check out the full interview below. Shyne talks Diddy around the 39:00 mark. 

“Call Hit-Boy for a beat, you get ten of ’em,” Cordae raps on the Hit-Boy-produced single, “Sinister” ft. Lil Wayne. It’s a bar that speaks volumes to Hit-Boy’s work ethic in the studio, and apparently, Cordae wasn’t exaggerating, either.

Vivien Killilea/Getty Images 

We recently caught up with Hit-Boy for HNHH’s January cover story where he discussed the amount of unreleased music he has in the cut with artists like Cordae, and Don Toliver, the latter of whom he collaborated with on “What You Need.” Hit-Boy explained that Don Toliver “pulled up” on him just like Roddy Ricch did when they worked on Nipsey Hussle’s Grammy award-winning “Racks In The Middle.”

“Don, he just be pulling up on me. We just cooked that. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I need a single right now.’ I hate that type of s**t, too. You gon’ scare me off and make me not want to pull up on you if you’re like, ‘Oh, I need this sound. I need my single.’ Like, yo. Let’s just work on music. You don’t have to put the pressure on the s**t,” he explained. Since the two have such good chemistry together, it seems inevitable that we’ll end up with a collaborative album from Hit-Boy and Don Toliver in the future. “That boy is on his way. So, you can’t call it. He’s got every producer breathing down his neck. I will say I do feel like this s**t is high-level. Not even feel like, I know it’s high-level,” he added.

Cordae is another artist that has plenty of unreleased records with Hit-Boy. The producer confirmed that he did, in fact, send a bank of beats to Cordae with enough material recorded to release an entire EP together.

“Again, I’ve probably got like an EP’s worth of s**t with Cordae,” he said. “You know, he’s a “rapper” rapper, so he freestyles like to every beat. Then he’ll catch a vibe and be like, ‘Yeah this the one. Let’s load this up or I’m going to take this with me and do it at my studio,'” Hit-Boy explained of Cordae’s creative process. “That’s what happened. He started “Sinister” at my studio, recorded a part of it, took it with him and just flushed it out then put Wayne on it.”

Be sure to check out Hit-Boy’s cover story here. 

Nas and Hit-Boy are having a moment, delivering three straight albums in the later stage of Nas’ career, which all sound like they could rank near the top of the legendary emcee’s loaded discography.

With Nas, Hit-Boy has been on an insurmountable run. It feels like, at this point, he’s delivering the best sounds in all of hip-hop, cementing himself as a true producer’s producer. That’s why we had to catch up with Hit-Boy for our first digital cover story of the new year, chopping it up with the 34-year-old Grammy-winner for all of his stories on the making of Magic, including the two stand-out songs “Meet Joe Black” and “Wave Gods,” as well as DJ Premier’s reaction to Nas calling him and Hit-Boy “the new Gang Starr.”

Speaking about the surprise release of Magic, Hit-Boy revealed that Nas locked in on this album as soon as KD2 was complete.

“We started working on Magic right after KD2 came out, King’s Disease II. I just was just inspired, man,” said Hit-Boy. “I had the vision for where to take the album, as far as just kind of… Man, it’s crazy because I was trying not to be super obvious on King’s Disease and King’s Disease II, that’s why you got songs like ‘Spicy,’ ’27 Summers.’ You got songs like ‘YKTV’ in the mix, and it’s because I was trying to keep some of his essence, but still give him a new flare aesthetically. You know what I’m saying? Musically. But this one, I said, ‘F*ck it. I’m going to just give these motherf*ckers what they want. I’m going to just give them the most Nas-level beats I can.’ I usually don’t want to be so obvious and be like, ‘Oh, I have to make a Nas beat.’ This one, I said, ‘Cool, this what y’all want? I’m about to give this sh*t to y’all,’ and it’s been the biggest reception so far. And this was probably the easiest for us to make because it was just Nas music. You know what I’m saying?

Man, right now, [my go-to song from Magic is] ‘Meet Joe Black’. I mean, bro, this is ridiculous, how a lot of people can’t hear. The first f*cking few seconds of this sh*t is… It took more talent to do the first few seconds of that beat than most motherf*ckers on the top end on Billboard, bro. All the sounds, and the transitions, and the chord changes, the baselines all f*cking hit you within the first few seconds, let alone on the horns in the beginning. I just can’t wait till people really understand quality, really f*cking get… You know what I’m saying?”

The interviewer went on to highlight some of Nas’ highlight lyrics on that record, including “Your top three, I’m not number one. How could you post that?” and “Run me the keys, run me the Bs, run me the flow back,” which prompted Hit-Boy to speak about Nas’ competitive nature in the studio. 

“Man, I mean, it’s just been all the progression since the first album we did, just being like, ‘Okay, cool. They f*ck with this? We still got a lot of gas to keep going.’ It’s like we about to just keep leveling it up. The first time we had a lot of conceptual records and just really thought it out. This time, it’s like, man, bro, I’m about to pull up a beat, you rap. Rap is a competitive sport, everybody talking their sh*t. You got to just talk sh*t. It was as simple as that.”

The iconic producer went on to talk about “Wu For The Children” and Nas’ line about “Nas enthusiasts” that won’t allow him to surpass his older work, as well as how motivated they are when they receive high praise on their collaborations.

“I mean, sh*t, we really just having fun making music,” he said. “I mean, we taking it very serious, but just to see people embrace it, that’s automatically just energy that’s coming your way. You’re either going to take it one or two ways. You’re going to do something with it or you’re not. And I feel like, man, me and Nas can make however many albums we want to, as long as we just stay locked in.”

Finally, Hit-Boy discussed the making of “Wave Gods,” DJ Premier’s contributions to the record, and his reaction to Nas’ “Gang Starr” line.

“We study this, man, we look at what people are saying. I seen a lot of people [saying the Gang Starr comparisons], and Nas must’ve caught wind of that too, to throw that bar in there,” he said. “The beat sounded like a Premier beat, like some Gang Starr sh*t or whatever the case. It just was a vibe. I mean, if Drake can say he turned into Jay[-Z], how the f*ck Nas can’t say me and him is the new Gang Starr?

‘Wave Gods’, that was a joint that Nas had the idea for. Actually, it’s crazy. I had a session with Rocky and I was playing him beats. Played him the ‘Wave Gods’ beat, he was like, ‘Yo. Me and Nas need to do this beat.’ So probably a few days later, Nas pulled up and I was like, ‘Man, Rocky said he wants to f*ck with you on this beat with you,’ and he was like, ‘all right, cool.’ He did the hook and his verse, then Rocky came through, made his verse and it was just right. Rocky came in focused, man. And that’s what I always say, everybody from Fivio, to Ferg, to YG, to A$AP Rocky, all these people when they get in the studio with Nas, they want to deliver their best sh*t. Go listen to their verses, bro. On our albums, their sh*t hits different. They just sound f*cking ridiculous, really good. And that’s because people got so much respect for Nas, they feel like, ‘Man, I got to rap my ass off, or I got to give my best performance.'”

Hit-Boy went on to reveal that DJ Premier did the scratches on “Wave Gods,” saying, “his scratches are legendary.” On Preme’s reaction to the Gang Starr line, he said, “He just laughed and said, ‘Oh, man. You know people are going to have an issue with this.’ But he said he didn’t give a f*ck. So I was like, ‘That’s perfect.'”

Check out our digital cover story with Hit-Boy here.

Hit-Boy’s produced for the best of ’em. He played an integral role in Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch The Throne early on in his career but the number of legends he’s clocked in work with goes beyond those two. In the past two years, he’s unleashed three projects with Nas: King’s Disease, its sequel, and Christmas Eve’s Magic. 

Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images

Hit-Boy recently sat down with HNHH for our January cover story where he discussed his storied career, and where he intends to go in the future. Though he’s already worked with artists like Lil Wayne in the past on songs like “Drop The World,” he admitted that he wants to do a whole full-length for the NOLA rapper in the future after producing Cordae’s “Sinister.”

“It’s dope. It’s especially dope for Cordae as a rapper who just came in and is respected on a rap level to go back and forth with Wayne on a song. That’s heavy,” he told HNHH. “As far as me, I’m trying to do a Wayne album! One song is cool, but we’ve got a song that’s four times platinum, bro. Pull up. You know what I’m saying? Simple math.”

Wayne isn’t the only artist on Hit-Boy’s bucket list. He also revealed that there’s a slew of artists, including Tupac and Biggie, that he would like to produce for in the future.

“I’ll do an album with Tupac or Biggie, that would be crazy. Right now, Jay-Z. That would be crazy too. Drake, Kendrick, Roddy [Ricch], send me whoever and they’re going to be straight,” he added. 

Check out the full cover story with Hit-Boy here. 

It was recently announced that the upcoming Grammy Awards have been postponed, which has left us with more time to speculate who some of the most prestigious trophies – including the one for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical – will go to. Nominees include Jack Antonoff, Rogét Chahayed, Mike Elizondo, Ricky Reed, as well as our latest digital cover story star, Hit-Boy.

During an interview with HNHH, the 34-year-old reflected on receiving the news of his first-ever Grammy nomination, calling it a “super special occasion.”

HNHH 

“I definitely didn’t know anything about the politics or any of the ins and outs of the Grammys. I had went one time before. This was two years before “N****s in Paris” won. I went to see Lil Wayne and Eminem perform “Drop the World” and that’s the song I produced with Chase N. Cashe. That was my first time, so I just was in there peeping the whole vibe.”

The California-born record producer revealed that by his second appearance at the show, he “had leveled up,” before explaining that a record’s commercial success doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s guaranteed to take home a Grammy.

“So, you can’t call it, but we won. It’s crazy because the year before I won with Nipsey Hussle for “Racks in the Middle,” I was there for “Sicko Mode” for my production on that and we lost. Way more commercial success from the song, but it didn’t win the trophy. It’s all a balance.”

He went on to point out that “Slide” vocalist H.E.R. “won a Grammy last year for like Song of the Year or something, and the video only had, not even a million views on it on YouTube for a song that she won for.”

“We got so piped up to it’s about the YouTube numbers and Spotify – all that can be finessed. They can dump some money into Spotify ads and dump some money into YouTube playlists to make the views look crazy. What is the music really saying? What is the music really doing?” 

Elsewhere in the interview, Hit-Boy shared that he actually turned off the Grammy nomination broadcast before his name was announced, and was surprised when texts of congratulation began flowing in from his loved ones.

“I had just watched them announce that King’s Disease II was nominated,” he recalled. “Which is big because we had just won last year. So, going back-to-back at the Grammy’s with Nas is unbelievable for real. A lot of people were feeling like, ‘Man, you should have gotten Producer of the Year last year at the Grammy’s too.’ I wasn’t nominated, but this year I am.”

After seeing Nas’ August 2021 release get its nod, Hit-Boy had had enough. “I was like, ‘Cool, I’m straight.’ I didn’t even think about the fact that they were announcing Producer of the Year. People started calling me, texting me, hitting me like, ‘Yo, you nominated for Producer of the Year!’ I was like, ‘Man, that’s unbelievable!'”

The “Sicko Mode” producer says that taking home the prize would feel “amazing,” especially knowing that inspirations like Pharrell, Rick Rubin, The Neptunes, Dr. Dre, and Babyface are previous winners.

HNHH

“Motherf*****s be enamoured over jewelry and money and all that type of shit. I feel like a Grammy, that’s something you can just have in your family that symbolizes greatness,” he said when asked if the Grammy will provide him with a form of validation that praise from colleagues simply can’t.

Hit-Boy continued, “My people was locked in. My family, my son, whatever, is going to be able to look and be like, ‘Yeah, my pops was really doing it.’ Most of these people kids aren’t about to inherit their jewelry and shit. My son is going to be able to have that on the mantle forever. That’s just how I look at it.”

Last, but certainly not least, the Fontana-born creative shared his feelings on being the only Black person to be nominated for Producer of the Year. “It’s just something that stuck out to me. A lot of us don’t get that opportunity. To even be talked about and ranked amongst people that are doing great things. Most of the people probably had bigger commercial radio records.”

“I don’t know if they had as much value and as much whatever as me, but everybody is in their own world and doing what they’re supposed to do. It ain’t even a thing where I’m trying to make it a Black thing or whatever the case is. It just was a fact.”

Hit-Boy is undisputedly one of the best hip-hop producers of the last decade. Right now, he’s working with a who’s who of talented artists, including The Game, Cordae, Playboi Carti, Lil Wayne, and more. Of course, it would be foolish to mention Hit-Boy’s recent accomplishments without also speaking about the legendary rapper Nas, who has hit a stride well into his forties with the help of Hit-Boy’s one-of-a-kind production. 

Hit-Boy and Nas are presently three albums deep into their dominant run (King’s Disease, King’s Disease 2, and Magic) and it doesn’t look like they will be stopping soon. We spoke with Hit-Boy for our first digital cover story of the new year, catching some information about the highly-anticipated album, King’s Disease 3, which has been teased by the producer in recent weeks.

When asked how far along he and Nas have gotten on KD3, Hit-Boy told us that they haven’t locked in yet, but that it’s coming.

“Man, we ain’t nowhere with KD3. It’s all in our mind right now. We planned it out. I’ve been listening to different sounds and things I want to do just to differentiate it and just set my game up. You know what I’m saying?” said the 34-year-old Grammy-winning producer. “That’s all I’ve been on, just studying different genres and sh*t like that, and studying different sounds that I want to implement, but definitely can’t give the sauce away right now.”

As far as what’s been inspiring Hit-Boy’s current state of mind, the producer revealed it’s pretty much himself–

“What’s inspiring me lately is Magic, bro,” he said. “It’s like, man, we really came straight out with another hit with this sh*t. We don’t have any Pop features to take our sh*t into the top. But it just feels right. It feels good. You know what I’m saying? We ain’t taking no generic or no cheap routes. This sh*t is just straight off the head, quality, hard sh*t that me and him just in the stu’ working on.”

What are you expecting from King’s Disease 3? Read our full cover story with Hit-Boy here.