Eventually he linked with AM Only, a booking agency whose diverse roster includes DJ Mustard, AraabMuzik and Just Blaze. His first experience with EDM came when he saw Diplo at the Mad Decent Block Party in Philly in 2014, which inspired him to get turntables and start learning to DJ. But even as he established himself as a top-shelf beatsmith, Jahlil’s most successful record came entirely by accident, when a teenager from Brooklyn named Bobby Shmurda turned a beat Lloyd Banks had abandoned into the platinum-selling ‘Hot Nigga’.ĭespite his long career in hip-hop, Jahlil is pretty green in the dance world. As Meek became a national star, Jahlil placed tracks with everybody from Jeezy to Juicy J to Royce the 5’9″, and was even in the studio with Rihanna last year. Their stocks rose together: when the rapper signed with Rick Ross and Maybach Music in 2011, the producer signed a management deal with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation in 2012.
The two became frequent collaborators, and some of Meek’s most successful records (“Ima Boss” and “Amen”, notably) are Jahlil Beats productions. Jahlil’s production, a savvy blend of Swizz Beats’s brash programming and Mannie Fresh’s bounce, matched the rapper’s meme-worthy intensity.
At that point, the Meek was still clawing his way to the top of the city’s cutthroat battle scene. I was super surprised – he ran down all the joints I did!”īorn and raised in Chester, PA – 10 minutes from Philadelphia – Jahlil Beats linked up with Meek Mill in the mid-2000s through MySpace. “I met Skrillex two years ago at Coachella. ‘Hop Out The Phantom’ doesn’t sound like a traditional EDM record, we just going into the studio and doing whatever we want.”īut there’s a level of pragmatism involved as well: “ is making big money and we’re trying to be a part of that while making great music.” Photography by: Derek Brad “Dance and hip-hop is hand in hand and it’s expanding hip-hop, honestly … but we don’t want to pigeonhole things to a genre. “A lot of these kids are turning up to trap music,” says Jahlil Beats. Rap is, after all, a form of electronic dance music. Why put this out with Dim Mak? The answer, of course, is why not? The lines between hip-hop and EDM are blurrier than ever. The other three tracks just sound like above-average, forward-thinking 2016 hip-hop. But only one of the four tracks (the dubstep-tinged ‘No Problems’, with its builds and drops) reads as EDM.
(Check out how he makes Big Sean’s haphazard flow sound precise on ‘Stoop Kid’.) And the production, handled by Jahlil Beats, is top notch. Bok is a nimble rapper, with an impressive range of expression and the type of next-level technical skill that makes Philly-bred emcees so good. This is something to think about when listening to Bok Nero’s Lorde of Legions EP, released last week as a joint effort between veteran Philadelphia producer Jahlil Beats’s Tandem label and Steve Aoki’s Dim Mak. Anything can be EDM as long there’s marketing logic to it. The boundaries of EDM remain extremely permeable. The invention of EDM made room for everything from progressive house to dubstep to “deep” house to “trap” to whatever buzz-genre we’re putting Flume in. America wanted to dance and, this being America, we needed a corporate infrastructure to make that happen. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. And so EDM was born: neutral, untainted by history, and ready for brand activations. The “rave” culture of the UK seemed old fashioned, and familiar terms like “house” and “trance” and “techno” had for years been used interchangeably and dismissively by American outsiders to describe all dance music. In the mid-2000s, as dance music and club culture seemed poised to spill into the American mainstream, the industry needed a term for the movement that wouldn’t alienate the existing factions. The global dance scene is balkanized into thousands of micro-genres, each with its own diehard fans, many of whom are willing to fight for their particular corner of the club’s superiority. Producer Jahlil Beats wants to change that, and Andrew Friedman investigates the deal with Dim Mak that could see more rappers head to the stadium.ĮDM is a marketing term, not a genre. Plenty of popular EDM references mainstream rap, but rap’s producers and performers, for the most part, sit on the sidelines.
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