In the film world, an executive producer credit usually signifies the people who oversaw the financing of the picture, while in television they take on both creative and budgetary duties. In the music game, however, a good executive producer / A&R can mean the difference between a tight, focused album and a sprawling mess of disjointed songs. While the collapse of the traditional music industry may have been good news for independent artists who are now able to exist outside of the machine and sell their music directly to their fans, it’s also removed a lot of the checks and balances that helped produce some extraordinary music.
The important thing to distinguish here is the difference between the faceless suits (who would sign off on a few expense accounts, pop their heads into the studio exactly three times in the space of six months and then stamp their name on the back cover) and the people who actually understood what’s required to construct a great album. The common thread seems to be that a great executive producer needs to have an understanding of the music, usually achieved through having been involved in the process themselves at some point.
A prime example is Dante Ross. During his time as an A&R at Tommy Boy he was involved in helping bring De La Soul, Queen Latifah and Digital Underground to the world, while his move to Elektra allowed him to really spread his wings as he contributed production to many of the projects he worked on as well as executive producer duties. As a result, he helped shape timeless classics such as Brand Nubian’s All For One, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version and Del Tha Funky Homosapian’s No Need For Alarm.
From a purely artistic standpoint, the focus of The RZA during the first wave of Wu-Tang solo albums resulted in two of the most effective hip-hop albums ever created – Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and the GZA’s Liquid Swords. The fact that RZA was also the sole producer on these projects was also a huge factor in how cohesive they were, but there’s no doubt that having the discipline to make the final track selection and decide the sequencing has almost become a lost art in recent times.
To be fair, technology has also caused led to this decline in clarity, as allowing the consumer to pick and choose which songs from an album they want to buy and listen to in the digital format makes it even more challenging to deliver a single vision. But despite these obstacles, there still are the occasional moments where it all comes together. Roc Marciano proved this with 2010’s Marcberg LP, a self produced voyage into his world strictly on his own terms, Common’s Be, where Kanye West reinvigorated the Chicago MC and put him back on track, and Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, M.A.A.d city, which despite my own reservations about those silly voices was undoubtedly powerful in terms of theme and structure.
It’s been said that Run-DMC’s Down With The King set off a disturbing trend where it was more important to assemble the hottest beat makers of the moment onto an album and hope that at least a few of them struck gold rather than pinning your hopes on one producer. On the plus side, this paved the way for the Large Professor and MC Serch to piece together Nas’ Illmatic, but that has proved to be the exception rather than the rule. It’s also important to remember that just because some big name has slapped their name onto the back of some new artists album as performing ‘Executive Producer’ duties, more often than not it’s simply a marketing ploy to get you to buy their weed carrier’s shitty album. Caveat emptor, motherfuckers.
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