The first modern rap album to popularize using multiple producers was Nas’sIllmaticin 1994. This was news to me, a rap fan born in the generation where this is the standard, and I learned—fromthis TikTok, ironically—that it was groundbreaking at the time. BeforeIllmatic,it was the norm...
Music-making duties in hip-hop have traditionally been divided evenly between the rapper and the producer when making an album. This was a division of labor that grew out of rap’s original DJ/rapper split, as memorialized in the title of the classic 1988 DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince...