"NEED BEATS?": Call Sultan's 800 number |
“As a producer, you have to be a fan of all types of music,” says the SULTAN (a/k/a WMS), the Boston Hip-Hop Awards’ Beatmaker of the Year. “You have to be innovative, cause that’s how you stay ahead of the competition. That’s how you start trends.” Sultan resides in Dorchester now, but he grew up all over town (South End, Jamaica Plain). And after years spent churning out beat after beat, his star’s beginning to shine. On the phone he lists project after project: EDO G, BAD NEWS, AKROBATIK, DRAG-ON (RUFF RYDERS), and his record label, ICEMAN RECORDS, which is releasing a full-length he produced called MASSMINDSTATE this winter. His latest promotional tape, We Got That Heat!!!, is jammed with Latin influences, Indian samples, and loop-de-loop productions — Sultan is certainly onto something. “My father played saxophone in college, so I think that rubbed a bit off on me. My older brother listened to a lot of hip-hop growing up, so I had that old-school hip-hop from my brother, the jazz from my father, and the soul from my mother.”
Sultan didn’t start making beats until his second year at UMass-Boston. “I started making music as a hobby, and I said, ‘Wow, I’m kind of good at this!’, and then I started making money, and it was like, ‘Wow! You can make money doing this!’ It’s like if you’re watching people play basketball and you’re like, ‘Yo, that sport looks cool,’ and somebody says, ‘Yo, you want to play?’ And you start hitting jumpers and dunking and you’re like, ‘Damn! I didn’t know I could dunk!’ ” The first track on Heat makes it clear he’s trying something different. A blipped-out melody slips and slides over a reggaetón bump-bump beat as new talent Keithisha sings. “I was like, ‘Yo, I need a hook for this,’ and she’d never heard it before, and in like five, 10 minutes she wrote the hook.”
Later, Sultan puts his own treatment on Common’s “Go” and again we have a syncopated, Latinized beat. The last track on the sampler CD (which you can get for free at his Web site) brings Biggie Smalls directly in touch with Sultan’s brother, MC STATIC, over a wicked sample that sways like a drunken sailor. “Whatever direction anyone else is trying to go I’m trying to go the opposite. I like to be creative with it. I’ll give you a little secret. I’ll go from the original beats until I get caught in a rut, then I’ll go over to the sampled stuff and it’s like a breath of fresh air. It keeps me going and keeps me creative.”
Dude is so on his grind that he even has an 800 number. “NEED BEATS?” reads his T-shirt. “CALL 1-800-915-HITS.” “I can’t get enough cause I’ve been waiting for it. I’ve put a lot of hard work in the music. I’ve consistently always been working on my craft, whether it’s interviews or an award show, finding out the new competition, the hottest new records to sample, the newest DJ gear, how to play certain chord progressions. I was always told if you constantly work on your craft, it’s eventually going to happen.”
