My Neighbor Showed Me the Future of Music

And I was too blind to see it.

Back in the year 2000, my neighbor asked me to come over to his house to hear some beats that he’d made.

Obi was an African kid, about 5 years older than me. I was 18. He lived with his brothers in a house across the street. They moved to America in the late 90s, rented the house and basically went to school. Aside from playing it at a ridiculously loud volume from his car, I hadn’t the slightest idea he had any interest in music.

He asked me to come over because one day he was passing by my house and through my garage door— I lived in the garage, which was made into a bedroom— he heard me tapping out a drum beat on my Akai MPC 2000 drum machine. I guess he figured we had something in common.

I walked over to his house and he started playing his beats for me. They were, predictably, terrible. Each one was basically an 808 drum kit programmed with a slight variation; sound effects thrown randomly on top. There were melodies, if you could call them that, but they were so A-B-C as to be laughable. And this was back in 2000, before being the worst at something ironically made you the best.

I had a few of my own beats that I’d burnt onto a CD, intent on playing them for him. One good turn deserves another, right? I popped the CD in and pressed play. Unlike his original productions, mine were all made of samples and sounded like they didn’t know if they wanted to be Rza, Hi-Tek or DJ Shadow tracks. Which is to say, in hindsight, they were pretty awful.

But I knew what went into those beats. Quite literally, hours of sitting around looking through records for loops to sample into my MPC; creating synthesizer sounds out of small samples on my Ensoniq EPS16+ keyboard; finding drum breaks to chop up into my own drum sounds. It was a labor of love. Like a scientist, sitting there piecing things together.

Meanwhile my neighbor was making what would become the early precursor to TRAP. He used Magix Music Maker, a program he got for free on the internet, and took a liking to the stock drum kits. He loved the way the bottom end of the 808 kick drum sounded.

“Do you hear the way that bass knocks?” he asked me. I did. It seemed so repetitive, lacking in dynamics and timbre. It wasn’t musical.

I assume he liked the beats I played, but they were largely of another style. They were more underground. I was keeping it real. He was making what music would eventually become. Mine harkened back to a forgotten era. His would be the sound of hip-hop for the next fifteen years.

Stubbornly thinking that he lacked talent— because that’s how my brain worked as an arrogant 18-year old— I walked away from his house self-satisfied, thinking I had it all figured out. And yet here I am years later acknowledging that it was me who didn’t have a clue.

What the future of what music would be— how it would sound, how it would be created, and who would be making it— was staring me right in the face. I was just too married to the past, too married to the way things were supposed to be done, to notice.

Years would pass and the sound I heard in his house— stripped down; unmusical— actually became quite popular. And it wasn’t like I’d never heard this before. Even a cursory glance at a site like mp3.com was littered with people making amateur-level 808 beats back in the year 2000.

I should have realized then that the writing was on the wall. That anyone with a computer and a copy of Fruity Loops was going to at least be able to get by in hip-hop production. Maybe they wouldn’t be the next Timbaland, but they’d be able to find someone who was into that sound, because the average person doesn’t know what’s good anyway. They just know what’s there in front of them. It’s kinda sad, but then again, it just is what it is.

My neighbor never made it very far as a hip-hop producer. He wound up dying in a car accident around 2003 or so, after he got behind the wheel of a vehicle while intoxicated. We weren’t the best of friends, but he was a good guy. I sometimes feel bad for thinking his beats were crap. He was just a guy trying to make music with what he had.

I hope he’s still making beats wherever he is now.

Paul Cantor is a writer, editor and music producer based in New York. Formerly an editor at AOL Music, his writing has appeared at Rolling Stone, MTV News, VICE and Billboard, among others outlets. Throughout his 10-year career he’s written/produced records for dozens of artists and provided creative services to brands like Disney, the CW Network, Verizon, Converse and HBO. His commentary has been tapped by the likes of CNN and Al Jazeera, and a selection of his recent work can be found HERE.