It feels pat to hail an artist’s new release as the album they’ve been preparing to make their whole career. Musicians who’ve been around for decades probably view that statement as a kind of lifetime achievement award, a gesture that seems dismissive when you’ve just given the world new music. It mostly entails looking backward, shaping a discography into a culmination. Laziness can ensue.
When new art is perceived entirely within the context of a body of work, it becomes easy to focus on triumphs past. We tend to emphasize records that have benefited from time and familiarity. The resulting write-up can read like a retrospective, a roundabout way of saying, “I like the new stuff because it reminds me of the old stuff.” Sure, but what’s new about the new stuff?
Refinement. That’s the word that comes to mind after examining the new RJD2 album from inside this messy critical matrix. The new album is titled Visions Out of Limelight, and it’s really good. It’s really good, specifically, at combining elements of RJD2’s sound that span his discography as a solo artist – from his 2002 debut Deadringer on through the indie rock of 2007’s The Third Hand to the syrupy funk grooves of 2020’s The Fun Ones.
Stylistically, Visions most closely resembles Deadringer‘s instrumental hip-hop, which will delight longtime fans and hip-hop heads who get nostalgic about the halcyon days of Def Jux Records. Sonically, though, Visions‘ mix of live instrumentation and sample splicing is unique to this point in RJD2’s maturation as a producer.
“[Visions] is pulling on all these elements that I’ve done over my career,” RJD2 says. “At some point in time – maybe five, six, seven years ago – I kind of let go of this thing of like, ‘Okay, I’m only playing an instrument so that I can recreate something that would sound like a sample.’ Now, I don’t really need to hold the creative process to any particular standard. I became comfortable with everything just kind of having a hybridization ethos around it. That is, in essence, where I’m at when you look at the methodology behind this new album. That’s how it was made.”
RJD2, for those unfamiliar, is a producer whose hip-hop roots show in his penchant for funky percussion and the sample-based approach that grounds most of his work. He started out as a hip-hop DJ in the 1990s. He can recall the first time he heard Qbert’s Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Musik, which prompted his obsession with collecting breakbeats. He owns a lot of vinyl records. He has interesting thoughts about the changing landscape of cultural curation. He sometimes plays recreational soccer. He has been producing music since the late 1990s, back when he provided beats and scratches for the Columbus-based hip-hop crew MHz.
“In 1997, I was a bedroom hip-hop producer,” he says. “I didn’t have any records out. If you go back to 1996 before any of the MHz singles came out, I was just a guy trying to make beats, and I didn’t care what I was using or how I was going about it. My only criteria was: How does it measure up against my idols? My idols at that time were the obvious ones: DJ Premier, Large Professor, Q-Tip, Prince Paul, and so on and so forth.”
RJ’s signature style was fully formed by the time MHz released the “Rocket Science” single in 1999. The song features a distorted bassline, a chopped piano melody best described as pretty, and record scratching that tears arcade laser beams to razor-thin shreds. Thirty seconds into the track, RJD2 cuts the bass and drums and introduces, for just a few seconds, a plaintive, slow-building string section. There are unexpected shifts in the percussion patterns and plenty of quaint sonic details to find through close listening. There’s also a sense of restraint. The instrumental never overshadows the rappers Copywrite and Jakki the Mota Mouth, both of whom deliver punchlines like backhanded blows to the dome piece.
“Fuck anyone who brings it / Fuck R&B and anyone who sings it,” Copywrite declares. Remember, this was the year Pharaohe Monch dropped Internal Affairs, when B-boys applied the precision of classical sculpture to hone their battle raps. Though RJD2 would soon be regarded for his expansive, often moody instrumental compositions, “Rocket Science” is a reminder that he got his start laying down the kind of raw underground hip-hop that set out to stupefy listeners and rampage wack MCs.
“There’s this period from the late 1990s up until the early aughts when there was a popularity in music that many people would call ‘instrumental hip-hop’. I don’t want to say those records were intentionally designed as alternatives to rap music, but that’s how an audience perceived them. Like, ‘Well, I don’t like new rap in 1998, but I love this Mo’ Wax record.’ Or, ‘I love this Fatboy Slim record.’ Or whatever. That’s not to sandbag anybody. I’m not disparaging any particular artist. I’m saying I can’t count how many times I heard somebody say, ‘I don’t like rap, but I like this thing over here that has beats but doesn’t have rappers on it.'”
With Deadringer, RJD2 attempted a double crossover: getting, say, the casual Portishead fan to try hardcore hip-hop and getting the b-boy with strong opinions on Critical Beatdown to try rhymeless instrumental songs. Pitchfork seemed to catch on; their review of Deadringer claimed that leading up to its release, “heads began to salivate with expectations of a terse, discordant soundscape that mingled the cinematic glory of DJ Shadow with the decidedly subterranean grime of the other Def Jux releases.”
“If there was an overarching concept for [Deadringer], it was, in essence, an instrumental hip-hop record that had one foot firmly in rap music,” RJD2 says. “It was basically arguing to a staunch rap fan who didn’t care about instrumental music, ‘Hey, give this instrumental stuff a shot.’ To a staunch beat guy who professed to hating rap music, ‘Hey, give rap music a chance.’ I was trying to do both of those things simultaneously, trying to make the counterargument for both audiences.”
Apprehension underscores nearly every track on Deadringer. A violin ensemble and pitched-up vocal harmonies bring overcast skies to the stripped-back funk of “Ghostwriter”. On “Shot in the Dark”, a foreboding piano backs a spoken-word vignette in which crooked cops hassle a seemingly innocent bystander. The blues vocal on “Smoke & Mirrors” is reinforced by one of the saddest wah-wah guitar treatments recorded to date. There are moments of respite, like the celebratory horns that blast through “Ghostwriter”, the marching band eruption midway through “2 More Dead”, and the electro-dub breakdown on “Good Times Roll Pt. 2”. But it’s the ever-looming minor chords, the persistent tension woven through the melodies, that make Deadringer such an emotionally vibrant listen.
“Asphalt Lamentations”, the last track on Visions, best resembles the atmosphere of Deadringer. The song is driven by a loop of dour harp melody backed by some crisp drumming and topped off with a playful dash of flute. The low end is subtle but deep, rounding out the rich tonal blend. A choir appears for a brief Gregorian chant placed alongside a synth that sparkles with the sheen of a Human League hit. The clouds eventually part for a breakdown that sounds like the score to a car-chase scene from a 1970s cop thriller.
There’s a clean edge to the instruments. The drum fills sound outsourced from a different kit, and the reverb-drenched sitar in the backdrop is muted with clean, precise editing. No resonant spillage. This razor-to-tape technique is characteristic of music programmed with a sequencer, harkening back to the first rap records to swap out live funk bands for the SP-1200. More than anything else, it’s this mechanical quality that caused listeners to label RJD2’s music “instrumental hip-hop”.
“When I first started making beats, I listened to my idols’ records, and I was like, ‘That sounds perfect, but when I do that, it sounds weird and truncated and mechanical.’ To me, working on an MPC is analogous to learning a new language. When you first do it, it’s as if you’re learning Spanish and you’re constantly translating every word back to English to understand it. You have to get over a threshold where you’re familiar with it enough that you can just think and speak in the language.”
Deadringer displayed RJD2’s mastery of the sampler. Then he moved in the other direction. Since We Last Spoke, his sophomore effort, melded more fluid-sounding live instrumentation into his sample-based process. The result is a record that’s as much rock as it is hip-hop. Dave Heaton of PopMatters noted the album’s prog-rock leanings and wrote that RJD2’s vocals came off “sometimes like an indie-pop frontman singing sad sweet nothings”. David Drake, in his review for Stylus, name-dropped the Cars, Todd Rundgren, and David Lee Roth as sonic reference points and claimed that “RJD2 has created not just a great hip-hop album, but also one of the best rock albums of the year”.
“Somewhere around 2003 and 2004 or 2005, right around there, I realized that I had painted myself into a corner of just being a sample-based artist guy,” RJD2 says. “I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do creatively for the rest of my life. Also, it was terrifying realizing that your whole creative output is reliant on the source material that you will or won’t find. Those things combined put me in a place where I was like, ‘I got to add tools to the arsenal.’
“So I went out and dusted off the music theory and composition concepts that I had in my background from going to music school, and I basically just went down the path of ‘How close can I get reproducing things live so that it would sound like a sample?’ So that was kind of the acquisition of new tools. Then that just basically continued in gradients up until now.”
The press pilloried RJD2 for 2007’s The Third Hand, which shirked hip-hop stylings altogether and instead committed to the tender hues of singer/songwriter pop-rock. “What still remains of his hip-hop backbone – the powerful, charging drum breaks that were his stock in trade dating back to his MHz days – feels grossly out of place,” Nate Patrin wrote in Pitchfork. “The beats feel bullish and overbearing amidst all the lightness, giving turbocharged propulsion to songs that feel like they’re better off ambling and forcing uprock rhythms to rudely stuff paisley ascots into their Adidas track tops.”
If you choose to view RJD2’s career as a narrative arc that crests with his latest record, then The Third Hand is an important point along the curve. Creative divergence garners strong critical opinions in the moment, whereas hindsight reshapes what critics considered a misstep (or, in rare instances, a masterpiece) into a transitional period. This tends to damper the extreme language of immediate response – a record goes from being “a travesty” to “a big step”.
Creativity is a forward-moving enterprise. A surprising swerve is considered the terminus until something else follows and proves otherwise. For an artist who cares about what others think, there’s risk involved in changing up your sound, even if that change is a natural progression, a route demanding to be explored despite different expectations from an audience.
RJD2 hasn’t made another record like The Third Hand. Everything since has been primarily groove-driven. If context can shift a fan’s engagement with music (and let’s assume it can), it’s safe to say it’s easier to enjoy The Third Hand now that it can be viewed not as a final disavowal of old tricks but an experiment that generated new ones.
With Visions Out of Limelight, the interplay between live instrumentation and sampling is more varied than on previous albums. Some tracks are entirely constructed on an MPC sampler, while others sound like the output of a studio band. These different approaches are also blended more organically than in past records.
“Cold Eggs” starts where RJD2’s last record, The Fun Ones, left off: with the raw heat of 1970s funk rhythms, complete with sidewalk chatter and party whooping. The song could be mistaken for a recording by a modern instrumental funk band like BADBADNOTGOOD or El Michels Affair, except the horns are chopped up à la DJ Premier.
The first third of “Apocalypse March” rearranges marching band drum rolls with the giddiness of a kid bashing pads on a floor-model MPC at Guitar Center. The rhythm gives way to noodling around the two-thirds mark before gathering itself for a downtempo strut featuring a church organ and a piano with a heavy dose of damper pedal. It could have been recorded in 1971. Right before the song cuts out, RJD2 chops it all up on the MPC, ending on a push-button stammer. He’s winking at the listener here, playing with perception and subverting assumptions about how the music might have been produced. The distinction between what sounds live and what sounds sampled is both highlighted and blurred to the point where it can be recognized as one of the album’s core themes.
“I spent so much of my career bending over backward to make an MPC sound like a band,” RJD2 says. “There was a label in the Bay Area called Bomb Hip-Hop Records in the 1990s. I was actually signed to that label. I made a whole album for them that never came out. It got shelved. The title of the album was To Beat the Band. I titled it that because that was what I was attempting to do. I spent so much time trying to make a sampler sound like a live performance.”
RJD2’s mastery of the sampler has come full circle, from toiling to make sample chops sound like live drumming to purposefully contrasting his own live drumming with rigidly sequenced sample blocks. On Visions, rather than limit himself to a singular approach, RJD2 built each track differently, switching tools and techniques in service of the song.
“I’ve always felt that once a song germinates, you’re kind of just following its lead. If something starts out like ‘Wild for the Night’ on the new album, if it sounds like a machine, depending on how the rhythms and the angles of that all feel, it can be very, very hard to come at that with a live performance [element] without smoothing off the rough edges that you really want to keep … So obviously I’m going to the MPC for the drums, and once you go to the MPC for the drums, something else might happen along the way. That song entirely came together inside the MPC. And that was mostly because I was just listening to what the song wanted to do as it unfolded.”
By contrast, “Fools at the Haul”, which features vocals from Jordan Brown, resembles the studio work of a well-polished soul band. You can practically envision each musician raised on a velvet-carpeted stage inside a dimly lit jazz lounge. The same goes for “Through It All”, a soulful ballad featuring vocals from Jamie Lidell.
“The origin point of that song was the main piano progression. That was a thing that felt so pretty to me and so flowery that the opposite was the case. Going to the MPC for drums would fundamentally make it a little stiffer … Could I have sat down at the MPC and come up with something that would have fooled the listener at first glance? Maybe. To make the drums sound like a live drummer, I could probably bend over backward for a bunch of hours and do that, but it’s frankly going to be faster and easier and more on the mark if, at this point in time, I just sit down and play the drum kit. Because I know exactly what kind of drum pattern I want behind this. I know where the fills should be. I already got the whole feel loosely mapped out in my head. It’s just a matter of executing.
“The years of figuring out which mics go where and the placement and how to tune the drums and how to hit the snare drums all so that it sounds the way I want it to sound, there’s a lot of legwork there. But once that legwork is done, once you get the performance right, boom, your drums are done.”
It’s much too pat to summarize RJD2’s career to this point as legwork, as if decades of revising chord progressions and adjusting microphones by fractions of an inch have all come together just to form this batch of songs. He’s produced over a dozen albums between his solo work and collaborative projects, and each release possesses its own unique flavor. Just as it’s unfair to obscure the new stuff by comparing it to the pile of old stuff – all of it made with different creative intentions – it’s unfair to reduce a body of work to a gradual progression. There are detours, dead-ends, and plots abandoned and taken back up again.
What needs to be said is that RJD2 has found his sound. He has collected nearly three decades of experience producing music and developing the methods, workarounds, and idiosyncratic quirks of a person devoted to his creative pursuit. He has refined his skills, instincts, and aesthetic preferences, and he has combined all these things to create an album that feels both cohesive and cumulative and could not have been made by anyone else, including himself, at any previous point in his life.
He will probably do this again. He will make new music, and what listeners once perceived as his signature sound might be remembered as a former glory or a quaint diversion. Though fans and critics will continue to look back on his career, adding context to each new release, it’s clear that RJD2 will continue to push his sound forward for as long as he decides to keep making music. The world should listen.