In the comments section yesterday, djonpoynt brings up an interesting point about Dr. Dre:
Dre is known to use “ghost producers” on some tracks on which he gets sole production credit. This is tough to substantiate because it’s such a touchy and ambiguous subject in hiphop. And obviously, Dre would never go on record and admit it.It’s been talked about in hiphop circles since “Chronic 2001″ was released when he had a production team working with him, including Scott Storch (former Roots keyboardist and now super-producer himself). Dre isn’t known for his instrumental skills, so he usually relies on others like Storch to lay down riffs, basslines, etc. Though to his credit, he’s probably the one who lays down drums and ultimately sequences these beats.
In fact, if you check out his production discography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dre_production_discography), it’s littered with co-producers whom he does give credit to. Notables: Storch did the famous riff on Still DRE and Xzibit’s X. A key guy named Mel-Man co-produced Chronic 2001 and The Marshall Mathers LP, doing significant synthesizer work on Xxplosive, Next Episode, Forgot About Dre, and Real Slim Shady.
My personal take is, he established himself by doing the bulk of production for the original Chronic and Doggystyle. But after he reached celebrity status, he needed to enlist others just to keep up with demand, which is completely fine.
Where it gets fuzzy is, how many no-name producers did he work with who never appeared on liner notes? I’m sure there’s more than a few, which probably isn’t that big of a deal given how hiphop production works in the first place (sampling, drum machines, etc). It’s just that a lot of people solely associate Dre with certain classic tracks, when much of the time he actually has a team of co-producers working for him.
I can’t speak to the uncredited producers part of it, but I can say this for sure: Very, very few pieces of art in any medium are truly the work of an individual. Certain works of fiction, maybe, but even then there’s usually plenty of editorial interaction. It is the tendency of the consumer and critic to associate the finished product with a single artist, usually attributing to that artist some sort of unified vision, but clearly that’s not often how it works.
Even some great Renaissance masters didn’t actually paint large portions of their paintings. They sketched out ideas for what they wanted them to look like, worked certain important parts of the pieces themselves, and then left big portions up to their apprentices and underlings. Blew my mind when I learned that. I always envisioned the lonely-painter-in-a-studio type image we romanticize, but those guys — like Dr. Dre, really — were in high demand.
Probably the best and most obvious example is with film. We talk about Woody Allen movies like they’re all his own because it’s simpler to do it that way than to consider the creative input and choices of the hundreds of other people involved in creating a motion picture.
And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing or anything else, it’s just a thing. But the truth is, perhaps the person making the final, overarching aesthetic decisions should get the bulk of the credit, since he or she is the one making the choices that ultimately determine the piece’s success.
No, Dre didn’t play the riff on Still D.R.E., but presumably he recruited Storch to record on the track, influenced what Storch played and selected that particular riff from many that got left on the proverbial cutting-room floor. And while maybe none of that classifies as typical nuts-and-bolts production in one sense, it seems like it should all fall under some larger umbrella of “producer.”
After all, those tracks are nearly all unified by the throbbing funk we identify we Dre’s production. It could be that he’s relying on co-producers as an easier way out, but it strikes me — and this, I should say, is entirely uninformed and spoken mostly as a hopeful Dr. Dre fan — as equally possible that he’s leaning on collaborators to help develop his production beyond the scope of his own limitations.
Regardless, the most awesome news is that Dr. Dre has a sweet robot helmet:
Tedquarters 
Unfortunately there’s another layer to this because Dre’s been accused of having ghostwriters for his flows as well. Not that uncommon: Pharoahe Monch, among others, has been writing Diddy’s raps for years. But supposedly if you dig around the darkest corners of the internet enough you can find guide vocals for “Detox” recorded by T.I. that are clearly meant for Dre.
Like all things on the internet, take that with a grain of salt.
And I’m still getting “Detox” the second it comes out.
Point well taken, and I alluded to this exact topic when I mentioned hiphop production rules being ambiguous, and the fact that sampling is the foundation upon which hiphop music was built. Really, the whole genre was born out of the art of taking others’ creations, breaking them down into workable pieces, and rearranging it into your own “original” composition. As you noted, the very same principle can be applied to other types of art like film and painting.
When you mentioned Dr. Dre yesterday, I had to bring it up because his name happens to be one that comes up often in “ghost producer” discussions, legitimately or not (on a side note, he’s also front and center in ghost writer debates). Regardless, I still have enormous respect for the man, and his classic records are on heavy rotation in my DJ sets.
The issue strikes a chord with me because I know and work with a lot of independent hiphop beat makers who bust their asses trying to make a name for themselves. They are the personification of the romanticized “lonely-painter-in-a-studio” type you brought up, in that they do actually create their beats single-handedly from beginning to end (“create” in this case defined as using samplers, drum machines, synthesizers, and sequencers of course). Lesser known, underground artists are more accustomed to associating finished products to a single person, rather than teams.
But I suppose this is the difference between independent artists and megastars like Dre. If one of those indie producers is talented and lucky enough to establish himself in the industry one day, it would be completely acceptable (and probably expected) to recruit co-producers to help him continue pushing, elevating and expanding his own “Dr. Dre”-type brand. Kanye West himself, by the way, started out this very way.
That explains why award speeches are 10 minutes long. Those names mean nothing to us but I’m sure it’s important for them.
I will say, organizing and mixing in all those sounds into one collective beat does take talent. I can appreciate music but impossible for me to try and orchestrate such a wide variety of sounds, riffs, and if you have good head phones you take notice of every single sound and although he may not “find” or “create” each individual sound used, putting all that together takes a great mind and talent.
This thread is awesome.