Pro Era producer Chuck Strangers recently stopped by the HipHopDX offices and opened up about the upcoming debut album from Joey Bada$$. Breaking down his own contributions to the record, Strangers explained his own progress as a producer and admitted that he reached out of his own comfort zone to provide a different sound for one track in particular on B4.Da.$$.
“The stuff on Joey’s album definitely doesn’t sound like shit we been doing,” he said in a clip that debuted as a part of today’s DX Daily. “It sounds different for sure. It’s real jungly, it’s jungle music. It’s real jungle. It’s still rap though and it’s dark. It’s faster, it’s double time. To me, I wanted to do—it came from just wanting to do party music. I feel like the music I produced before wasn’t really like party. You couldn’t really party to it. Or you could, but not like dance and shit. So I always wanted to go to a party and hear my own music and shit. Just being honest with myself, my shit’s not for the fucking party. So I was like, ‘Man, we gotta make some shit for the party.’ But I was like, ‘How the fuck do I even do that?’ But then I was going to all these places and you hear all these dance beats. I was like, ‘Okay, word. This is some different shit.’ And also I used to live with this cat Lee Bannon and he’s heavy into that kind of stuff.”
Naming “Escape 120?” as the party-friendly track he referenced, Strangers also touched briefly on his two other credits on the album.
“Raury’s on the song too,” he said. “And then there’s another one. I did three on his album. There’s [‘Teach Me’] and then I did ‘Black Beetles.’ They don’t all have the same vibe. Just ‘Escape 120?’ I don’t wanna talk too much about the other two just because the nigga got an album coming out and shit.”
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Addressing the album as a whole, Chuck hinted that the record is a no-bullshit effort from the young emcee.
“I think it’s really, really good,” he said. “I think it’s better than a lot of niggas’ albums. One thing I’ll say about it, to me, it’s just not bullshit. To me, at no point am I sitting there listening to it like, ‘Oh, this sounds fake,’ or ‘Who told you to do this?’ It’s just his vision I’d say. It’s a really, really, really, really good album to be honest.
“And, it goes a lot of places that I don’t think people see,” he added. “You don’t know what this album sounds like. I think some people think they do but they don’t. He really about to show’em, okay, dag, just as far as—I think he’s gonna surprise a lot of people on the production. I think he’s gonna surprise a lot of people with the songs he made, the amount of places he took the listeners. I think he really did a good job.”
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