Blockhead Breaks Down Seven Perfectly Produced Records
The legendary New York hip-hop producer dissects tracks by Black Sheep, Prince Paul, Fiona Apple, and more.
The Producers is an interview series where our favorite artists discuss their favorite music production.
Alternative hip-hop remains in a state of flux and mutation, but you can always count on Blockhead to be a constant. A veteran with nearly 30 years of experience, the New York-born producer and DJ has steadfastly kept to hip-hop fundamentals while sounding fresh in every era. He’s made beats for all of your favorites—he’s made full-length albums with Aesop Rock and Billy Woods and has collaborated with artists from Illogic and Hangar 18 to Vordul Mega and Open Mike Eagle—while keeping a steady drip of instrumental tapes.
Blockhead, whose real name is Tony Simon, first embarked on his path from the time he was 14, when he was first digging through his mother’s cassette collection for samples. He recalls finding the drums from Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Miss Lover” and giving it “to an older rapper friend at the time.” Coincidentally, those drums would end up being picked and used by A Tribe Called Quest on the beat for “Scenario” years later, further solidifying Blockhead's penchant for good percussion. “When I was 18,” he remembers, “I got an ASR-10 for Christmas, and the rest is history.”
Blockhead’s found-sound approach lends itself well to a style primed on the best hip-hop of the 1990s and 2000s. His exhaustive curiosity led him to reach out to the Baltimore rapper Brian Ennals, with whom he released the zonkily psychedelic Boatshoes earlier this year. They’d collaborated before—Ennals contributed the song “Sad Vampire” to The Aux, Blockhead’s 2023 compilation for Backwoodz Studioz—and Boatshoes came from Ennals’s ear as much as Blockhead’s. “The beats on there are things I’ve been working on for years,” Blockhead says, “and he just picked the ones no rapper I work with would ever use.” Boatshoes is all clanging drums and psychedelic loops with just a touch of mania to match Ennals’s sardonic bouts of socioeconomic (looting your local imperialist supermarket) and personal truth-telling. That madcap energy defines Boatshoes, since both Brian and Blockhead are straightforward and raw in ways familiar and patently insane. Blockhead even had to stop Ennals from releasing “Wet Noodle,” a song partly about erectile dysfunction,, as a single.
As a hip-hop connoisseur, Blockhead’s choices for The Producers skew toward dreamy loops and pounding drums. He also threw in a few curveballs—a remix of a Björk deep cut; a full-length Fiona Apple album—but otherwise, this is a master of layered loops paying homage to the beats that raised him.
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