Apollo Brown

Talented artists can make what appears to be impossible look easy. It’s in this rarefied air where you’ll find Detroit’s Apollo Brown, constantly conjuring fresh innovations out of a tried-and-true formula. For the last decade, the artist has singularly re-defined and expanded the foundation of what boom bap production can sound like in the 21st Century.

Originally from Grand Rapids in West Michigan, Apollo Brown is a hip-hop producer based in Detroit. In the tradition of left-field beatmakers like the great J Dilla and Madlib, Brown is a man of many influences, with a sound that owes as much to the yacht rock of Seals & Crofts as it does to classic R&B, pulling from all corners of the music world to craft beats that are as interesting musically as they are rhythmically. His vast discography includes guest-filled projects, instrumental albums, and full-length collaborations with MCs such as Big Pooh, Che' Noir, Guilty Simpson, Joell Ortiz, Locksmith, O.C., Philmore Greene, Planet Asia, Raheem DeVaughn, Ras Kass, Stalley, Skyzoo, and many more. Brown has also participated in the hip-hop groups The Left and Ugly Heroes. While Brown started making beats as a bedroom producer in 1996, it wasn’t until he moved to Detroit and became part of the city’s hip-hop scene that he really began to make a name for himself with his production skills on his first beat albums. In 2009, Brown won the Detroit Red Bull Big Tune Championships, and later that year the producer signed on with Mello Music Group. Under the label, Apollo released a body of work that lives up to the legacy of the head-nodding, screwface-inducing, soul-replenishing lineage of Primo and Pete Rock, J Dilla and Large Professor, Mobb Deep and DJ Muggs. This is the tradition that Apollo Brown triumphantly upholds, conceiving, beat by beat, an East Coast sound with a midwestern mentality, hard and nasty drums that blends sadness, depression, and tenderness. It’s fall music, somber relatable music, gray sky music that offers the unvarnished truth. These aren’t beats impersonally e-mailed across the continent from producer-to-MC. On every album bearing the Apollo Brown alias, the artists create songs in the same room, bouncing ideas and concepts off each another until the final product is a masterpiece. Everyone from Danny Brown to Chance The Rapper, Freddie Gibbs to Masta Ace, Black Milk to Oddisee, and Westside Gun, have spit bars over his beats. The explanation why is pretty simple. If you still have any doubts, all you need to do is press play.