So So Def is celebrating their 25th anniversary this year and Jermaine Dupri has revealed some things about the label throughout the course of that time.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, JD spoke on everything from how he discovered Anthony Hamilton through his pops to the start of the label and how he hard had to work to compete with New York R&B at the time.
One small tidbit he talked about as well was the fact that created the Trap R&B sound we hear today, saying he was ahead of the curve.
Do you think the label was known for a certain sound?
I posted something the other day about the Monica record “Everytime tha Beat Drop” with Dem Franchize Boyz. None of her records — like “Angel of Mine” and “The Boy is Mine” and all of these songs was in the pattern of this old R&B, what people thought R&B was, but Monica was an artist to me that was dripping with the sauce of Atlanta. And everything she did was hood, shit, go in the hood-club and partying and loving this hood type of music. So I took this chance to try to make her a record that felt like where she would go partying, felt like the things that she actually loved, right?
And this happened in 2006. I posted two days ago, I asked a question: Who else from Atlanta was making R&B music like this? The sounds of that R&B that you hear now, I mean people don’t give me credit for it, but I was ahead of the curve. I won’t say I created it, but I guess I should, because I did.
In terms of really fusing rap and R&B in that way?
It terms of fusing R&B with that trap type of mentality we found. What you hear from like, the Weekend and 6lack and PartyNextDoor, those type of records weren’t being created when I created Xscape, when I did the Monica record in 2006. Even in 2006, nobody was making R&B records like that.
R&B has to now find it’s space, the same way hip-hop did. One thing I can say is that, people still wanna hear people sing. We just gotta know how to do it. You gotta be smart about how you do it and when the Ella Mai record came out, that should make people realize that people are not done with R&B.
OS REWIND: Ludacris & Jermaine Dupri – Welcome to Atlanta (Falcons Remix) [Music Video]
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