T.I. "WHY YOU WANNA"
THE BEST THING that ever happened to Kevin “Khao” Cates, 27, was the theft of a truck carrying all of his music. “I lost all my zip disks, 2,500 tracks and my signature sounds,” he recounts of the 2004 heist. “It was like I lost a kid or something.” His production already in demand after contributing a pair of tracks on T.I.’s Urban Legend, the Montgomery, AL native rushed into the studio barehanded. “It made me start from scratch,” says Khao. “I got back the passion I had when I was learning different things and constantly trying to take it to the next level.”
Said passion for musical enrichment existed well before Khao was knocking out tracks for the likes of Lil’ Kim and Paul Wall. A decade ago, he studied the construction of music era-by-era for several months before even touching a borrowed MPC. “I could look at a record and know if it would have a sample on it,” Khao remembers. “I knew the majority of the stuff I wanted to use would be melodic—the records with the butterflies, the skulls and somebody riding over a rainbow with a unicorn...”
Ben detrick