While Crunk and Snap are today’s tasty treats, the veteran A-Town players of Organized Noize still focus on serving up hearty slabs of hip-hop soul .
STORY n. ali early | PHOTOGRAPHY zach wolfe
OVER A DECADE has passed since Rico Wade, Ray Murray, and Patrick “Sleepy” Brown—collectively known as Organized Noize—laid the groundwork to Outkast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Still, it stands as a historical and defining moment in Southern hip-hop, as does their Goodie Mob-produced gold debut, Soul Food. Since claiming their spot as monarchs in their Atlanta stomping grounds, Organized have created platinum plus product for the likes of TLC (“Waterfalls”), Raphael Saadiq (Instant Vintage) and Ludacris (“Saturday’s (Oooh, Oooh!)”) among others.
Upon conquering the music masses, the trio moved to test their talent in film. They’ve contributed to a plethora of movie soundtracks, including Miami Vice and Newline Cinema’s Snakes On a Plane. Now with the release of Sleepy Brown’s Virgin debut, Mr. Brown, the Hotlanta trio shares how they keep their old school sound so fresh and so clean.
SCRATCH You all are largely responsible for Atlanta’s sound from its most infant stages, but you still manage to keep it modern without compromising the music of today. How do you go about doing that?
RICO We stay up to date, like we got the soul in us, but we don’t just have it. We read books. We study the ’60s and the ’70s. You gotta know what they were doing, how they were using chord progressions, how they were copying each other but trying to change some stuff because that’s all they knew. I think what keeps us modern is buying the new equipment, but at the same time we [have] all the old drum machines, the standard 808. We don’t necessarily want to work on Reason or Garage Band, but we gotta check it out, ’cause that’s what the kids are doing. We can’t be dinosaurs. So we incorporate that with our old school style because we’re still digging in the crates, [but] we know we have to bring the technical side too.
Which machines are you using these days?
SLEEPY The MPC4000, MPC60, the Fantom keyboard, the Rhodes keyboard... Just those things. I like old keyboards, the Clav and all that kind of stuff.
RICO Keeping it real, we actually have an FTP site and we have stream players in New York like an orchestra section. We can post music on the site, they can hear it, play parts to it, and send it back to us. We sample those parts and put them back on a song. But that’s live music! That kind of stuff is a blessing and it’s what’s keeping us around.