When you’re a part of something memorable, more times than not, it will stick with you for a lifetime. Enter the world of producer Rondell “Ron Browz” Turner. Before he got you to ‘Pop Champagne,’ start ‘Jumping (Out The Window),’ or had you believing you could get ‘Arab Money’; he and fellow Harlemite Big L were updating the urban vernacular with a song called ‘Ebonics.’
(more after break)
From there, his name would be written in Hip-Hop lore for creating ‘Ether’ by some guy named Nas who used it to battle another guy named Jay-Z. The debate will forever go on in Hip-Hop whether Nas cooked Jay-Z with ‘Ether’ or not, but there will never be any debate on who the architect in the studio was that armed Nas with his ammunition.
Now the man who’s produced for the likes of Lloyd Banks, Ludacris, Snoop Dogg, and Jim Jones [click for interview] steps into his own realm with his first project, appropriately titled Etherlibrium. Things are about to heat up, so make sure to throw on that Kevlar button-up before going outside.
Ron Browz: I actually wanted to be a rapper when I was a child… I used to be around producers who would break records up for me and stuff; and then I started getting into how beats were made… So I started off with the science of music, and making beats… I just so happened to become a producer, but it wasn’t a goal though…
Ron Browz: I had did ‘Ebonics’ for Big L, and that just lead into me making more beats, and putting them on CD’s and stuff like that… Big L was the first person to pay me, rest in peace… I was just doing beats for him, and one day he gave me some money and was like, “This is for the beats.”
Ron Browz: The manager I had at the time went through Nas’ travel agent, and Nas sat on the beat for a couple of months before he even put it out… I had gave it to him in the summer time, but he dropped ‘Ether’ in the winter time…
Ron Browz: At first it was like that, but after ‘Ether’ came out, it opened up a lot of doors for me… After that, artists pretty much wanted to work with me, and see what I had to figure out if I could come up with something for them… So everything kind of fell right into place after ‘Ether.’
Ron Browz: I call Etherlibrium the dark side of ‘Pop Champagne.’ After I made ‘Pop Champagne,’ a lot of things were happening in my life at the time… Sometimes when I’d get off the road, I’d go right into the studio, and just vent…
So a lot of the records are just about me and my thoughts, and basically trying to get people to know who I am… I don’t think people really got to know who I am, because I never put out a full project, and all people heard from me were selective singles… So this record was just for people to get to know who I am, and to put out a full project…
Ron Browz: People tend to pigeon toe hold you, like you can only do one thing… Like, “He can only use Auto-tune,” “He can only make party songs.” So I’m just trying to show people that I can be very diverse lyrically, concept-wise, and production-wise… A lot of people thought I got lucky at the time, and I want to let people know that I can do records without Auto-tune…
Ron Browz: I was giving a New York flavor to Auto-tune, and I was successful from it… Everything was good money until Jay… Nobody was saying anything about it until then, because everybody was rocking to it… So when Jay came out with his record, I think people started to look at it a different type of way…
But before he even came out with his record, I was already experimenting with it, and I made a lot of money from it… So you can’t knock somebody for experimenting with a hustle, and being successful from it… You can’t knock somebody for making some dope records with it…
Ron Browz: To do both is brilliant… To come up with some beats that people love around the world is brilliant to me… To come up with some lyrics that people around the world can sing is brilliant too… When I perform these songs around the world; people know these lyrics and these hooks…
So you have to have some type of smarts to make records that the whole world can sing, not just the people on your block or your boys can sing… People may bring up the Auto-tune, but you still have to write lyrics in Auto-tune that the whole world can sing… You still need some type of talent, so that’s why when ‘D.O.A.’ came out, there were certain bars he [Jay-Z] was saying in the record that people needed a crutch, and stuff like that…
But you still have to go into the studio, and it’s a process to make the record… If that wasn’t the case, then everybody would’ve gotten on Auto-tune and made millions of dollars… But if you look back, there was only a selected few that was successful at doing it…
