Local producer makes beats for hip-hop stars

Editor’s Note: We’ve made enough ruckus about South Carolina being the only Southern state without a lasting hip-hop star. So instead of continuing to write about the fact, we’re going to profile the people trying to put S.C. hip-hop on the national map instead. Here’s the third of several stories.

Hip-hop is a genre, regardless of economic times, that celebrates excess. It demands it.

So why isn’t Will Washington pushing a new whip or wearing a diamond-clustered chain? In a little more than two years, Washington, an Irmo High School graduate who produces beats as WillPower, has become a leader in the state’s hip-hop movement.

That’s what happens when Eminem, one of the most popular recording artists regardless of genre, taps your sound to reboot his label. That was WillPower’s beat — a harrowing piano riff accented by static-like flourishes of muffled sound bursts — underneath verses by Eminem, Slaughterhouse and Yelawolf on “2.0 Boys,” a song that announced Eminem’s new team.

At least a watch to celebrate?

“When I started doing this, I always had to work for it, so I’m really careful about what I do,” said Washington, who drives a Nissan and was dressed casually in Army fatigue shorts and a white T-shirt. “I really just always reinvested my money into what I was doing. Most people bought cars. I bought equipment. To me, it’s just part of what I do. I don’t event think about ballin’.”

It’s not a stretch to suggest that the careers of Washington and Yelawolf are, to this point, inextricably intertwined.

Yelawolf’s album “Radioactive,” which was released Nov. 21, entered the Billboard Top 200 charts at No. 27 with 41,000 copies sold its first week. Washington produced seven of the album’s 15 songs, including two that share credit with Eminem.

“‘Trunk Muzik’, it changed my life man,” Washington said, referring to Yelawolf’s 2009 mixtape he produced.

The mixtape made a Yelawolf a hip-hop star. It made Washington see that after years of struggling he was going to get rewarded.

A ‘Shady’ deal

Washington said he met Yelawolf in the kitchen of a recording studio in Englewood, N.J., where Washington was working in a production mill for a famed producer. (More on that later.) It was 2001.

“Immediately, we kicked it because we were both from the South,” said Washington, who returned South after 9/11. “We both left around the same time. He came to my house in South Carolina and started cutting records.”

Yelawolf, a rapper who is capable of delivering words at the pace similar to that of a booking-house bill counter, raps about rural poverty, backwoods problems in his native Alabama and his plight in the industry. He has been on the cusp of stardom for several years. In 2007, it seemed Wolf, as Washington calls him, had broken through with a record deal on Columbia Records. Washington, who was in a rut, was surprised when Yelawolf called him from New York.

“I was at a really low point. It was terrible,” he said. “(Yelawolf) said, ‘I have no idea what I can promise you. Just get to New York and I’ll get you on my album’. It was so bad I had to borrow gas money to get to New York. I went up there, played him these beats and I got three records on the album. I wasn’t trying to get but one.”

Columbia severed ties with the record executive who signed Yelawolf, which meant the album, “Fearin’ And Loathin’ in Smalltown, U.S.A.,” didn’t have a chance.

Washington returned to Atlanta and Wolf, who went home to Alabama, ventured into rap-rock. In 2009, Wolf wanted to record a hip-hop record. They cut “Trunk Muzik” in four days and it dropped in January 2010.

“And it’s been booming every since,” Washington, who has two children, Lyrical and Legend, said through a smile. “I looked up and we were on the road with rapper Wiz Khalifa. We went on a second tour with Wiz and then my phone started ringing.”

In January of this year, Washington was in Las Vegas working on “Radioactive” when a Shady Records representative heard the “2.0 Boys” beat.

“That was the introduction to Eminem,” he said. “Then we went to Detroit and I actually got to meet him. Honestly, I prepared myself for days to not be nervous and be cool. His studio, impeccable. And no plaques on the wall. It’s like, this is where I work.”

Now he’s got beats in the pipeline for Eminem, Slaughterhouse and even 50 Cent. Since Washington doesn’t have a signature like, say, the whirring synthesizer sweeps of The Neptunes, “Radioactive” contains electronic funk, symphonic piano base lines and eruptive sound collages.

“Anything Shady, I have red carpet love. Not in the sense of like you’re definitely going to get it, but I definitely have a straight track to give it a look,” Washington said. “I’m not treated like an outsider. I’m not going to front and say I can go up there anytime I want, but I definitely have that musical relationship that is real.

“Like, my e-mails get opened. That’s what I’m appreciative of.”

Getting e-mails opened — that’s his kind of ballin’.

“There’s no reason to paint a perfect picture because things are not and they haven’t been, but one thing that’s been totally consistent in my life is my music,” he said. “My music is what has provided for me and my family. Trust, this next round is truly going to change my family’s life. Fifteen years ago, I knew that one day I could get this.”

Ups and downs

Fifteen years ago Washington, 37, who had been a member of the R&B group Beiz (pronounced “beige”) was trying to build local label Peach Phuzz Records. Washington is a hustler, but not in a sense of the rappers holding on to the long-passed glory days of “trap” music.

“I wasn’t a dope boy,” said Washington, using slang for drug hustler. “The dope boys actually came to work with me so they could get away from it. Before I moved to South Carolina, I did have a troubled teen life. I was glad to be away from that.”

He moved to Columbia from Louisiana in 1992 and graduated from Irmo in 1994.

“I came from a real country school to a prestigious white school,” he said. “It was like going to college for me. I felt free. I didn’t have to worry about being a thug.”

In 2001, Washington left Columbia for New Jersey, signing a production deal with Sugar Hill Gang Records, which was owned by Sylvia Robinson, often referred to as the mother of hip-hop.

“She gave me a small publishing deal and I didn’t make any money,” Washington said of Robinson, who died in September. “I signed it and I was stuck with no money. I was in a building with 10 studios and 10 producers signed to her. At the end of the week, we’d turn in beats. I thought I made it. I thought that was it. I quickly learned it wasn’t.”

He met Yelawolf there and he got the idea to start his own production company, Supa Hot Beats, with Tasha Brown. The company began in a storage unit off Fernandina Road in 2002. Washington said it made close to $90,000 the first year.

“I was doing really well with production, but after a year, year and a half making money with music, it’s kind of hard to convince somebody to reinvest if they didn’t (blow up),” he said. “That’s when you’ll really find out somebody who’s trying to do music for a living as opposed to somebody who’s trying to hit a lick with their music or just doing it because it’s cool.”

He started The Starving Artist Showcase, which morphed into a TV show, “Independent Music Review.” He took the show to Atlanta where it aired on UPN for six months.

“I was a big fish here, but I wasn’t even a minnow out there,” he said. “I went down there with a TV show and used the TV show to get in position. So I would go over to (T.I.’s label) Grand Hustle with a camera, and I would be working with artists over there filming their sessions and doing stuff to put them on the TV show.

“Just recording footage, a reason for me to put together reels. I was just trying to work that angle.”

Would the success have happened here?

“No, but I never would’ve went to Atlanta if it wasn’t for Columbia,” he said. “Because this place does just enough to you to make you feel like it’s going to happen here. And then reality sets in. You realize you’re in a circle.

“If you want to take it to the next level, you have to go where the next level is. Just think if I had gone to Atlanta in the ’90s. Where would I be now?”

Washington is in Columbia often. On Monday night, instead of posing for pictures at New Brookland Tavern, Washington took them as people clamored to get a snapshot with the singer Nikkiya, the Columbia native who is one of the new faces of R&B. In August she released “Speakher,” a Washington-produced mixtape. Nikkiya, who is based in Atlanta, has appeared on tracks with Yelawolf, Tech N9ne and Wiz Khalifa.

There were several local industry players in the building, but not enough to make it seem like Columbia’s often-fractured hip-hop scene had come together to celebrate one of their own.

“Prince Ice played my first record on the radio,” Washington said referring to the longtime local DJ who was in the crowd. “And now we got a record at No. 21 on the Billboard 200. We about to put this (city) on.”

More music might be coming through Columbia — to get mastered. Washington co-owns Columbia Sounds, a mastering lab off Gervais Street, with longtime friends Irvin Johnson and Jason Wilson. Parts of “Radioactive” were refined there and “PL3DGE,” Killer Mike’s critically-acclaimed 2011 CD, was mastered there — the day before it was released online in May.

Things are better than it’s ever been, but it’s still not time to ball. For one, Washington hasn’t scored a classic yet, one of those songs that seem to spin on an endless loop on the radio and in clubs.

“A lot of people get it messed up,” he said. “They get these advances and just start buying stuff. Once you spend it, it’s gone. For me, I buy equipment because the main thing for me is to turn it over.”