Ali Shaheed Muhammad

Composers/producers Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Doc McKinney are well versed in adding unique textures to established music scenes. Muhammad first did it in the ‘90s as the deejay for seminal American outfit A Tribe Called Quest, whose jazz-infused brand of hip hop provided a counterpoint to around-the-way party jams and the hard lyricism of gangster rap. Similarly, McKinney crafted a sonic palette of jazzy trip-hop, notably on Canadian singer/songwriter Esthero's debut album Breath From Another.

Last month, the duo signed with Los Angeles, New York and London-based music and sound design house Finger Music, and scored their first brief for Jello via Draft FCB, Chicago. Boards caught up with the producing/writing team to talk about the new gig, the narrowing gap between the ad and music industries and why the "Rapper's Delight"-sampling Evian "Roller Babies" is a good ad but misses the mark musically.

You're both coming from the music industry. What made you decide to get into composing for the commercials world?
Doc McKinney: More and more with the commercial music I was hearing, I'd think, "Wow, that sounds like records I like and that I'd want to do." The [ad] industry's changed quite a bit and there's more opportunities to do different stuff. [The two industries] are becoming so close now that a lot of the records I do work for commercials as well. So many artists are licensing stuff to commercials because it's a big opportunity to break a song.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: What's exciting about branching off is you get to explore a different side of music and put what you create out onto a different platform. [The ad industry] is obviously a different world than making an album, so it brings new insight that you can draw upon to take back into the studio.

It's something I've been shy of out of a lack of experience and I felt it was something that I needed to grow into. I wanted to move from being a programming type of musician -when I say ‘programming' I mean sample-based music - because the majority of musicians in the world really aren't like that. There's so many challenges coming from a sample point of view in regards to being able to license your music. For me, even though I knew how to manipulate other people's sounds, as far as moving forward into film and TV, I felt stifled and wanted to be able to bring a musicianship by picking up a piano, guitar or bass and be able to explore and create something different. I feel like I'm there now.

Doc McKinney

You're joining Finger Music as a producing/songwriting team. How did you two connect?
DM: Ali and I have been friends for 10 years. I met him right after I did the Esthero album and he wanted me to help him produce songs on the Lucy Pearl project [late '90s R&B supergroup featuring Muhammad, musician/producer Raphael Saadiq and former En Vogue front woman Dawn Robinson]. From there we kept in touch whenever I was in Los Angeles or New York. We crossed paths but we didn't have a working relationship up until a year or so ago when I actually got a place in New York and spent most of my time there. Since then, we've been doing different projects together and our own collaborative records.

 What unique insights do you hope to bring to your role at Finger and to the commercial music landscape?
DM: A different interpretation of what urban music is. I think sometimes it's just stigmatized as being only Dirty South [genre] stuff and it's dumbed down to a point where it's hard as an adult to [engage with] those sounds. Partly from my time spent in Toronto, and Ali being an international DJ, we approach stuff that's grounded in urban but has an eclectic type of feel. It will definitely sound like us, but it's not an ambient vocal or A Tribe Called Quest. We're trying to reinvent ourselves.

How do you view the treatment of urban music in commercials and what opportunities do you see for its growth?
ASM: From the advertiser's point of view, I think they only look at the music as something that's going to draw a large demographic, so they won't necessarily retain the purity of it. I'll cite the new Evian commercial. I think it's an awesome ad. On so many different levels you see how far hip hop has come but I look at something like that and I still see limitations as far as representing [hip hop] culture is concerned. You wonder if there's a real purity in its intention.

For me, I'm certainly hoping to bring something that is a lot more authentic. I don't want to bastardize the culture for the sake of a commercial and I believe there are a lot of people out there who understand how sensitive and how important the hip-hop culture is to a lot of people and they're ready to approach people like myself and Doc who bring authenticity to the art form.

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