Large Professor

• 1. Introduction

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  Large Professor was born William Paul Mitchell on the 21st of March, 1972, in Harlem, Manhattan, then raised in Flushing, Queens. By the time he was eighteen years old, he had already helped shape one of hip-hop's most celebrated albums and was steering the career of a teenage rapper named Nas who would become one of the genre's defining voices. What made a kid from Queens so central to New York's underground scene? The answers lie in a set of turntables, a Casio sampler, and a method of catching beats from a different part of the record than anyone else was bothering to try.

• 2. Learning the Craft

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  Before William Mitchell had a stage name, he had two turntables, a Casio SK-1 sampler, and pause-tape cassettes. His earliest beats came from a technique he developed by instinct: while other producers grabbed the kick drum hit at the top of a bar, he listened for the third hi-hat instead. "I was trying to catch it from a different part of the record," he later explained. "I would catch it from the third hi-hat and be flipping it." The man who focused his ear was a mentor known as Paul C, who taught him how to use an E-mu SP-1200, the machine that would underpin so much New York hip-hop through the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Paul C's influence ran even deeper than lessons at the machine. When Large Professor produced "In the Ghetto" for Eric B. & Rakim's 1990 album Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em, he built the track by sampling directly off a cassette of ideas that Paul C had originally assembled for Rakim himself.

• 3. Main Source and Breaking Atoms

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  In 1989, Large Professor joined Main Source alongside two Toronto natives, K-Cut and Sir Scratch. The group's 1991 album Breaking Atoms arrived as a compact document of Queens rap at its most focused. Tracks like "Just Hangin' Out" and "Looking at the Front Door" became the record's most recognizable moments, but the album's lasting significance came from a single guest appearance. A track called "Live at the Barbeque" featured a young rapper named Nas alongside Akinyele and Joe Fatal, marking Nas's first public appearance on record. Looking back on "Looking at the Front Door" years later, Large Professor described writing it as a teenager with directness that holds up: "That's a deep record. At that time in life, I was eighteen years old. It was a kid with a pure heart, just writing, and putting his soul out there for the world." In 1992, Main Source's momentum carried them onto the White Men Can't Jump motion-picture soundtrack with a track called "Fakin' the Funk." But business differences soon pulled the group apart, and Large Professor signed with Geffen Records.

• 4. Illmatic and the Nas Connection

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  In 1994, Large Professor produced three of the ten songs on Nas's debut album Illmatic: "Halftime", "One Time 4 Your Mind", and "It Ain't Hard to Tell". That tally tied him with DJ Premier for the most production credits on the record. The beat for "Halftime" had a prior life. According to Busta Rhymes, it was originally intended for him. He liked it but passed, and he later said he regretted that decision after hearing what Nas did with it. Large Professor described the session's intent with plainness: "We just wanted to put something gritty out there to the world, and those drums, that's what it was at that time. It was that gritty, muffled out, because the Hip Hop that we grew up with, we grew up with park jam tapes." Nas valued his work on Illmatic so highly that he offered Large Professor an executive producer credit. Large Professor turned it down. A few years later, while Nas was recording Nastradamus, Large Professor played him the beat that would eventually become "You're da Man" on the 2001 Stillmatic album. Nas chose the beat but deliberately held it back for a later project.

• 5. Shelved, Bootlegged, Released

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  In 1996, Large Professor completed a debut solo album called The LP for Geffen Records, promoted by singles including "The Mad Scientist" and "I Juswannachill". Then the project stalled. Delays stretched across years, and the album was shelved by the label. A bootleg version circulated in 2002, which meant the record found its audience before it was ever officially released. An authorized version finally appeared in 2009, thirteen years after it was first intended to come out. Around that same time he worked more broadly: in 1993 he produced the entirety of Akinyele's Vagina Diner, an album that sold well initially before a controversy over the song "I Luh Huh" drew a critical article in The Source. The backlash hurt the album's commercial performance. Akinyele responded in the magazine's next issue, defending the song by noting that the violent thoughts expressed in the lyrics are just thoughts, and pointing to the song's own closing line as his answer: "Just cause I talk this shit don't get me wrong, Yo, I still luh hur." The episode illustrated how closely Large Professor's work tracked the debates and pressures of early 1990s hip-hop.

• 6. A Network of Collaborations

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  Across the 1990s, Large Professor moved through nearly every significant corner of New York hip-hop. He produced tracks for Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Busta Rhymes, Masta Ace, The X-Ecutioners, Tragedy Khadafi, Big Daddy Kane, Mobb Deep, and A Tribe Called Quest. "Keep It Rollin'" on A Tribe Called Quest's Midnight Marauders arrived not long after he left Main Source, and he would later describe that placement as a moment that opened a new level of credibility for him as a solo artist. About.com eventually ranked him at number 13 on its Top 25 Hip-Hop Producers list, a measure of how consistently his name appeared across the era's most respected records. On the 22nd of December, 2002, the original Main Source lineup reunited on a concert stage in Toronto for the first time in nearly ten years, closing a chapter that had defined the start of his career and opening whatever would come next.