Why the Rapper/Producer Collab Album Is More Important Than Ever

Be honest: when’s the last time you listened to a full album? If you’re a music nerd like me, you may already be upset that I asked such a question, but even the most devoted listeners have to agree that the landscape of music is changing. Data shows that viral snippets and algorithmic playlists are preferred over full songs and focused projects, and it feels as if albums are becoming less and less important by the day. A 2020 study of listening habits found that only 9% of people prefer to listen to albums, with 40% expressing a preference for playlists instead. Furthermore, only 36% of adult respondents listened to albums in chronological order. In a 2022 study of over 44,000 people from 22 countries, 13% of respondents said short form video apps and social media were their primary choice for listening to music—a number that has surely only risen since.

Thanks to the internet, it’s possible for today’s rappers to record entire albums over beats that have been sent in remotely, from producers they’ve never met. However, we’ve seen more and more rappers in the past few years link up with a single producer for a full album, an idea that feels somewhat antithetical to everything about how fans engage with popular music these days. Why is it a mode of creation that is beloved by rappers, producers, and fans alike, and what makes these musicians keep going back to it?

Blockbuster albums like Future and Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You and We Still Don’t Trust You have kept this album format in the popular conversation, but the artists who are really keeping this tradition alive have mostly emerged from the underground, building tightly-knit musical communities and evolving their sounds through these projects. We talked to Wiki, Saba, Tony Seltzer, and Black Noi$e, four artists who have made waves with their explorations in this format, about what draws them towards this mode of creation and why it endures.

The first modern rap album to popularize using multiple producers was Nas’s Illmatic in 1994. This was news to me, a rap fan born in the generation where this is the standard, and I learned—from this TikTok, ironically—that it was groundbreaking at the time. Before Illmatic, it was the norm to only work with one producer on an album, something I found surprising until I started to think about some of the albums we consider classics today: Enter the 36 Chambers had the RZA, Paid in Full had Eric B, Str8 Outta Compton had Dr. Dre, and Low End Theory had Q-Tip. As Wiki puts it, “It goes back to the DJ and the MC. There's such a history of it, So I think it's cool to even keep that tradition going.”

Even though it started a move away from the rapper/producer album, for Wiki, the ideals are still present in Illmatic: “There are mad different producers, but they were all together, saying ‘we're doing this for Nas.’ It wasn't just sent in beats.” Wiki tells us that through his recent projects, he seeks to keep those ideas of genuine collaboration and community alive in our new age.

These albums aren’t only a chance to pay homage to rap tradition though—they also are an opportunity to expand and engage with this history on a deeper level. We spoke to Saba about his upcoming album with No ID—who was close with his father—and what it meant to be collaborating with the Chicago legend. “On all my albums, it's important to me to have there be some type of intergenerational dialogue happening. It's call and response in a lot of ways, and I just think that conversation is worth keeping alive forever and worth experiencing in as many different ways as possible.”

For Saba, this album is an opportunity to tell two Chicago stories from different time periods and sides of the city, as well as a way to push his sound forward through working with one of the greats. The collaboration with No ID pushed Saba to become more honest on this project, and he speaks with admiration about how he felt compelled to keep up with the legendary producer. “Bro can make any type of beat. The identity and the soul that's in his music is universal to all of his music, regardless of the genre, regardless of the BPM. It's so uniquely him. I think for me, I felt challenged by that—challenged in a good way. I wanted to rise to that same conclusion as the lyricist, as the artist on the songs—I wanted to match that and be able to show up as myself in any world that we enter.”

This is where the beauty of these albums lies—as fans, we get to see artists moving outside of their comfort zone and in new directions, something this format is primed for. For Wiki, working with producers like Navy Blue, Subjxct 5, and Tony Seltzer allowed him to sit back and focus solely on his raps and lyricism. “I've been so comfortable working with one producer because it does kind of center things. I can be free, and they can be more focused on the full sound of everything.”

Wiki appreciates how the producers he works with can build an environment for him to play in. He starts to sound like a basketball coach when comparing these projects to the albums where he works with multiple producers, likening it to being a role player versus the GM. He is planning on working with a broader team and taking more of that curatorial role on his next project, but Wiki will be making sure to preserve the authenticity found in his rapper/producer collaborations, always making sure he’s avoiding creating in a way that doesn’t feel honest. “I never want to be in the industry on a level where it's you're just going from one fucking room to another room. You know what I mean? You're getting sent from one room to another room and everything's fake. You know what I mean? I want to be out in the real world.”

While these types of deeper collaborations allow rappers to play with new ideas and offer them freedom to experiment, they push producers as well. For Tony Seltzer, who has made full albums with Wiki, MIKE, KEY!, and many others over the years, it’s an opportunity for a creative challenge. “It lets us get the go-to Tony Seltzer beats and rap styles out of the way, and instead explore how to push each other to enhance an entire project, as opposed to one or two tracks.”

As the sole producer on a project, Tony feels the responsibility to avoid monotony at all costs. Part of this job is to keep things interesting for fans, even when that means trying things he wouldn’t do normally. “If it's my first time in the studio with someone or we're just doing a session here or there and we haven't really built that relationship and trust, I'm probably not going to see if I can get them on my more experimental beats. Whereas if I'm really locked in with somebody, I think they'll take something like that a little bit more seriously.” No two Tony Seltzer-produced projects sound the same—for example, compare the airy, stripped-back beats on 14k Figaro to the more hard hitting sounds of Pinball.

Making an album together as a duo requires a significant commitment, one that Saba likened to an athlete in the gym, seeing “who's willing to also contribute that time and put those same efforts into your product.” Wiki explained to us how years-long friendships with Navy Blue, Tony Seltzer, and Subjxct 5 informed their albums together. For Wiki, trust does not only come from having faith in their taste and creativity but also the confidence that they want to work with you to create something special. “That gives another trust too. It's like you guys are both putting your trust in each other.” He was going through a rough time when Navy Blue reached out to work together, and the confidence boost that it gave him resulted in some of his most assured, insightful rapping on Half God.

Black Noi$e has worked on projects where he has sent a batch of beats over and gotten a whole album back the next day—his great EP with Valee from this year, Partridge, for example—but he also told me that he had a lot more fun working with Zelooperz on 2019’s Dyn-O-Mite. Why? It’s simple—working with your friends is always more fun. That sentiment was echoed by everyone we talked to. In Wiki’s words: “All this shit is real connections. Real people, real friendship and shit.” Fans can feel this authenticity in the music, and four years on from the pandemic, that sense of real-life community being built resonates now more than ever. Saba agrees: “To me, it seems like the best albums, they come from either working with one producer or working with one team of producers who work closely on it. It feels like the relationship comes out through the music, and those albums a lot of times feel more homely.”

These albums also make the shared musical worlds feel smaller as fans start to connect the dots between scenes and communities. Wiki compared it to comic-book crossovers in the way that “it’s taking it out of just Wiki world, and going like, no, this is Tony world too. This is Subjxct world and 2oo4 world too. It’s like when Spider-Man pulls up to the X-Men. You have your world, but then there's the collaborative joints where it's like, ‘Yo, they together in this joint. This is crazy.’” Wiki lights up when explaining this to me, and it's clear how important these communities are to him.

These crossovers also accomplish another important goal by highlighting the importance of producers in building the sound of a scene, and allowing artists to share more of the spotlight. In Tony Seltzer's words, “Producer collab albums really help people to realize, ‘Oh, I see two names on the sound, but I'm only hearing one person rap. What does the other person do?’”

Aside from the Pharrells, Timbalands, and Metro Boomins of the world, many in the general public don’t know who produces the music they enjoy, and these albums help raise the profile of beatmakers. “In the last couple of years, I’ve seen myself gaining more fans and more recognition by people who've been listening to music that I've been producing for years but haven't really been locked in with me because they haven't seen my name on the artist level with the rapper,” says Seltzer.

On Cold Cuts, Wiki’s album with Subjxct 5, Subjxct talks throughout the album and appears on the cover alongside Wiki, something the rapper made it clear to me that he insisted on. He had a similar approach on 14k Figaro as well: “After we did the album, Tony went through and just did the crazy effects on everything and souped it up. That was his version of getting [his] shit off on the record.”

I lived outside the US for the first 18 years of my life, and my high school years were spent in obsessive rap fandom. So much of rap music is deeply indebted to local and regional communities and traditions, and I don’t think I fully understood these contexts and histories until understanding how the different artists I love related to each other. Shining the spotlight on producers through collab albums led me to start putting the puzzle pieces together, discovering so much great music in the process.

Saba and No ID working together led me down a rabbit hole of Chicago rap history that I was previously ignorant to, and I got into Wiki because of his work with Tony Seltzer and Subjxct 5, who I followed because of their respective projects with Key! and DJ Lucas/Papo2oo4. I discovered Zelooperz because of his connection to Black Noi$e, who I loved because of his work with Earl Sweatshirt, an artist who introduced me to MIKE and Navy Blue, who have made albums with Tony and Wik... you get the idea.

When I started college in the US, I was able to start making sense of various cultures through the webs of connections and collisions of sounds between these artists. The rapper/producer collab album can serve as a lens through which fans can begin to understand rich rap histories, that could never be learned from a Daily Mix or Mellow Bars Spotify playlist.

The rapper/producer collab album is a lot of things. It is a vehicle for two artists to push themselves in new directions, a platform for intergenerational conversations, a vital opportunity to spotlight rising producers, and a chance to celebrate musical communities. Most importantly, it can lead to music that isn’t afraid to take risks, authentically pushing the boundaries of the genre in a way that can feel so rare these days.

We live in a world of type beats, TikTok trends, and anonymous instrumentals, and while this democratization of music creation and distribution has been a positive in some ways, it has also created an ecosystem in which artists’ careers hinge on making the next viral hit instead of fully formed bodies of work, at risk of being forgotten as soon as the next viral sound comes around. This approach can hurt young artists, and careers launched by these hits are rarely sustainable. While the data might say that albums are becoming less popular, they still are the primary way in which we evaluate artists’ legacies and lasting impact.

Conversely, discographies full of bloated, incoherent projects made to game the algorithm and hit as many playlists as possible may be one reason why we see fewer superstars in rap, and why so many artists touted to be the “next big thing” never reach their perceived potential.

When a single rapper locks in with one producer, it more often than not promises an album where beats are allowed to become bespoke and performances start to breathe in new and exciting ways, leading to music that feels fresh, exciting, focused, and cohesive. Even though everything about our culture tells us that the rapper/producer album should be a dying art, its power is undeniable, and arguably more important than ever.