INTERVIEW: DANNY G BEATS

THE MICHIGAN RAP MAESTRO

“Ooh shit, that’s a Danny G Beat.”

If you follow Michigan rap at all, the above producer tag is likely burned into your brain. This is partly because the person saying it just happens to be BabyTron, a rapper who has scaled the heights of Detroit music to the point where he recently collaborated on a song with Eminem. It's also because the producer Danny G Beats has laced tracks for a good portion of the state’s most notable rappers: Rio Da Yung Og, Icewear Vezzo, Rmc Mike, KrispyLife Kidd, and the crew ShittyBoyz (BabyTron, TrDee, StanWill).

Since roughly around the time of the pandemic, Michigan rap has undergone a serious popularity boost. This is not the time nor place for me to attempt to give you a Michigan rap lesson, but let’s just say that the state’s scene, which centers around Flint and Detroit, is far from monolithic. Along with like-minded producers including Helluva and Energy Beats, Danny G’s work with members of ShittyBoyz represents a particularly playful corner of the Mitten ecosystem. BabyTron has rapped over Danny G flips of the Jurassic Park theme and the uptempo electro-pop variant known as freestyle, all with an off-beat mischievousness that matches the urgency of the producer’s tracks.

I was able to chat with Danny G Beats last week. Fittingly for Detroit, he conducted the interview from his car. He was driving to a studio session. 

Do you remember the first beat you ever made? 

I do remember the first beat I ever made. It was 2013 and I didn't really make it into a full beat because I didn't know how to structure it into a playlist on FL Studio. So it was a 16 or 20 bar loop. I think it’s trash, but lowkey it is kind of sweet minus all the fucking voices I put in there. I put all these voice drops. But I do remember that shit, it was before I went to jail for the first time back in 2013. So two weeks before I went to jail, the very first beat I made. 

What kind of track was it? Were you making Michigan rap music back then? 

No, not at all. It sounded like some Soulja Boy trap shit. I don't know. 

So when did you pick up doing beats again? 

2014, the following year. You know, it just was on and off. In 2019, I went to jail again. I did a year and that was when I was like, Oh yeah, I got to stop. I got to do something with this shit or I won't ever do anything with it. So I just decided to get back into it then. 

Was that around the time you linked with ShittyBoyz?

Yeah. End of 2019 or something like that. 

How did you fall in with them? 

I came home and for some months I was just trying to make beats every day and get on Instagram and network. I found their music a little while before, and then my girlfriend was like, You should make a ShittyBoyz beat. So I did that. This is around the pandemic just coming about. I made a ShittyBoyz beat, tagged StanWill and Tron. And I just locked in with StanWill, and met Dee and Tron after. And I just kept locking in with those guys. 

It seems like that pandemic era was really when things started going crazy for all of you. 

Hell yeah. I feel like it was a blessing for me. Dude, I was working a construction job. I was in the union. I was doing tile work. You know, there's nothing against it. It's just not what I wanted to do. My body's all fucked up from sports injuries and it was just hard to do. When the pandemic hit, I was like, Fuck yeah, stay home and make beats and not go to work, get paid—unemployment. I got really lucky, because I got tapped in with the right people at the right time, and it really helped to turn me up. 

For sure. That pandemic unemployment was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I don't think America is going to be doing that any again anytime soon. 

No, plus the fallout from it too, that many people being out of work for so long. And then the Federal Reserve printing that many bills, that's a part of why we have this big inflation problem right now.

I think it enabled a lot of people to chase their dreams. 

Absolutely. I feel like I hear a lot of stories now that are very similar. Like, Oh yeah, I decided to take this photography serious or be an artist or whatever. I keep hearing that. 

There's not so much arts funding in this country. So it was some weird sideways form of that.

Right. That's an interesting way to look at it. It was a perfect opportunity for people with those inclinations. Before the pandemic, before they shut everything down, anyway, I was working at this Toyota headquarters, one of the corporate offices in Farmington. We were doing the tile in the front of the building inside, and there was this 40-something dude. He wasn't even a tile setter. He didn't want the responsibility. He was just the best tile helper ever. Coolest, coolest dude ever. But he just asked me what I wanted to do, and I told him what I was trying to get into. And he's like, Go get out of this shit. Go do your DJ thing. And that was kind of tight because I definitely did do that. And I appreciate him. 

In the Midwest, I've found—I mean, I think Detroit's a little bit different—but I found in the Midwest, they don't take creative stuff as a career as seriously as places where an industry is based. 

If you're in LA or New York or something, it's not really a crazy thing. In Michigan, if you're not working at a big three or you're not working in the plant or if you're not selling mortgages for Quicken Loans… 

In Detroit, there's still this lineage of music, though. Do you feel like you're a part of that? 

You are right about that. There is the Motown shit, and growing up, my dad used to play all the Motown stuff for me, he played all the old good music. I was always aware of Motown being this historical thing. For a long time though, Michigan music kind of was on the backburner. You got Eminem and you got some other artists, but nobody really represents for Detroit outside of them, you know, or they didn't anyways. 

Were Doughboyz Cashout big for you growing up? They seem like Detroit legends.

They were, but it was still very niche. I liked it, and some of my friends liked it, and I showed it to my cousin who moved from here to Florida, and he and his friends loved that shit. But sometimes I'd be at parties and I would put that shit on the aux and some of the people would just be like, What the fuck are you playing? You know, they want to listen to Drake or whatever, Lil Wayne or something. Like, anything but that. I think they just didn't understand it—it was so niche. But it definitely started to grow in Detroit.

What was cool about them was that their style was so different from prevalent Atlanta rap trends. When you started making beats again, or taking it maybe more seriously, were you influenced by that kind of Michigan sound that had been brewing for a minute? 

Yeah. I mean, I was always a fan of it, you know, I just never tried to make Detroit beats. I think I was listening to other people, I was kind of confused, I didn't have a direction. And whenever I asked somebody about it, it was always some misguided information like, Oh, that's not marketable. You need to do this type of beat or whatever the fuck. I wanted to, but I I didn't get around to doing it. But I definitely was influenced. 

So when did you start making Michigan beats?

When I decided to start making that stuff, I started going to the cyphers in Detroit at the radio station. DJBJ used to be on 107.5, he used to do this cypher every Friday and get all these locals in there. And one of my friends, Young Muncy, one of the first rappers I worked with, he brought me up there. I met Primo Beats, he had the big ass fucking FL Studio tattoo on his fucking arm. And I thought that was the funniest shit ever, when I met him, but he was real cool. He was in Ypsilanti—I ended up moving to Ypsilanti, actually. And yeah, I just started locking in with Primo and ShittyBoyz. 

Once I started working with ShittyBoyz, I wasn't engineering at the time. I was like, What can I do to get more songs with these guys and build a relationship with them? I'll get them in the studio. So that's when I started booking time at Suite 328 in Ypsilanti. I was just having sessions with ShittyBoyz there. And then eventually, I was like, Man, I got to just fucking learn how to do this engineering thing myself, you know?

That makes sense. You're staying in the room as much as possible. 

Yeah, man, it was just invaluable because me, Stan, and Dee, we're still locked into this day. Tron, we’re locked in, and it is all from that era. The first time I met Tron, I had a session, he just showed up and made me my beat tag. He heard StanWill drop my name in a song and I made it into a beat tag, and he's joking like, Yeah I should make you a tag, and then he actually did, you know. At the end of the session he just said, “Oh shit, that’s a Danny G Beat” and laughed and walked away. It was just some, whatever, some silly shit. That was a cool thing, and that wouldn't have probably happened if I wasn't getting in the room with them.

ShittyBoyz have such a good sense of humor. When you pitch beats to them, are you throwing curveballs? Do you think they can take weirder beats than most rappers? 

Yeah, they still can. They've definitely all taken a more serious side now, but they were definitely like that. Just like—they were doing the freestyle dance beats.

I was gonna ask you about that. How did those freestyle flips start?

Here's the thing—I didn't even know it was called freestyle. I used to hear it when I was a kid, I would hear family members playing it or hear it in the car or some shit, right, and I didn't even know it was called freestyle. People definitely sampled it in Detroit and then on the West Coast they were doing it a little bit, but it was still very different. I think it was Tron and ShittyBoyz, it was their idea to do it. They just fucking pulled up an actual song and rapped over the song, not even a beat, but then it became that—they started rapping on beats that were sampled from that. I think that's a big thing that drew a lot of people into them. I for sure was drawn into their sound because of that, because it was different, it was unexpected for someone to rap over freestyle, you know what I'm saying? 

For sure, then there's the track you did with Tron where you sample the Jurassic Park theme song. 

I definitely came in sort of trying to do the freestyle stuff and I have done that and contributed to that sound, but I definitely got to explore a lot of cool other shit that I never thought was possible to do. Obviously, anybody can sample Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, but before it would have been corny. Maybe some people might still think that. But I just think that ShittyBoyz, the era, the generation, and then the sound that we created doing it—let's say on those movie samples, it was Detroit and Flint kind of sounding stuff. I don't want to sound cocky or anything, but that Star Wars beat, no one ever did no shit like that. Definitely nobody ever did the Harry Potter sample.

It’s funny, some friends of mine actually sampled Harry Potter music over a decade ago, but the difference between you and them is that they weren't giving that beat to a rapper, they were doing it in an art band kind of context. 

I feel like the only way this would have worked was with Tron, he had the platform at the time and also just he's really dope. Tron doing it he made it to where it wasn't some nerdy, corny shit—not that there's anything wrong with that, but he just made it cool for the kids listening to him, they took that seriously because it's a different generation with memes and TikTok and everything.

I think there is a balance. There’s humor but then there's something really Detroit about it that kind of offsets that a little bit.

Yeah, exactly. Tron is memeable but he's not a meme rapper.

It seems like you spend a lot of time in the room with rappers versus shipping out beats. 

I fucking hate sending out beats, bro, I fucking hate it. 

So you like that energy in the room?

Yeah, last night I was with 3200 TRE and RMC Mike. I hadn't seen Mike in a while, and I did send him some beats, I think he sent me one song back, but I always end up having better luck making some cool shit with them in the studio. Obviously, I've sent beats out and made dope shit, but I do like to be in there because it's important for me on the artistry side of things—actually seeing what they want and hanging out with them and really just being in the mix.

Are you ever coaching on song structure or anything like that? A lot of these tracks, they're not really verse-chorus-verse so much. 

It depends on the artist, of course like I've made suggestions to Tron and Stan and Dee, but also at the same time a lot of those guys are really confident, too, in themselves and I'm not gonna tell them what to do or whatever. I kind of let the artist do what they want, but I think it depends on the artist, or not just the artist, but the timing. What date is what, what mood they're in, and what's happening, you know what I'm saying? 

For sure, and a lot of the energy of that music is based around a certain kind of freeform style. I mean, with that said, you did that Lonni Monae “FTPU” record recently. That’s a real hit.  

I did. I sent that to Tron, but he kind of hasn't been rapping on that stuff lately, he'll have to be in the mode to do it. But anyways, I just ended up getting her on it because actually Rio's manager was like, Yo you should send this to a female rapper, that'd be a hit or whatever. So I did send it to her and she sent something right back, and he was right.

So who are you driving to go work with today?

A couple local artists and then I'm gonna go over to RJ Lamont's studio and see what he's up to. I don't plan stuff all the time, like yesterday with RMC Mike, I didn't plan for that—that was just, you know, pulling up. 

That's kind of how the studio often goes.

Ideally, it'd be cool to plan everything out, but you know…

That's not how the world works.

Sometimes it'd be nice, but whatever. I’ve kind of become used to it.

It seems like a major skill for a producer is to be able to roll with the punches. 

It is, and it can be one of the hardest things. I know that was one of the hardest things for me because I used to be afraid to make a beat on the spot with the artists and I'd get stage fright. But I learned, so now it's not so bad, a lot of times I don't even really have beats ready because I’ve used every single one and people will like, You got beats? 

It can bring out another level of performance—it's like athletics.

You know how I was saying I had that stage fright? I'd be like, Oh no, they're not gonna like it, whatever, all these stupid thoughts, but now I've definitely gotten to a point where I sort of almost get it right away. Yesterday, Mike was like, Can you make me some beats with pianos and saxophones? I really just pulled out a couple loops from one of my producer homies and I just made these beats. What he said to me was so vague, sometimes it will be a shot in the dark, like, fuck, it could mean anything. I'll just try to use my reasoning powers. I've been getting better at doing that. It worked out, and Mike was like, Oh my god, you understood the assignment.

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