Twenty years ago Nas released his career-defining debut, Illmatic, and while the New York MC has spent the bulk of the year celebrating that anniversary—he’s played the album in full on tour—other folks have been working and building on those ideas. In Chicago 33-year-old producer Adrian Villagomez, aka A-Villa, has been waving that flag proudly. His forthcoming debut is steeped in bold, old-school hip-hop, right down to its title, Carry on Tradition—that’s a reference to a line Nas collaborator AZ raps on “Life’s a Bitch,” which A-Villa sampled for his album’s title track. A-Villa’s vital, bustling “Carry on Tradition” features local stalwart Mikkey Halsted and Little Brother‘s Big Pooh—it’s an excellent example of how the producer is drawing from hip-hop’s past to push the form further.
I went to a local Guitar Center, bought an MPC drum machine, and really taught myself from the ground up how to make beats. It was starting out as a fun, after-work hobby, but that changed when Guru of Gang Starr passed away—that was April 2010. I didn’t know Guru personally, I was just a fan of Gang Starr’s music coming up, but it really triggered something in my own life and put things in perspective in regard to my own personal legacy. I can be here today and gone tomorrow, but what exactly am I leaving behind for my loved ones—really, the world—to remember me by?
Your career is your parents’ dream for you—what did your family think of you pursuing this dream on the side?
Yes indeed, that was definitely dedicated to her. It’s kinda wrapping up the whole project, and I’m rapping on the song, I got the last verse on the album. It’s kinda just me putting out the narrative of my whole journey of starting music, where it began, my goal with it, and what I was trying to do with it—and at the end of the day it’s all for her. And that’s her featured on the song as well, that’s actually her first cry that you hear on the song—that’s her first sound.
I can’t say that, man, but I was definitely involved in the studio process with a lot of these songs. A lot of these compilation projects get made through e-mail stuff—that happened with this album too. I would say it was kind of a 50-50 thing. When I was in the studio it was definitely a full-on session with me actually producing the track, vocally working with the artists, and definitely bouncing ideas off each other.
The challenge with that is at the end of the day you got a lot of rappers in the room with one producer. It’s very competitive, rap, and they want to outdo each other and sound better than each other. So you may get a situation where a rapper hears something and they want to improve upon that, and then the other rapper that previously recorded wanted to hear what the other guy did. So that was a challenge and that’s why some of these songs took a long time to do. I’m dealing with all the artists from different parts of the country—I got artists from the west coast, down south, the east coast, and the midwest—so I’m kinda just bouncing that all together.
