PI’ERRE BOURNE, YOUNG HIP-HOP PRODIGY
A true maverick, Pi’erre Bourne has become one of the most soughtafter producers on the hip-hop scene, thanks to a sound that is his and his alone. The young prodigy is also a rapper, each of his successive albums opening up a new chapter in his development that is eagerly awaited by his many fans.
“Yo Pierre, you wanna come out here?” Sampled from The Jamie Foxx Show – a late-90s sitcom starring the famous American actor –, this jingle opens every track produced by Pi’erre Bourne. Though they are indispensable figures on the hip-hop scene, with all its subsections and derivatives, producers generally remain in the shadows, hired by labels simply to create compositions to which singers or rappers from the same stable will add their voices. But some producers have managed to go beyond this thankless status and become stars in their own right, both in the world of hiphop and more widely. For them, the personalized tagline that precedes each track they’ve worked on is a mark of their status and influence: the importance of figures such as Metro Boomin, Mike Will Made It or the collective 808 Mafia can thus be measured against the huge number of hits which open with their aural signature. Identified with the sound originating in the American South, in particular Atlanta, they’re the successors to super producers such as Dr Dre, the Neptunes, Timbaland, Swizz Beatz and Kanye West, who all set their seal on the 90s and noughties. Except that the latter earned their place in posterity as rappers as well as producers. Thanks to his protean talent, Pi’erre Bourne – Jordan Timothy as he was born, in 1993 in Kansas – is following in their footsteps.
Jordan’s first love was rap, at an age when he could barely speak and hadn’t yet learned to write. And then there was New York, where he spent each summer with his family, a city that literally enveloped him in its harshness. In the place where hip-hop was born in the late 70s, the young Jordan cut his teeth, improvising free style in the street to his friends and family. “I totally identified with New York’s energy,” he says today, “and that’s what made me want to start rapping, at a very young age. My uncle and his friends stayed out in the street rapping, and I joined them… But I was so young I barely knew any words! So I invented my own language. My uncle told me I was gifted, so I continued. I also tried to write my first rap, but I was just learning to write at the time, so it was a bit difficult!”
Pi’erre Bourne’s family offered him all the encouragement that most young rappers lack. Hailing from the Central American country of Belize – known for its reggae, dancehall and ragga scenes –, he grew up surrounded by music, with relatives who improvised musical events in their garden in South Carolina. His uncle performed as a ragga artist under the name Mobile Malachi, and became particularly well known for his collaboration with another artist, Junior Reid. “You could say it’s in my blood,” laughs Pi’erre Bourne. “The melodies and energies of Belizean music are very present in my sound. I haven’t yet collaborated with my uncle, Mobile Malachi, but I sampled him on one track, and I’m sure we’ll work together one day.”
To help him get started, another uncle, Dwight, bought him a computer so that he could produce his own tracks and become independent. Pi’erre Bourne then set his sights on Atlanta, the new epicentre of rap, enrolling at university there to study sound engineering so that he could perfect, in total autarky, the albums he had already written. Along the way, he developed his skill as a creator of sounds, his goal being to go beyond mere sampling, which is typical of hip-hop but is now challenged by the emergence of trap, with its rich layers of synthesizers deriving from electronic dance music. While in Atlanta, he met the rapper Young Nudy. “The sound that’s emerging today is the one we built together, he and I, back then,” continues Pi’erre Bourne. “We wrote a lot of tracks that maybe didn’t make it internationally but that are definitely considered classics in Atlanta. I hadn’t necessarily imagined that I’d be one of the people making music evolve, but that’s what’s happened. We really set down the basis for a new sound.” Shortly after graduating, in 2015, Pi’erre Bourne was hired as a producer at Epic Records, a job whose heavy workload left him no time to finish his personal projects. In 2017, he met Playboi Carti, spearhead, along with ASAP Rocky, of a new and more sophisticated New York rap characterized by a taste for experimental sound, and also for fashion. Their collaboration sparked a host of hits, among them Magnolia and Wokeuplikethis, manifestos for a new kind of sound that mixed cold and mechanical trap rhythms with
“The sound that’s emerging today is
the one Young Nudy and I built together. I hadn’t necessarily imagined that I’d be one of the people making music evolve, but that’s what’s
happened.”