Music duo spins hip-hop on multiple levels
Chemistry flows for the artists behind the Midnight Hour and ‘Luke Cage’ scores.
The studio for Linear Labs, the analog recording label owned and operated by “Luke Cage” co-composer and hip-hop producer Adrian Younge, is hidden behind a Highland Park salon and record store on Figueroa Street. To get to the socalled laboratory, you approach a clerk and, speakeasy-like, request Younge.
Chances are Younge will greet you as he did a visitor a few weeks ago: dressed as if he’s time-traveled from the Harlem Renaissance in wingtips, a well-tailored dark suit, black fedora and designer glasses.
He’ll lead you through the shop, past the LP racks filled with vintage soul, funk, disco and Afro-beat recordings — including a section devoted to tracks set to tape for Linear Labs — past the busy hair stylists, through an unmarked door and into a newly built space he calls “my baby, and it houses the music that I believe in.”
He clarifies: “Music that is based on vinyl culture — music that was all recorded in analog.” His aim, he adds, is “to create and release music that is a new version of that old world.”
A few minutes later the masterful and intense hiphop producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad, best known as a founding member of hiphop group A Tribe Called Quest, arrives. Responsible for classics of the genre, the L.A. transplant, who has his own studio in North Hollywood, teamed with Younge on both seasons of “Luke Cage” and for their new album as the Midnight Hour.
Although the two projects were created for two different media, the work is connected through Muhammad and Younge’s aesthetic: dusty soul, disco-funk and groove tunes, mixed with an adoration for the funkfueled European film scores of the ’70s. Younge describes the goal as “maintaining the compositional and sonic perspectives of yesterday but pushing that forward with a new idiom,” one filtered through hip-hop.
That approach typifies the score for Season 2 of “Luke Cage.” The superhero series stars Mike Colter in the titular role as a protagonist whom Younge has described in interviews as “a different type of black alpha male. He’s not bombastic.”
Nor is the work on the Midnight Hour, which features guest singers including Bilal, CeeLo Green and Marsha Ambrosius. The 20 songs suggest the vibe of Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and the roots-reggae sounds of Lee “Scratch” Perry.
The collaboration between Younge and Muhammad is somewhat unlikely. They met each other in New York in the early ’10s and immediately connected over music. Younge, however, had long preferred working alone: “I know where I want to go. I know what I want to do. I just don’t feel like somebody giving me a suggestion that I’m not feeling. Not an ego thing — I just know where I want to go.”
Where Younge speaks in precisely phrased paragraphs and pages, the taciturn Muhammad speaks in carefully considered sentences. Calling it “a great chemistry,” the co-producer of such rap standards as “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” and “Award Tour” characterized himself “a team player and writer.”
Muhammad said he prefers exploring “what’s in my heart and in my mind, and what’s in the mind and heart of the people that I work with. It’s understanding my place, and my ego has no place in the room.”
Like the music for the first season of “Luke Cage,” which has earned millions of spins on streaming services, the short instrumental pieces in Season 2 have enough meat to chew on — and hit with heft.