Beatmaker Mike Dean helps craft sound of the hitmakers.
Mike Dean is arguably one of the greatest-of-alltime beatmakers from Texas. The producer and music engineer has a long list of accolades, which includes work on three Grammy-winning Kanye West albums and most of Travis Scott’s body of work, in addition to production and writing credits on albums by Beyoncé, Justin Beiber and Madonna.
Now, one of his protégés is a rapper from Missouri City named Dice Soho, whom he signed to his Mexican Wrestling Association label in 2017.
You can catch Dice Soho performing Saturday at Super Happy Fun Land on the East End.
“I always lean towards Houston artists,” Dean says.
He long ago cemented his claim to Houston by working on such gems as Scarface’s album “The Diary” and a ton of early Rap-A-Lot material. He cut his teeth on the late Bushwick Bill’s “Little Big Man” release.
One of the best examples of his work with Scarface is “Smile,” the gangster uplift song and paean to late rapper Tupac Shakur.
“Tupac and (Scarface) and me were in the studio working on music. We made a couple of beats. They ended up recording ‘Smile’ and then (Tupac) got killed like two weeks later; and then they brought me the track to rework and sync up the vocals,” he recalls. He said he made the beat in one day, with its melodic bridge and R&B-tinged hook that drags out the word “smile.”
“I remember I called J Prince and said, ‘I think we got something,’ ” he said, referring to the Rap-A-Lot impresario. He knew he had a hit on his hands, and the 1997 song became a top three rap single that year on the Billboard charts.
Dean remains a behindthe-scenes craftsman, but he’s hoping to change that one day. When you talk to him, you realize he’s just a regular Texas kid who grew up racing motorcycles and playing keyboards where he grew up, in a rural stretch between Freeport and Angleton in Brazoria County.
The musical chops he’s been perfecting for decades were honed in Houston, however, specifically in the city’s Third Ward. “That’s where I used to go when I was a teenager and go play in bands. I used to play in Emancipation Park on the weekend. That’s where I kind of learned my whole soul music thing,” he reminisced. “Every Sunday at Emancipation Park, there would be like five or six bands playing, every weekend we’d go play.”
The bands would cover Michael Jackson, P-Funk, Morris Day and The Time. But Dean’s experiences and musical influences ran the gamut, from playing bass in country bands in Clute to jamming blues at biker bars in Surfside Beach.
His production and music background map the breadth of Houston’s hiphop output starting in the early 1990s through now. One of his earliest hip-hop credits came on the album “Hard Hittin’ ” in 1990, producing for a group based out of the Angleton/ Freeport area called Def Squad.
Later, he was an inhouse producer for Rap-ALot Records almost from its beginning.
The superproducer got his professional start touring with Selena.
These days, Dean doesn’t rest on any of the accolades or Grammy wins. He’s become more visible to music fans however thanks to Travis Scott, social media and Netflix. He’s the touring band for Scott, jamming his funky synth solos surrounded by keyboards and controllers, and rocking out like he was when he was onstage during Scott’s Astroworld fest recently.
He’s also made several appearances on “Saturday Night Live,” backing West and Scott on separate occasions. And for those who know his face, he’s easy to spot in the Netflix documentary “Travis Scott: Look Mom I Can Fly.”
Still, Dean is learning to be his own label boss and create a body of work for his own rap artists, like Soho. And it’s not as easy as it may look. “It was okay, it wasn’t what I wanted, we gotta try again soon,” he said about the 2018 album he produced through his label venture with Asylum Worldwide Records.
Soho’s album “You
Could Have” was released to little fanfare and didn’t mint any big hits. Still, it brought a wider audience to Missouri City’s multiethnic rapper who identifies as Colombian and Mexican. “He’s trying to take advantage of that,” Deans says about the rapper’s background. “He needs to say something in Spanish.”
Fans of Dean’s music, however, may care less about who he is working with and more about what he’s working on for himself. The musician has teased people with jazzy preludes and ethereal sci-fi soundtrack work such as “Prophet 200 and 6” and “Rhodes Jam 1.” They are tracks he puts on his Soundcloud page (soundcloud.com/ therealmikedean/tracks). But he promises he’s saving the best stuff for an eventual album of his own.
“I’m trying to become more of an artist myself instead of just a producer,” he says.