Pete Rock & CL Smooth

Why they matter

Pete Rock (Peter Phillips) was born in the Bronx and moved to Mount Vernon at seven. He met CL Smooth (Corey Penn) at Mount Vernon High School. Pete came up as a DJ, filling in on Marley Marl’s WBLS show after his cousin Heavy D connected them, and he learned to make beats at seventeen on an E-mu SP-1200 that Freddie Foxxx gave him. Elektra signed the duo, and the All Souled Out EP came out in June 1991.

Mecca and the Soul Brother followed in 1992, mostly produced by Pete Rock with DJ Eddie F of Heavy D & the Boyz as executive producer. The centerpiece is “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.),” written for their friend Troy Dixon, a dancer with Heavy D & the Boyz, who died in 1990. Pete built it from a Tom Scott record, starting with the bassline and then finding the sax. It’s one of the most loved songs the era produced.

The sound became a template: obscure soul and jazz records, horn-driven hooks, smooth basslines, filtered samples and crisp drums. CL Smooth mostly kept it clean and conscious at a time when gangsta records dominated. The Main Ingredient (1994) sharpened everything, and then they split in 1995. Pete Rock kept producing and remixing, and his work on Nas’s Illmatic is part of why that album sounds the way it does. People compared them to Gang Starr, another one-MC, one-producer team, and the comparison holds.

What a working rapper can take from it

Build the record around the beat’s best moment. On both albums Pete Rock gives the music room before and after the verses, short instrumental passages that set the mood and let the loop land. If your songs start on the first bar of rapping and stop dead at the last one, try giving the beat eight bars to breathe on each end.

Start with one sound that moves you. Pete has said “T.R.O.Y.” began with a bassline that hit him emotionally, and everything else got built around it. When you’re digging, wait for the record that makes you feel something rather than the one that’s merely usable. The sample-chopping guide covers finding the loop.

Clean can still hit hard. CL Smooth rarely cursed and still sounded like nobody’s pushover. Restraint makes a rapper’s word choice do more work. Try writing a verse with no profanity and see which lines get stronger when you can’t lean on it.