The 45 King (Mark Howard James) the pioneering producer behind 'The 900 Number' and hits for Jay-Z and Eminem, has died.
, noting his death came three days after his 62nd birthday. Paul Martinez, a spokesperson for the producer, confirmed James’ death toJames’ skill for flipping perfect samples is encapsulated in his biggest hits: Jay-Z’s 1998 classic “Hard Knock Life ” featured an unexpectedly brilliant sample of “It’s the Hard Knock Life” from the 1977 musical; while Eminem’s 2000 smash “Stan” was built around a then-little known song by the British singer Dido, “Thank You.
But more than a decade before “Stan” and “Hard Knock Life,” the 45 King had cemented his place in rap history with his 1987 breakbeat track, “The 900 Number.” The song looped the saxophone solo at the start of Marva Whitney’sand transformed it into a skittering, delirious blast of hip-hop gold. The beat would be used and sampled numerous times — the beat soundtracked the. He called the track “the national anthem of hip-hop,” adding: “It’s so potent it needs nothing but humans with a pulse.
“Puffy been through that — Biggie, Tupac, Busta. Jay-Z been through this turnstile — a lotta people, man,” James said in a 2015 Flavor Unit oral history forJames’ early hot streak, however, sputtered in the early Nineties as he struggled with drug addiction. In a 2015 interview withThe long gaps between James’ bursts of brilliance seemed to give him the aura of the kind of creative genius who comes and goes as he pleases.
In recent years, James kept busy with a variety of projects, including, for a time, his own interview show on YouTube called “Making the Beat.” He remained an active creator and uploader, building up a page filled with short snippets of beats that fully embraced the surreal . Just a couple years ago, James even tried his hand at acting with a small role in the VOD horror thrillerhim as “one of the sweetest people you could ever meet” and “one of the most gifted people in the world.
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