@AintNoJigga | Ron Working with Jay-Z

Ron "Amen-Ra" Lawrence & Jay-Z and , 1997

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Jay-Z and Ron "Amen-Ra" Lawrence, photographed together in 1997. At the time they were in the Quad Recording Studios in Midtown Manhattan, working on In My Lifetime, Vol. 1's standout track "Where I'm From," and also "I Know What Girls Like." Born in Dominica in 1968, Lawrence's family immigrated to the United States when he was two years old and settled in the East Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens. He showed artistic talent early, and would be accepted into Manhattan's specialized High School of Art and Design.

When later attending Howard University in Washington D.C., Lawrence met Deric "D-Dot" Angelettie and they formed the rap duo "Two Kings in a Cipher." Signed to Bahia Entertainment, the duo released the album From Pyramids to Projects and a handful of EPs between 1990 and 1992. In 1993 the duo met fellow Howard alumnus Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs and later joined his Bad Boy Entertainment production team The Hitmen. Amen-Ra made an impact straight away, helping to produce tracks such as Biggie's "Hypnotize" and four cuts on Puff's No Way Out.

In the middle of 1997 Amen-Ra was brought into Jay-Z's In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 sessions as part of his role in The Hitmen. Jay had been encouraged by his Def Jam Recordings partners to find a more "radio friendly" sound for their first release together, so he looked to Puff and his shiny suits for inspiration. At the time Amen-Ra was looking to leave Bad Boy due to a feeling of Puff overlooking him and his talents, Puff taking beats intended for other artists for himself, and the fact he hadn't had enough placements to make a fair amount of money for the time he was spending on beats. When Ra and his lawyer Reggie Ossé (Rest in Peace Combat) approached Puff he apologized, and said he wanted to make the situation work. Ra gave Puff all of his hottest beats on DAT tapes, and almost immediately his beats started getting placed.

For Jay-Z, Amen-Ra first produced "I Know What Girls Like" alongside Puff Daddy. They brought the rapper a beat that assimilated a glam rhythm from "A Fly Girl" by the Boogie Boys, with a catchy hook from new wave band The Waitresses' 1982 hit "I Know What Boys Like." While this song is placed by many as one of Hov's worst ever, one of Lawrence's crowning achievements would be his and co-producer D-Dot's production of "Where I'm From"—a track that is regularly hailed as one of, if not the, best ever recorded by Jigga.

Amen-Ra used the Akai MPC3000 and the Roland JV-2080 to create the beat, while sampling a section from Yvonne Fair's 1975 "Let Your Hair Down" throughout. He had found the Soul singer's record while hunting in 1996, and used a sample he found at 0:54 to "give [the beat] a sinister soundtrack feel." The beat would eventually also sample Run-DMC's "Rock Box," Biggie's "Me & My Bitch," and Puff, Jigga, Biggie, and Kelly Price's "Young G’s."

Here, in a video Amen-Ra uploaded online, he explains how he created the final beat: "This song was actually very easy to do. So what I did was I put it on 16 levels. Basically, 16 levels is when you play with the velocity of the pads and it slows the sample down. The kick introduced the beat and ran at 81 beats per minute. Next came the snare, then the hi-hat. The hi-hat was put on 16 levels, but instead of de-tuning it I played with the volume going up and down, so you have it both loud and soft. Then came the keyboard bass; and it was [pretty much finished]."

When Amen-Ra had first brought the beat to Puff on a DAT it was still in rough form—there were no sound effects, no extra percussion—and the Bad Boy founder passed on it. As he explained to Shawn Setaro recently, "I had chopped it up, but it wasn't finished. There was no bass, no drums, it had nothing."

However, when D-Dot played the beat for Jay and his A&R Kyambo "Hip-Hop" Joshua and the rapper heard the rough, sample-heavy cut he was immediately inspired, and began recording the highly-personal verses four lines at a time. "I came to the studio so we could do the vocals together," Ra told Setaro. "He was very cool, smooth, laid-back about it. He would listen to the track and pace back-and-forth in the studio." In a video uploaded by his own production company he spoke further on this experience: "I saw Jay-Z walk back-and-forth from the booth to the control room. Never once did he pick up a pen to write lyrics. He would memorize four lines in his head at one time, go into the booth, knock out the lyric, and then come back to the control room to listen to it. Before you knew it the record was done." Watching Hov record his vocals in this way gave Lawrence "a vision to make the track sound more dramatic based on Jay’s flow"—as he once told Rolling Stone, who once named "Where I'm From" as Jigga's greatest effort.

The resulting product from their spontaneous session is one of the rap mogul's most candid and intimate efforts—as RS put it: "part memoir, part cultural and socioeconomic critique, part distillation of his surroundings both past and present." Amen-Ra has always admired how "he was painting a grim picture about Marcy Projects. It gave the listener a mental vision of what it was like for him growing up there in Brooklyn." "Where I'm From" and "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five describe the despair of the ghetto like no other.

Thanks to the DAT agreement with Puff, Amen-Ra's hot streak began in 1997 and continued for many years. He has produced iconic hits for Mase, Diddy, Faith Evans, LL Cool J, Mary J. Blige, Brian McKnight, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross, The Lox, and many more. In 2000 he composed the film score for Spike Lee's Bamboozled, as well as appearing in the film as a musical engineer. In 2005 he produced "A Woman Like Me" for Beyoncé, which was written for The Pink Panther soundtrack. He has since become a hip-hop historian and documentarian, and has produced many films on oft-ignored aspects of the culture.