In talking to people about Bob Power and his contribution to music as an engineer, there’s a particular thread that extends through his direct work I feel like is still underappreciated. It shows up in the artistically competitive push from the east coast and the west coast (before that turned into a Pac and Biggie beef), that we still feel the aftershocks in popular music today.
Dr Dre, Q-Tip, and Bob Power are all linked in how and why modern pop sounds like it does. They laid the foundation for putting machines and musicians next to each other in a fully formatted sense, moving beyond the groundwork Sly Stone laid, and that Prince continued.
The way this unfolded is just such a cool story, I wanted to write it down and reflect.
When N.W.A. dropped Straight Outta Compton in 1988, the ultra precision of Dre’s sounds and technique were felt across the country. I’m talking sonics, here. Not just the lyrical side of things. That record got into Q-Tip’s head and, by his own admission, pushed him to rethink what a Tribe album could sound like.
In 1991, A Tribe Called Quest released The Low End Theory, engineered by Bob Power and produced by Q-Tip, almost in response to the sonics of Straight Outta Compton. The drums were tight, but instead of a mechanical attack, Tribe pushed forward the idea of using Ron Carter on an upright bass, nested with the samples, to feel way bigger and warmer in another dimension.
Bob Power’s music theory and jazz experience made him the perfect guy for the job. He knew the old records and the modern techniques and had the expertise to pull Q-Tip’s vision together. They were the original duo to execute this connection at the highest level yet.
Q-Tip expanded on what he saw Dre doing. And of course Dre heard it (as he’d later admit).
When he left N.W.A. to go solo and start working on The Chronic, Dre pushed the concept even further. Why emulate the New York jazz club when he could bring an Oakland house party to his own record? Bootsy Collins and P-Funk basslines became G-funk basslines in Dre’s world, with live replayed riffs of old samples (in a very Stetsasonic sense), and sine-wave synths over the top to create a West coast reimagined extension of Tribe’s Low End atmosphere.
If anything, Dre moved beyond sampling and directly into local lore, on a mission to re-record the sounds as he wanted them. It’s part of why The Chronic still sounds as incredible as it does. In particular, by merging live drums and drum machine reality into the groove, he’d set up where Q-Tip and (very soon) Dilla would eventually take things next (see the footnotes below - the Janet Jackson song epitomizes this).
And so right there, beyond the studio magic of Bob Power, we see Dre’s influence and creative push on Q-Tip, with the return volley, that results in a completely reimagined approach to how live instruments and re-structured samples can compete on pops biggest stages.
This is the back and forth responsible for why the low end in so much of today’s pop feels larger than life and weirdly human all at the same time.
Incredible, right?!
BONUS FOOTNOTES:
This is a journey, a quest really, to see and feel this. We’re going to go Sly & The Family Stone doing “Family Affair” (as an early drum machine with a band example), followed by Prince working on Morris Day and The Time, “777-9311” (which I’ve written about here because it’s such a cool story), then “Straight Outta Compton” by N.W.A., “Excursions” from Tribe, “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” by Dr. Dre, and let’s end on “Got Til It’s Gone” by Janet Jackson (oh that Q-Tip!). Hear the through lines?
