Erick Sermon

Producer Erick Sermon helped define hip-hop’s more commercial form. Sermon and his Long Island schoolmate Parrish Smith founded EPMD in 1987, introducing a taste for fat electro samples and an ever-so-rough arrangement style that pushed the genre past its founding breakbeats into funkier territory. The joint production work on their chart-topping debut alone, 1988’s Strictly Business, established several samples as canon, including Zapp’s “More Bounce to the Ounce”. “So Wat Cha Sayin’”, from the following year’s Unfinished Business, was one of the first hits to flip P-Funk before Digital Underground’s “The Humpty Dance”. Sermon’s beat for his group’s biggest single, 1992’s “Crossover”, returned to the Roger Troutman well and helped legitimise talkbox rap hooks. He went on to executive-produce the rise of Redman, in whom he found a perfect foil for his bass-driven sample stacks; he developed an enduring relationship with Def Jam labelmate Keith Murray, too. Sermon would go on to work with successive generations of New York royalty, including LL Cool J, Jay-Z, and 50 Cent.