Top 25 Kenny Beats Quotes

I was working for Johnny Shipes in New York when I was 17 years old, getting beats off.

I started making beats in high school.

The point of ‘777’ is for the world to hear adult Key. Your favorite new rapper’s favorite rapper, grown up. My job was to lay any canvas he needed at any given moment.

At the end of the day I’m not just sending beats in. I’m mixing the song. I’m recording the song. I’m engineering the song. I’m in the studio helping with the songwriting. I’m doing the whole beat – every single piece of it is me.

Greedo is one of the most important California artists of our generation.

Most of these producers have an agenda of what they want to push or what they think will be hot for someone. I don’t have an agenda. My agenda is to take someone and bring out their dreams, what they’re hearing in their head.’

Lil Jon was definitely a pioneer for some of the punk-rap acts we see now. He showed you could scream on a song and still have a hit on the radio.

Every time I’m working on something, I’m extremely excited about it.

Key! is the greatest rapper alive. I honestly, truly believe that no one is as effortless, weird, and creative, and themselves as he has been for years and years.

I never was able to pay any type of bill doing the music that I was instinctually was making ’cause I loved it. I had to kind of pivot into doing the stuff that someone had taught me about to really get on my feet.

There’s a difference between a beatmaker and a producer.

When I make a lot of really good music with someone, I want to let the world hear it right now; unfiltered. I don’t think it has to be more complicated than that.

Many times you make music and someone decides to try and pick the best of everything. But if you wait, you sometimes fall out of love, or a song doesn’t speak to you anymore, so you lose the moment.

I’m a very self-sufficient person, much like a lot of people I work with.

I feel like I wasn’t making music that meant anything to me until I was 26 years old, so I’m realizing that sometimes it takes three years or five years to understand what the point of even making music together is.

I got way more songs with Key! than Greedo, but I met them via each other, they Facetimed me at 6 A. M. in Atlanta, wearing sunglasses. Key! said, ‘You and Greedo doing a whole project.’ And I was like, ‘Alright.’ Then they hung up on me.

You go to a Rico Nasty show and there’s gay people, trans people, white people and black people all in the mosh pit together, and it’s beautiful.

I’ve been doing music in some form since I was seven years old.

I think a lot of people make a big misstep when they assume what an artist is going to be interested in, so I try to just take that out of the equation and make sure whenever I’m talking to people about their music, I’m getting all my context clues from that – and then we go to work.

I had to learn how to bring the best outta Key! by learning what’s going on with him. That’s how I approach every artist I work with, period.

Being genre-bending doesn’t really cross my mind. I don’t consider anyone I work with a specific genre.

Making assumptions taught me a lot as a producer, because it’s something I never do now.

I started a group called Loudpvck, which I do by myself now, and toured the whole world.

People will go through 50 beats from a producer and pick the best ones, go make a song on that beat. That’s cool, but someone coming to me and hearing what I’ve been working on, picking out pieces of all of that, and then adding some of their own ideas is way more exciting.

Since he was 17 years old in Atlanta, I think people always knew that there was something different about Key. He’s obviously been able to adapt to so many sounds and time periods in his own way, which is clear from the long list of collaborators; but he has always retained an effortlessly weird perspective.