By Ben Westhoff
Timbaland
Timothy Mosley – Timbaland to you and me -- was born in 1972. His dad worked for Amtrak and his mom for a homeless shelter. They raised him in Norfolk, home to the world’s largest naval base, and he later built a massive recording studio nearby, in a Virginia Beach industrial park. “Ain’t nothing spectacular about it,” Timbaland said of the racially mixed suburban area where he grew up. “Ain’t nothing going on out there, really.”
There certainly wasn’t a music industry. But Tim was undeterred, keeping himself busy as a kid by learning drum machines and samplers. He befriended an aspiring rapper named Melvin “Magoo” Barcliff, who became one of his main collaborators, and by his late teens was a popular club DJ. He made beats for an R&B group called Fayze, featuring his high school friend Missy Elliott, whom he’d met through Magoo after Surrounded By Idiots broke up.
“Tim had this little Casio keyboard, and he has big hands,” Missy told Roni Sarig. “So it was hilarious to see him play on that Casio. But he had a way of making a record sound like something I hadn’t heard before.”
Success was still many years away for Timbaland, however, and his high school years were fraught with roadblocks. After work one day at Red Lobster, he was accidentally shot in the lower part of his neck by a coworker, which left him paralyzed for much of a year. “I would work with him, give him the medicine and massage his arm, and he’d still go in the room every single day, messing with that turntable and writing down lyrics,” said his mother Leatrice Pierre. Then there was the time in 1991 that Tim crashed his Mazda, killing a friend riding along. “I been through some junk,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “It ain’t all been peaches and cream.”
But he received a break through Missy, whose group was invited by Jodeci member Devante Swing to his Warhol-style singer-songwriter compound in New Jersey. Later renamed Sista, Missy’s group promptly moved up to the New York suburbs, and later to Rochester, and Timbaland and Magoo joined them.
“Their stay in Rochester was simultaneously a scary and a magical time,” studio engineer Jimmy Douglass told journalist Michael A. Gonzales for the website Soul Summer. “DeVante had all of these talented kids living in this house: Timbaland, Ginuwine, Missy, the group Sista, Magoo, Playa and Tweet. He had all this talent living under one roof and if he had treated them better, DeVante would have owned the world. . . . Although DeVante was supposed to be the mentor, there were times when he just wanted to control everybody.”
Though a Sista album saw a quiet release and Missy and Tim contributed to a Jodeci work, the pair felt stifled and decided to break away. They went back to Virginia for a time and, mining their newly developed contacts, came upon more opportunities. Timbaland landed a hit with Ginuwine’s “Pony,” and in 1996 he and Missy placed tracks on Detroit-bred R&B singer Aaliyah’s second album, One in a Million.
The teenage superstar had previously worked with R. Kelly and even married the Chicago singer/producer while still underage (it was quickly annulled). But Tim and Missy’s songs came to define her sound, and Million went double platinum. The title track, written by Missy and Tim and produced by the latter, is a fairly standard love song (“Your love is a one in a million”), but stands out for its rattlesnake shakes and tranced-out atmosphere.
Even better is their “Are You That Somebody,” off the Dr. Dolittle soundtrack, another sonic slice-and-dice masquerading as a traditional radio jam. Featuring a choppy beat that shows up when it’s good and ready, the song’s back-up singers include an infant and Timbaland himself.
Aaliyah’s next, eponymous, album had more Missy and Tim productions, and is my personal favorite. But the twenty-two-year-old singer was killed in a plane crash shortly after takeoff in the Bahamas, where she was filming a music video. An autopsy found traces of alcohol and cocaine in the pilot’s bloodstream. It was a ghastly end for an extremely likable talent, but Aaliyah’s songs would set the standard for a generation of cutting-edge radio pop.
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Timbaland began working alone and with other collaborators besides Missy, creating and jump-starting numerous other careers. Perhaps his greatest challenge was making Justin Timberlake into a credible solo star. No one gave *NSYNC’s adorable powder puff much of a shot, considering that the escapist boy band era was thought to be over.
But, along with the Neptunes, Tim made a viable artist out of Timberlake on his 2002 debut Justified. Haunting album centerpiece “Cry Me a River”—reportedly about Timberlake’s failed romance with Britney Spears—features abrupt starts and stops and eerie snaps and pops. Though Miami producer Scott Storch claimed he deserved credit for the song, it established Timberlake as an artist with actual meat on his bones.
His evolution continued with 2006 follow-up FutureSex/LoveSounds, on which he and Timbaland got even more creative. Bare bones hit “SexyBack” is an unusual, almost jarring piece of rave-pop that, along with other techno-influenced tracks like “My Love,” vaulted Timberlake to the top of the pops. The ever-modest Kanye West later asserted that only Timberlake could match him for fans and respect.
“Me and Justin is different: it’s not work, it’s magic,” Timbaland told the Guardian.
He was nearly as successful with a pair of female artists, Nelly Furtado and Keri Hilson. Under the auspices of his label, Mosley Music Group, he overhauled the image of the Canadian singer Furtado, best known for her earthy inspirational, “I’m Like a Bird.” Under his direction she veered into hip-hop, with urban turns like “Promiscuous” and “Maneater.”
Timbaland’s curiously named solo hit “The Way I Are” introduced an Atlanta songwriter turned R&B artist, Keri Hilson. Her 2009 debut In a Perfect World… shocked industry watchers with its strong chart performance. Considering it was shepherded by Timbaland, however, they oughtn’t have been surprised.
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